Abandonment

A Public Policy Challenge

When searching for effective public policies dealing with abandonment, one frequently stumbles on a mix of property rights, tax and other liens that encumber properties, and issues pertaining to the size of the resources needed to either rehabilitate or clear and repurpose the properties being demolished. The presence of derelict properties in a community also provides a way to recognize that the social and built environments of the city are in continual flux. It is not just the skylines that change but the look and feel of communities apart from the centers of commerce that also sit at the confluence of capital investment, housing markets, and income differentials. Neighborhoods also reflect the changing spatial organization of urban areas as cities and metropolitan areas grow in size and extent, particularly as the locations and spatial relationships between employment and residential opportunities change.

During the 1990s, the concept of housing abandonment largely referred to an end-of-market scenario in which population and employment shifts had created an older stock of housing units that oversupplied the immediate neighborhood. This oversupply of housing units was largely ignored until properties slipped into tax delinquency, disuse, physical deterioration, and either decay or demolition. In older cities, many city neighborhoods that had grown as a part of dense manufacturing centers experienced a reversal of fortune in the last half of the 20th century; people able to choose between housing options tended to select less dense communities in suburban areas, where jobs had become more plentiful. During this time, cities evolved into metropolitan regions that had multiple employment and commercial centers, and highway and road investments facilitated a less dense, even sprawling, urban structure.

From this perspective, housing abandonment in the older urban core can best be understood as the not-unexpected outcome of decentralizing forces that effectively emptied out frequently overcrowded neighborhoods of large proportions of their population. Neighborhood revitalization efforts with the intent to improve local housing conditions have had some positive outcomes. Often rooted in community-based organizations, these efforts depended on [Page 2]a combination of social capital, technical skills, and the ability to attract new residents with either refurbished homes or replacement units. For the most part, these programs have been unable to stop either residential or capital entities from leaving these older neighborhoods. Many examples of neighborhood-based development can claim notable successes; most, however, have been forced to recognize that these efforts could not address the scale of the abandoned housing problem on a citywide basis.

...