Ask an expert: Danielle Lewinski on revitalizing vacant and abandoned properties

The Economic Mobility Catalog’s Strategy Guide on Addressing vacant and abandoned properties shares best practices on measuring, rehabilitating, and reducing vacant or abandoned properties. It was created in partnership with experts and practitioners in housing policy and urban planning, including Danielle Lewinski, Chief Program Officer at the Center for Community Progress.

In this edited Q&A, Danielle provides insights for cities and counties to reduce vacant and abandoned properties, highlighting effective approaches and financial mechanisms to create long term solutions for communities.

How do properties become vacant or abandoned and why are they an issue for local governments?

We can attribute the rise of vacant properties to major population losses driven by de-industrialization and white flight, propelled by public policy decisions. Urban renewal compounded these shocks by isolating and destroying many neighborhoods—disproportionately Black and lower-income communities—resulting in sustained housing market disinvestment that persists today..

But local leaders aren’t just dealing with a problem from 60 years ago. Properties fall into abandonment when owners don’t pay property taxes or fail to address building code violations, leading to foreclosure. We also see many properties become abandoned when there’s an heirs' property issue, typically stemming from a lack of estate planning when a property owner dies.

Vacant or abandoned properties are harmful to cities and residents. The research is clear: individuals living in or near substandard housing are more likely to be exposed to toxins that cause brain damage or cancer. There are also psychological, safety, and economic impacts for residents. Vacancy is a stark reminder of neighborhood disinvestment, which can harm mental health. We also know that abandoned structures or vacant lots attract illegal activities and make people feel unsafe. There’s definitive data that proximity to run-down properties lowers home values, creating a real economic hardship for people already living in lower income neighborhoods. From a local government perspective, vacant properties are plots that aren’t generating tax revenue and often require city services for maintenance and safety.

What are some approaches for local governments to prevent vacant and abandoned properties?

The first step is for a local government to understand vacancy rates and property conditions. Regularly conducting rental property inspections and vacancy surveys helps governments understand the scale of the problem and identify at risk properties. The real mechanism here is code enforcement to ensure health, safety, and habitability. I recommend proactive code enforcement based on data — not just responding to complaints.

Localities can also provide assistance through grants or tax rebates for home repairs, especially for low-income and elderly property owners. The pipeline to vacancy starts when property owners fall behind on repairs and the violations add up, so targeted support for low-income owner- and renter-occupied homes helps to break that cycle.

Local governments should take a systems level approach by working with residents, business, and neighborhood associations to create a community development plan that strengthens the local real estate market, reducing a primary reason for vacancy in the first place.

Once a property is vacant or abandoned, how should municipalities handle them?

If it’s vacant for a long time, code enforcement is citing it, but nothing is happening, there are two approaches to handling the property: pay it up or give it up.

The “pay it up” approach is when governments take action to prevent as many negative consequences of vacancy and abandonment as possible, and then make sure the owners foot the bill. That includes city workers mowing, boarding up windows, or removing trash. Importantly, local governments should have a process to add the cost of these remediation services to the property tax bill. The owner is then motivated to maintain the property and avoid future costs. This is effective with property speculators in lower income neighborhoods who let properties languish but still need to pay taxes to keep the property. Deploying city services to maintain run-down properties is especially impactful when done strategically alongside other community development investments to stabilize a neighborhood.

Once a government tries the “pay it up” approach and doesn’t get paid, then the property owner has to “give it up.” This means initiating a property tax or code lien foreclosure. These are two processes by which a local government can compel the transfer of a property to a new owner for unpaid taxes and other violations. In general, the property tax foreclosure process is preferred, because it uses an established enforcement system that can incorporate unpaid code enforcement costs from the “pay it up” phase, avoiding the need for a separate foreclosure process.

What are some ways local governments can improve their approach to vacant and abandoned properties?

We don’t like seeing criminal penalties as the primary enforcement mechanism. When it comes to vacant properties, LLCs are common owners, and it is hard to hold them accountable through the criminal legal process. What’s far more effective are enforcement mechanisms that stick with the property — this is called an in-rem procedure — instead of pursuing the negligent owner personally.

Another area for improvement is reducing the sale of property tax liens by local governments. When a property goes to tax foreclosure, the government can sell the plot or the lien, including the right to collect the debt from the lien. By selling tax liens, the government has ceded the ability to influence the future of the property, and purchasers typically have no obligation to fix the property – only to collect the debt. This is harmful to residents because the city can no longer transition the property to a new owner who is more interested in the property than the debt tied to the property.

Cities are increasingly using land banks to hold properties and help transition vacant and abandoned properties to responsible owners that care about property rehabilitation. A wider adoption of land banks can help neighborhoods by enabling a city, county or state to control the future of distressed properties.

How can responding to abandoned properties help local governments reduce racial or economic disparities?

Doing nothing about vacant properties perpetuates disparities for those who suffer the negative mental, physical, and economic impacts — and widespread vacancies tend to be disproportionately concentrated in low-income communities and communities of color. Policymakers need to also realize that widespread vacancies and the problems they bring aren’t a reflection of the neighborhood or the residents, but a consequence of larger economic shifts and public policy decisions that spurred population loss and disinvestment in many cities. When you’re working to reduce vacant and abandoned properties, you’re really fighting against history and years of underinvestment by governments. Oftentimes communities are also under-resourced to deal with these properties, so cities need a cohesive strategy that includes dealing with one-off emergency situations, but also looks to improve the local housing market by bringing development into these areas.

From a policy perspective, provide off-ramps for property owners as a part of code enforcement. For owners in disinvested neighborhoods or low-income communities this flexibility is important because the mounting costs of violations can lead to owners abandoning the properties completely, which is what those violations are trying to prevent. Local governments should work with these homeowners by extending timelines for repairs and waiving fees. Cities can also connect people to home repair resources when the situation merits it.

Who are the important players that should be involved for a city to address vacant and abandoned properties?

Primarily, residents should be involved in determining what the priorities are and what solutions are used. Working with neighborhood associations can help cities identify properties in need of code enforcement, design property tax relief programs, or involve residents in advisory roles for land banks.

Municipal code enforcement and housing or community development departments are on the front lines for cities. Code enforcement departments handle the proactive code enforcement to stop decay before it starts, while community development or housing departments manage federal Community Development Block Grant funds to fuel vacancy prevention programs. Beyond the local level, state agencies are key financiers for demolition, hazardous waste cleanup, or subsidized housing projects.

Community Development Corporations (CDCs) act as the bridge. Besides engaging community members, high-capacity CDCs can actually step in, take ownership of properties, and drive development that stays true to local priorities.

I’ll also highlight the important role of financial institutions — specifically Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) — as partners for rehabilitation. In weaker markets where traditional lending stalls, these partners provide the specialized financing needed to get a rehabilitation project off the ground.

What metrics or indicators could a local government use to understand whether its approach to addressing vacant and abandoned housing is working?

It’s important to start with metrics that track indicators for vacancy to help cities identify areas at risk. Localities can use USPS data to measure vacancy, but while that data is easily accessible, it doesn’t provide nuance to understand property conditions. Property tax status, code enforcement trends, and foreclosure rates are useful for making typologies of neighborhoods to prioritize resources, and you can use some of those same metrics to see if an intervention is working.

I would also look at when properties change hands, so tracking sales prices, sales to mortgage ratios, and changes in the number of households (as opposed to population change) can help leaders measure if a market is starting to rebound.