Addressing vacant or abandoned properties

Before making investments in this strategy, city and county leaders should ensure it addresses local needs.

The Urban Institute has developed an indicator framework to help local leaders assess conditions related to upward mobility, identify barriers, and guide investments to address these challenges. These indicator frameworks can serve as a starting point for self-assessment, not as a comprehensive evaluation, and should be complemented by other forms of local knowledge.

The Urban Institute's Upward Mobility Framework identifies a set of key local conditions that shape communities’ ability to advance upward mobility and racial equity. Local leaders can use the Upward Mobility Framework to better understand the factors that improve upward mobility and prioritize areas of focus. Data reports for cities and counties can be created here.

Several indicators in the Upward Mobility Framework may be improved with investments in addressing vacant or abandoned properties. To measure these indicators and determine if investments in these interventions could help, examine the following:

• Safety from crime: Reported property crimes per 100,000 people and reported violent crimes per 100,000 people. These data are available from the Federal Bureau of Investigations’ Uniform Crime Reporting Program.

• Economic inclusion: Share of people experiencing poverty who live in high-poverty neighborhoods. These data are available in the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

• Housing affordability: Ratio of affordable and available housing units to households with low, very low, and extremely low income levels. These data are available from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Local Income Bands.

• Opportunities for wealth-building: Ratio of the share of a community’s housing wealth held by a racial or ethnic group to the share of households of the same group. These data are available from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

• Engage community members: Interventions that rely on residents to participate, like community gardens, benefit from early and consistent community engagement. For other strategies, clearly communicating with and involving nearby residents in plans for their neighborhood (e.g., demolitions or property redevelopments) builds public support and ensures efforts align with community goals.
• Develop cross-sector partnerships: Addressing vacant properties requires resources and expertise rarely present within a single organization. Partnering with community members, local nonprofits, developers, and other relevant stakeholders ensures a program builds buy-in and the capacity to work at scale.
• Identify a consistent funding source: In weaker markets, addressing vacant properties is a long-term project, and identifying consistent funding sources will ensure efforts like land banks and property inventories can operate predictably and at-scale. Certain interventions, like community gardens and greened lots, also require ongoing maintenance, making a consistent funding source necessary for their longevity.
• Find appropriate data sources: Interventions like vacant property inventories and land banks require data to identify vacant properties, manage property inventories, and demonstrate their impact. Localities should strike a careful balance between leveraging fine-grained and accurate data and identifying sustainable data collection processes.