The Reclamation An important component of the Reclaiming Vacant Properties Conference is success stories — sharing them as a way of showing attendees that a seemingly intractable problem is actually reversible. At last year’s conference, for example, a session called “Redeveloping Neighborhoods and Revitalizing Housing Markets: A Tale of Two Cities” presented a joint case study on innovative programs in New Bedford, Mass., and Baltimore.

The Baltimore portion is particularly eye- opening. Baltimore Housing’s Julia Day and Michael Braverman took attendees through the agency’s Vacants to Value (V2V) initiative, launched two years ago to target 16,000 vacant buildings throughout the city. By streamlining and strengthening the process through which properties are declared abandoned and providing incentives for the private market to reclaim them, V2V has resulted in a 175-percent increase in the sale of city-owned property, helped secure nearly $35 million in private investment, and seen some 760 rehab projects completed or under way.

“Where developers have the means to rehabilitate every vacant house on a strategically selected block, they can effectively restart a housing market,” according to Baltimore Housing’s presentation. “Using their expansive toolkit, Code Enforcement attorneys can require every owner of vacant property on a block to either rehabilitate or sell to someone who can.

… As long as there is at least one capitalized developer, the block will be rehabilitated.”

For more information: baltimorehousing. org/vacants_to_value.aspx

states, and regions across the United States reintegrate vacant, abandoned, and blighted properties into the eco- nomic and civic life of their communities.” Vacant properties, Leonard said, “really tend to destroy communities, but they can be great assets. But you need to get your hands on them in order for them to be assets.” That’s where Community Progress’ Reclaiming Vacant

Properties Conference comes in. Anywhere from 500 to 1,000 local, state, and federal government officials, policy- makers, activists, sponsors, and other people working on the issue attend the annual meeting, which this year is scheduled for Sept. 9–11 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia — a city that’s no stranger to vacant properties. Ditto the conference’s previous hosts, including New Orleans, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh. “It has to be a city that does have a challenge,” Leonard said. “But more important than that, we think it’s important to know that they’re actively doing some- thing about it. … We want to be able to say, ‘This city is doing really cutting-edge work.’” Community Progress also wants to be able to help attend-

ees — by offering a program that shares “lessons that people around the country have learned [about reclaiming vacant properties],” Leonard said, “so they’re not figuring it out for themselves.” At the 2012 conference in New Orleans, there were seven “mobile workshops” that took participants on tours of revitalization projects throughout the Crescent City; three-hour training sessions on topics such as “Building an Effective Code Enforcement Management System” and “Understanding Neighborhood Dynamics and Using Market- Based Data”; and breakouts that included “Local Efforts to Combat Blight: Foreclosure and Vacancy Ordinances,” “Com- batting Crime in Vacant Properties: Engaging Unusual Allies to Battle Vacancy,” and “Alchemy for Resurgent Regions: Using Vacant Land to Kick Start Local Economies.” About 600 people attended the first Reclaiming Vacant

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vacant property is a missing tooth, a onetime healthy home or store that now stands empty and dilapi- dated, sometimes indicating the presence of a rot

that could spread to its neighbors. Each one is a threat to neighborhood cohesion. And each one represents hope — the potential to do something small that can fix something big. “When you’re looking at how to create vibrant commu-

nities, when you’re looking at creating communities that people want to be living in and working in, vacant properties are really tough,” said Jennifer Leonard, vice president and director of advocacy and outreach for the Center for Com- munity Progress, which is dedicated to “helping cities, towns,

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Properties Conference, held in Pittsburgh in 2007 — many of them coming from the older industrial cities of the North- east and Midwest. “They were so excited to recognize they weren’t alone,” Leonard said. “They were in a room of people who had this problem.” It’s a problem that, since the subprime-mortgage crisis

and the economic meltdown, has only become more acute. And understanding the systems that create vacant proper- ties is more important than ever, as is creating “a national network of people that are connected to each other,” Leonard said. She added: “It’s fun. You have people in the room who are really, really excited about changing how their com- munity is dealing with vacant properties. And everyone is so enthusiastic.”

. — Christopher Durso For more information: convn.org/vacant-property JANUARY 2013 PCMA CONVENE 59