RUNNING A LAND BANK RIGHT: A Michigan City Shows The Way

MUCH OF Flint Mich. looks like a ghost town, where factories and neighborhoods have vanished alike.

BY TONY WEST/ Philadelphia wants to establish a “land bank” to deal with its vast swaths of abandoned land and derelict properties.

This independent government body would work to consolidate all blighted land parcels, now scattered among three different agencies – along with 30,000 private owners. Clever leaders like State Rep. John Taylor (R-Kensington) and Councilwoman Maria Quiñones Sánchez are spearheading this program. Desperate citizens plagued by blight will accept almost anything at this point. But are we going about it right?

No, comes the answer! In fact, we may be making a crippling mistake.

Flint, Mich. is a city that has become a trailblazer in innovative approaches to abandoned land. It had to. This Midwestern burg blossomed into fame in the 1910s as the hometown of General Motors. A hundred years later, it’s famous as the setting of Michael Moore’s biting documentary Roger and Me: a manufacturing city in free fall when its factories (those which survived at all) no longer needed many workers. Where GM once employed 80,000, only 8,000 toil for it today. Its population plummeted from 206,000 in the early 1960s to 102,000 in 2010. Huge factories have vanished, whole neighborhoods have withered. There are 22,000 abandoned properties in its parent county, Genesee Co. Not yet a ghost town, still it is a town where ghosts now outnumber the living.

Desperation drove Flinters to reinvent the wheel – or at least the vacant lot. After enabling legislation was passed in 1997, Genesee Co. established a Land Bank with a mission to grab as much dead real estate as possible, clean it up, and resell it or repurpose it by any means necessary, ASAP. It succeeded to a remarkable degree.

FLINT, MICH. is a leader in innovative ways to cope with abandoned land. Its Land Bank is a national model. However, its model is not being followed in Phila.

After 15 years, the Genesee Co. Land Bank has become a national laboratory and a model for managing catastrophic urban blight. Its founder Dan Kildee cut foreclosure and seizure time on delinquent properties from six years to three. He consolidated tens of thousands of abandoned properties into one body, which now owns one-sixth of the City of Flint and a good piece of its suburbs now as well. He developed ways to fast-track transfer of these lands to responsible new private owners with a minimum of fuss – all in a place where the market value of much land is less than zero.

Kildee was succeeded in 2008 by Doug Weiland, a respected manager with deep roots in the city’s automotive culture. In 2011 alone, Weiland’s Land Bank sold 645 properties, for $2.8 million, outnumbering Sheriff’s sales at 417. It has redeveloped a large abandoned downtown hotel as condos. An empty Fisher Body plant site has been partly reused by a generic drug-maker which now employs 700 and will soon reach 1,000 jobs. Flint has demolished 1,700 buildings. (Bear in mind this is a city one-fifteenth the size of Philadelphia.)

At the same time, the Genesee Co. Land Bank works aggressively to promote home ownership. It runs a foreclosure-prevention program. And it will peddle an undamaged, available house for a song to anyone with the wherewithal to maintain it. Upper-middle-class housing in Flint can be had for $12,000; substantial frame houses on big lots for – nothing, really.

There is no market to build on much of Flint’s land, however. The land bank drives numerous community groups to sponsor food gardens and green lots. It helps stable owners acquire vacant side lots. You know Philadelphia’s balky policy for a reputable homeowner to acquire an adjacent vacant lot? Many trips to many offices are required, and often some greasing of political palms. Not so in Flint. There it costs $25, is done in one shop, and takes 30 days most of the time.

“The entire process is handled here at the Land Bank and does not involve any other agency, although there is a property-transfer affidavit that needs to be filed with the City. In a case where there is more than one party interested in the property, we try to make sure the person getting the property is the best fit – someone that does a good job maintaining their current property,” Weiland explains.

So it can be done. But Flint doesn’t do it the way Philadelphia is thinking of doing it.

Flint’s land bank-head Doug Weiland … no political interference.

Legislation now before City Council which would set up a land bank in Philadelphia Co., grants the 10 District Council Members the power to veto any transaction our land bank proposes, even a 16-foot lot. This risks killing the business efficiency of the land bank, because its executive will no longer be making final decisions. That’s not how it works in Flint. There, the Genesee Co. Land Bank’s board of directors contains a representative number of elected officials. But it takes a majority of the seven-member board to overturn a land-bank decision.

In practice, this never happens. “Having solid policies and procedures in place regarding the sale of property removes any political interference from decisions,” Weiland says.

Citizen input is allowed for. The Genesee Co. Land Bank has an 18-member advisory council on which every city ward and county division is represented. However, it too must live by the rules for land-bank transactions and it rarely second-guesses the management.

Flint’s message to Philadelphia, then: Remove politicians from the business of real-estate reinvention as much as possible. This may be a bitter pill for Philly politicians to swallow, especially those whose bases are in the badlands. Understandably, they would like to be involved in redevelopment. But the alternative may be continued stagnation under a new shop sign.

That’s the criticism leveled against the politically-controlled land bank of St. Louis, Mo., created in 1971. There it was set up with veto power for local pols. And critics charge it has produced little in the 41 years since.

Another key is funding. “Make sure the enabling legislation provides for an income stream that will provide at least a base level of funding to allow for property maintenance,” Weiland counsels. Poorly maintained properties create bigger costs down the road and make it harder to move inventory.

DESPITE EVERYTHING, some of Flint’s abandoned industrial land has been repurposed, like this giant pharmaceutical factory on site of former Fisher Body plant.

There is still time to adjust Philadelphia’s land-bank structure. The bill which Quiñones Sánchez introduced in City Council is in the Committee of the Whole, awaiting enabling legislation in Harrisburg.

Philadelphia as a whole is in far-better shape than Flint. Its economy is more diverse and its location can’t be beat. In some parts of the city, long-abandoned land is now attracting private investment with little effort by the public sector. But other parts of Philadelphia are little Flints in themselves, though. They will not heal on their own.

A land bank won’t solve all their problems. But it can start to push these sick communities in new directions – provided it is given real freedom to act.

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