Date: Tuesday, 25 August 2026
https://ericzuesse.substack.com/p/unless-there-will-be-a-second-american
https://theduran.com/unless-there-will-be-a-second-american-revolution-the
Unless there will be a Second American Revolution, the U.S. Government will keep getting crueler and crueler. What’s the limit, before there will be a revolution?
24 August 2026, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)
Things certainly will continue getting yet worse (for non-billionaires) than they already are. And, for the poorest Americans, things will get even a lot worse than they already are. The cruelty of the U.S. Government is increasingly being focused upon them — America’s most vulnerable — as the following news-report makes clear.
On August 23rd, this (abbreviated) was the lead story in the Sunday New York Times:
——
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/22/us/politics/homelessness-lonsdale-billionaire-trump.html
[Top-right, page A1, Sunday New York Times, 23 August 2026]
22 August 2026
A team from the Cicero Institute, an upstart think tank, flew to Indiana this year to help make it a crime for homeless people to sleep on the street.
It was their third attempt. Even in the conservative state, previous efforts to ban street camping had failed. Catholic leaders said the measure would hurt the poor, and sheriffs had warned that arrests would crowd the jails. “We’re Hoosiers — we’re better than that,” a Republican state senator, Ron Alting, said last year, urging a more caring [notice that euphemism — the NYT did NOT chose to say “a less cruel”] approach.
But much had changed since the group, founded by Joe Lonsdale, a billionaire ally of President Trump’s, had made its initial efforts. Mr. Trump had issued an executive order [I added the link] on homelessness [24 July 2025, “ENDING CRIME AND DISORDER ON AMERICA’S STREETS”] that so fully reflected Cicero’s agenda it was hard to tell where the group stopped and White House policy began. The sponsor of the Indiana law was fresh from a Cicero conference, Cicero lobbyists worked the bill, and three Cicero analysts testified that the threat of arrests would push homeless people into treatment for mental illness or addiction.
The ban passed just before the legislature adjourned.
…
Twenty-one states have considered camping bans or other Cicero-backed homelessness laws in recent years, and 16 have passed them. But the group’s sway goes further: It is working with the Trump administration to transform federal homelessness aid away from housing subsidies and toward the forced treatment of substance abuse or mental disorders.
…
A co-founder of Palantir, the data-mining firm, Mr. Lonsdale, 43, is an unlikely force in homelessness policy. He brings to it vast wealth but no experience with homeless services and a distrust of conventional expertise. He argues that his outsider’s perspective gives him and the young generalists he hires a fresh view.
A pugnacious presence on social media — he recently called for public hangings of repeat violent offenders — Mr. Lonsdale said he is fighting in part to defend “capitalist society.”
…
Mr. Lonsdale’s conservatism took root much earlier. He cites Ayn Rand and Austrian free-market [commonly called “libertarian”] economists as teenage influences and used his perch as editor of The Stanford Review, a conservative publication, to assail “political correctness.” He blasted a student movement to raise custodians’ pay, warning it “destroys incentive for them to improve themselves.”
The magazine’s alumni include Peter Thiel, the libertarian investor who helped start PayPal, where Mr. Lonsdale landed an internship and found a mentor. They helped start Palantir in 2003 when Mr. Lonsdale was 21. He left after six years and became a tech investor. Forbes now estimates his fortune at $3.5 billion.
The subject of homelessness never arose in 2019 when Mr. Lonsdale hired Cicero’s first analyst, Judge Glock, who tackled technocratic topics like zoning laws and published into a vacuum.
…
Then Mr. Glock turned to encampments and interest surged. “The one thing that took off was homelessness,” he said.
Mr. Lonsdale left San Francisco for Austin in 2020, but encountered another homelessness crisis. The City Council had lifted a camping ban, encampments were growing, and Mr. Lonsdale gave $40,000 to a ballot measure drive to bring the ban back. Even in liberal Austin, the measure passed easily.
…
Success flowed in part from Mr. Lonsdale’s wealth. Together with a nonprofit lobbying arm, Cicero Action, the institute hired lobbyists, commissioned polls, made political donations and invited lawmakers to study tours. Mr. Lonsdale’s personal company gave $1 million in 2024 to a PAC that supported Mr. Trump.
Declining to say how much he spends on Cicero, Mr. Lonsdale called it “well less” than $15 million a year and called the sum “very small” for the clout it brings.
…
The head of the group’s homelessness work, Devon Kurtz, is a 28-year-old Quaker with a background in prison ministry and often appears as earnest as Mr. Lonsdale can be caustic.
…
During the [election] campaign, Mr. Trump had released a seething video [on 17 April 2023] that pitted [“the homeless” and] “dangerously deranged” people who “squat and do drugs” against “hard-working, law-abiding citizens.”
…
Scott Centorino, who worked on homelessness issues at the White House Domestic Policy Council, later offered an explanation: The council wanted guidance from groups “in the trenches” like Cicero.
…
In helping draft the [Trump] executive order, he consulted with Cicero “to kind of bring you a sense of what the solutions might be.”
…
A few months after the executive order, HUD issued an annual document called a Notice of Funding Opportunity. It had long been the lifeblood of Housing First [which is a program that was first tested in NYC in the 1990s], directing about 90 percent of homelessness aid to long-term housing. Following the principles in Mr. Trump’s order, HUD sought to move two-thirds of the money to time-limited programs with work rules.
Mr. Lonsdale exulted.
“A lot of the permanent bureaucracy is in the hard left,” he said in an interview soon after. “We’re stopping them from doing it their way and forcing them to do it a different way.”
Opponents sued, arguing that only Congress could alter the program so profoundly and warning that as many as 170,000 formerly homeless people could lose housing. A federal judge blocked the initial plan and a revised version (which cited Cicero four times), both times on procedural grounds. HUD is appealing. In the meantime, the money has been dispensed under pre-Trump rules.
“Housing First has fueled a self-serving homeless industrial complex,” and “enabled dangerous encampments and addiction,” Scott Turner, the HUD secretary, said in a statement.
Dennis Culhane, a homelessness scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, contends the opposite, saying the problem is a shortage of Housing First funds.
Examining a year of national shelter data, he found that only 13 percent of the chronically homeless got housing aid. By contrast, 48 percent of veterans got housing, due to a veterans program with much greater funding that operates on Housing First principles. Veterans homelessness has dropped by more than half since 2010.
“If Housing First didn’t work, we wouldn’t have seen that success,” Professor Culhane said. “But outside of veterans, we’re greatly underfunded.”
Mr. Kurtz sees little need for long-term rental subsidies, arguing “most people can eventually pay their bills.” …
Mr. Kurtz found the victory especially satisfying. Not long ago, he noted, Republicans had little to say about homelessness policy. Now they had detailed plans, an effective message, and an ally in Mr. Trump.
He credited his boss, the founder of the Cicero Institute.
“If we were to think about the conservative position on homelessness even in the first Trump administration, it’s quite unclear,” Mr. Kurtz said. “Joe Lonsdale articulated the conservative position on homelessness.”
——
So it is that this billionaire, Joe Lonsdale, who admires the novelist Ayn Rand — who had idolized a psychopath (William Edward Hickman) for the purity of his psychopathy — is willing to spend “$15 million a year” to ‘clean’ his nation’s streets of the homeless, and that the U.S. Government now is using taxpayers’ money in order to institute this program nationally.
(Moreover, it’s not only the U.S. Government that has so little concern for the public that it claims to represent, but also the Governments of its colonies — ‘allies’ — who likewise do. They all now increasingly share this neoliberal-neoconservative, or fascist, ideology, which is based upon the same callousness that America’s has.)
This Trump program, of removing the homeless and forcing them into ‘treatment’ programs to make them straighten-up-and-fly-right or else go into mental institutions, became official U.S. Government policy on 1 June 2026 by Trump’s HUD Secretary, the former football star, Scott Turner. Before Turner had become approved as HUD Secretary, I emailed to him my own study of, and proposal to address, the problem of homelessness in America, as I had previously done also with Biden’s HUD Secretary, and neither of them replied. My proposal was very different from any approach that has yet been tried. Here it was, so that you can see what they didn’t want to see:
HOW TO REVERSE THE WORSENING OF AMERICA’S SOCIAL LANDSCAPE
I aim to document here that the problems of homelessness and of the physical decline and decay not only in our urban areas but in rural America, and which scar America, are largely due to very wrong and inevitably failing governmental policies everywhere regarding each one of these individual issues, and can become solved ONLY by taking a wholistic integrated comprehensive and systematic approach to all of these problems simultaneously — an approach to all aspects of this interconnected network of problems, each one of which is both caused by and results from all of the others, because they actually are systemic, and can therefore be effectively addressed and solved only on that basis. Here, then, is the core of my analysis (at the end of which will be presented the empirical evidences that document it):
The following mutually dependent problems are currently treated (in most municipalities) as-if they weren’t mutually dependent (but are instead independent of one-another — which they’re NOT — and this is the key thing to understand about each one of these problems in order to solve ANY of them):
Homeless people
boarded-up and abandoned storefronts
declining real-estate property values
declining tax-receipts
‘racial’ segregation
For example, homeless people and abandoned storefronts and boarded-up houses are three problems that present opportunities to help to solve each other, but nobody is even paying attention to that possibility. Here is how they might be reshaped so as to help to actually “solve each other”:
Municipalities at present are, at least to a large extent, powerless when a property-owner keeps paying the taxes due on a boarded-up, declining, or vacant building or space, even though that continuation of the status-quo on the property reduces nearby property-values and thus tax-receipts (by continuing that property in decline) and so it is actually a public issue and not ONLY a private matter (as it’s currently being treated).
According to eminent-domain laws, the building’s existing owner must be fairly compensated for any taking of that property to serve the public good. And, yet, “fairly compensated” is calculated falsely. No entity is calculating the tax on that vacant or declining property in such a way as to increase the taxation of it so as to compensate nearby property-owners for the declines in their property-values that result from that under-utilized or deteriorating building or vacant storefront, and also so as to compensate the municipality for the resulting decline in its tax-revenues. For example, boarded-up buildings tend to be contagious; studies prove this.
Those losses by the public-at-large don’t become — as would only be fair — added into the annual tax which must be paid upon that vacant or declining property, by that property-owner, as they need to be in order to produce the right incentives for property-owners. (to either get their property fixed, or else sell it to an investor who will).
Moreover, the practical unemployability of the homeless causes yet additional reductions in the municipality’s and state’s and federal tax-revenues, and those harms to municipalities’ budgets reduce yet further the resources that are available to deal with homelessness, and, so, likewise are fair to be added into the taxation-rate on any vacant or declining property.
Beyond this: properties that are in rural areas or otherwise disadvantageous for employment opportunities, public transit and other options, must likewise be added into the costs that will need to be compensated to the public sector so as for the public sector (the government) to calculate correctly the fair taxation-rate on those abandoned or declining properties, in those rural areas.
Doing this would produce enormous benefits for those municipalities, and for those neighborhoods, and for the homeless (as I shall document at the end here); and also it would enable the government to reduce these problems, and to increase tax-revenues, so that all of these problems will be able (as they now are not) to receive the governmental resources that are required in order — finally, at long last — to solve these problems, and to end the decline in America. This is what a systemic change can accomplish.
Already, some municipalities are instituting non-systemic changes that might help parts of the system, and which could — if they can be made to work (and which I shall now discuss) — be added onto the systemic change that I have here summarily described:
Whereas some few states, such as New Jersey and New York, are applying, or adding to, Vacant Property Registration Ordinances (VPROs), many hold lenders on vacant properties liable to pay fines if the property isn’t timely restored; the owners, even in those jurisdictions, aren’t being additionally taxed on the vacant property. Such taxes would be a far more efficient (and, actually, alternative) way to provide the necessary incentives (especially if there is no remaining lien on the property — in which cases, any such ordinances, as currently written, are useless). Even some ordinances that hold the owner liable include municipal subsidization of some of the costs, and other transfers of the losses back onto the public. These laws are poorly (perhaps even corruptly) drafted, wrongly conceived. No model national VPRO law even exists. No system exists to deal with this entire interconnected network of problems; and, so, massive unnecessary and uncounted losses to the entire system occur every year. A model national law is urgently needed that’s based upon the by-now substantial body of citable empirical studies that exist (such as are exemplified below). None of the research to-date has related to increasing the taxation-rates upon under-maintained and abandoned buildings, but this research must be done because the taxation-part would be a crucial part of any solution to the problem, in order to provide the requisite economic incentives to the owners of these properties. So long as the private entity owns the property, the challenge will be to transfer onto this entity (by changing taxation-laws) the public’s full costs that are stemming from that entity’s control over that property, so it becomes an added cost for continuing that entity’s control over the property. For example: maybe the property-tax on a building should automatically increase 10% each year that it remains unoccupied; when a new owner takes the building over, it returns to the normal taxation-rate. This will incentivize new maintenance, and not merely new construction. The real-estate taxation-rates need to be designed to incentivize gentrification, not deterioration (as now). None currently are (except a newly passed ballot-initiative in San Francisco that went into effect on 1 January 2024). (Also, York Canada is studying a proposed “Vacant Homes Tax to Support Affordable Housing”.)
Real-estate taxation-rates need to become connected to the condition, and especially to the vacancies, in buildings, and this might do more to upgrade communities and the national economy than everything else combined, which is already being tried — more than all the rest does — because the taxation-rates can do more than everything else to shape the incentives of the owners, and those incentives are the most important factor of all, to produce the changes that are needed, which will optimize and upgrade the nation’s entire landscape. When the owner experiences the right consequences, it will take the right actions. The incentives are more important than everything else.
What would a 10% addition to a property’s taxation-rate per year do to that property’s taxation? Increase it from being 100% in year 1 (its current annual tax) to 260% in year 10. How many of these property-owners would continue paying that escalation even beyond year 10? Perhaps very few. And what should happen when they finally decide to and do either improve and get paying occupants into that space or else sell it to an entity that will? Of course, the municipality will have received added tax-revenue each year until that happens, and this money that’s collected each year can go into a trust-fund to supplement what those paying occupants will be paying, and to thereby highly incentivize that landlord to invest in that property, because of that governmentally enhanced profit-incentive for improving it. Of course, as soon as the property does become rented or sold, its annual taxation will be restored to what it would have been prior, and continued on from there, until the next appraisal occurs. So: the annual 10% (or other) property-taxation-rate hike for each year until that property has been restored, will be eliminated at the moment when it has been restored to being a productive (instead of, any longer, a destructive) entity again within that local economy.
An alternative use for that 10%-per-year addition to the unmaintained and vacant property’s taxation-rate would be to reward each such property-owner who DOES decide to improve and sell the property — to subsidize the property’s improvement and sale. The most constructive way to do this would be for the subsidies to be held in escrow until that property becomes sold — to pay it to the seller at that time of sale, and thereby effectively increase that property’s sale-income to the person who is selling it.
And what about the homeless? Government can also include in the contract a provision to subsidize whatever a homeless person pays to rent or buy that property, and so to yet further incentivize its landlord to upgrade the property. This way, both the owner and the occupant will be incentivizing each-other to do the right thing for the entire community.
And what about the impact upon the surrounding properties? Right now, the unoccupied declining properties are lowering the market-valuations on all of those that are nearby, but now this decline will stop, and all of those surrounding properties will instead increase in value, because of that change in the formerly declining property. This will bring substantially increased tax-revenues for the local government. This is how the system would function. It’s a system-change, instead of merely a policy-change.
That’s the summary of the CORE of my proposal. But there is much more:
On 2 November 2023, the Vermont monthly newspaper Seven Days had as their cover-story, “Blight Sites: Burlington’s Vacant Commercial Buildings Are Eyesores and Potential Safety Hazards. Some Remain in a State of Ruin for Years.” It opened with a remarkably comprehensive description of this entire problem, and of the duct-tape types of ‘solutions’ for it that are being tried (and that never succeed):
For four years, a demolished downtown mall and a series of broken promises left a gaping wound in the center of Burlington. The three-acre block walled off with concrete barriers was synonymous with urban blight, an object of frustration and derision that earned the property its own moniker: "the Pit."
In November 2022, bulldozers and cranes finally resumed work on the long-stalled CityPlace Burlington project, bringing relief and renewed optimism about the future of Vermont's largest downtown. Developers say that by 2025 the cavernous hole will be replaced by more than 400 apartments and an array of new businesses.
But as steel beams rise from the Pit, other buildings in the downtown core remain vacant. Though small in number, they occupy highly visible locations on major downtown thoroughfares. The defunct Memorial Auditorium looms over Main Street, the former YMCA displays its boarded-up windows on College, the shuttered Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception sits dormant on Pine, and the crumbling Bove's Café has become a target for vandals along Pearl.
In a city with little undeveloped land, the blighted properties could provide much-needed housing or new cultural and commercial space. Instead, they sit empty, becoming potential hazards and a thorny challenge for the city to regulate. As time passes, places such as the Pit project disorder and decay. They contribute in an outsize way to the perception that Burlington is in decline.
They also stoke concern about possible similar deterioration of downtown buildings that are soon to become vacant, including a 50,000-square-foot state office building and a Walgreens pharmacy, both on Cherry Street.
The city maintains a register of vacant buildings, defined as those unoccupied for at least 210 days. As of October, it included 11 small residential structures and six privately owned commercial properties. Seven Days examined each of the commercial buildings, plus the city-owned Memorial Auditorium, to understand their current condition and prospects for redevelopment.
Businesspeople and city officials are actively working to reuse some of these buildings. For others, though, transformation is years away.
click to enlargeCityPlace Burlington: Developers say that by 2025, the former mall will be replaced by more than 400 apartments and numerous businesses. - LUKE AWTRY
LUKE AWTRYCityPlace Burlington: Developers say that by 2025, the former mall will be replaced by more than 400 apartments and numerous businesses.
There's no one reason the seven properties have languished. They could be demolished, but city regulations require owners of historic buildings and those in the downtown core to have a redevelopment plan before bringing in the wrecking ball. Redevelopment takes time, motivation and money — and right now, building is expensive. Interest rates are high, construction crews are hard to come by, and materials costs have risen dramatically.
Those factors narrow the types of projects that pencil out, according to Yves Bradley, a real estate broker and partner at V/T Commercial. Many property owners are waiting for market conditions to change before embarking on redevelopment. "It makes sense to sit on it," he said.
But what's best for the owner of a blighted building may not be what's best for the neighborhood. That's why Burlington, like many U.S. cities, regulates vacant properties. Their owners must pay annual fees of up to $3,000 unless they can show they're rehabbing, demolishing or marketing the structures for sale. They must also keep entryways secure, maintain the grounds, and keep the places debris- and graffiti-free.
The city can fine property owners for letting buildings fall into disrepair, though the penalties are typically modest: Since 2018, the city has fined eight delinquent property owners a total of just $4,400.
Burlington could take more aggressive enforcement measures. Under a city ordinance, officials can declare decrepit buildings a public nuisance and ask a judge to intervene. And state law allows cities and towns to use eminent domain to seize properties needed for "urban renewal" projects.
Mayor Miro Weinberger said the buildings on the city's list haven't risen to that level of concern. "It's possible that could change in the future," he added.
Bill Ward, the city's code enforcement director, agreed. His philosophy is to nudge property owners to act instead of forcing them to. But he also said the city isn't afraid to push harder — and it has, by pursuing at least one owner in court for running unpermitted businesses on its vacant lots.
Ward has also considered that higher fees could be effective; he's heard of at least one city that doubles its vacant building fees every year, up to a maximum amount. There could be "widespread support" for that in Burlington, Ward said.
Vermonters for People-Oriented Places, a citizen group that supports denser housing in Burlington, believes taxing vacant lots at higher rates could help solve the problem. Property owners "would be much more likely to redevelop," member Jak Tiano said, "or at the very least sell it to somebody who will."
Weinberger, a former housing developer, maintains that Burlington doesn't have a vacant building problem. …
Property-owners hope that a better time will come to dispose of their property, while governmental officials are in denial about their “vacant building problem,” and they don’t recognize that it’s actually far more than that. To think of it as being merely that is like a person’s thinking of one’s chest-pains as being only that and not as being, quite possibly (and in this particular instance it is), a part of a potentially fatal disease (here, urban and rural decline). Denial doesn’t cause the underlying disease to get fixed, but instead to continue being ignored and thus getting worse.
Moreover, the duct-tape ‘solutions’, such as “annual fees of up to $3,000,” and arbitrarily fining “eight delinquent property owners a total of just $4,400,” ignores the reality of the actual problem. Those are either one-time penalties, or else fixed annual penalties, and their underlying assumption is that urban decline rises linearly through time, instead of as a power-function of time (accelerating as it gets worse — instead of, as is implicitly being assumed, getting worse by the same amount each year).
Furthermore: as a general rule, a major failure in current governance is the failure to recognize that an increase or decrease in the rate of a tax doesn’t affect only future tax-revenues, but also (and perhaps even more importantly) it affects incentives. Incentives drive decisions, and a good tax is one that will incentivize the right decisions — the decisions that will be optimal for the entire society. Any tax that is designed only on the basis of governmental-revenues from that tax, is bad (wrongly conceived) from its very start. For example: the increase in municipal tax-revenues that will flow from increasing the taxation-rate on vacant or insufficiently maintained buildings isn’t only the increase that will come from that tax-increase, but even more the increases that will come from the perhaps hundreds of other buildings in its neighborhood as a result of their no longer being depreciated from being in that building’s neighborhood. In order to provide a residence to the homeless, and the social services they’ll need in order for them to become employable, etc., the government-expenditures will be substantial; and where will this money come from? It will come ONLY from instituting this systemic change.
THE NON-TAX ISSUES
However, increasing the taxation-rate on vacant or declining properties — though it might be the most important PART of the needed systemic change — isn’t the entirety of it. (Promising and empirically tested examples of other components of it will be presented here at the end, documenting everything that has been alleged here.)
In sum: No entity currently exists to assist municipalities in implementing this entire process so as to increase housing, decrease homelessness, increase the employability of the currently homeless, and greatly reduce the downward-spiraling vicious circle that results from the current counting of ONLY private interests and the current counting as zero the relevant PUBLIC interests that are actually a much bigger part of the economy than are the private interests of the declining-property owner, and so ought to be included in (added to) the fair-value calculations under eminent domain at least as much as is the private interest of that owner of abandoned or declining property.
Such an entity must be working with state and local officials to implement into their eminent domain and associated laws the optimal legislation to benefit the entire economy and not MERELY the owners of abandoned and declining real properties.
It also must be working and coordinating with both governmental agencies and non-profits that are involved with the problems of homelessness, under-utilized and boarded-up and abandoned or long-term unoccupied or under-occupied real properties, and property-owners who are concerned about the impacts that those problems have on the values of their own properties, so as to engage all of these governmental agencies and non-profits to function together in a synergistic way so as to, together, prevail upon legislators in order to introduce the required legislative and administrative changes (such as regarding property-taxes), that will get and keep the entire system to function as it should, both for the private sector, and for the public sector — and both for property-owners and for the homeless.
The way that the existing system functions is constant failure, and is well described in an article in the 29 January 2019 Kensington Voice in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood, “How hard is it to convert vacant buildings into safe, affordable homes for people in need?” In that region of high homelessness and associated problems, neither national nor state programs are even mentioned (if known at all) and everything interprets these problems through the perspective of nonprofits, ‘charities’, instead of from any sort of systemic perspective, which is both socialistic and capitalistic together, functioning in synergy with one-another. The head of a local non-profit was quoted there as saying, “We want to stabilize families who live here. … We won’t build a house for you, but rather, build a house with you.” It’s the perspective of treating the poor as charity-cases, instead of as citizens who, at present, happen to be especially in need of taxpayer-funded — instead of charity-supplied (such as now) — help. Whereas the intentions might be to help the homeless, it’s not systematic, incentive-focused, and involving the entire system, including government, corporations, and the homeless, and also the neighborhood’s other property-owners, all functioning synergistically together, so as to boost the economy for the benefit of everyone. Without that all-inclusive systematic focus, the existing failure will only continue. It helps a few of the poor, but fails. That’s the existing, non-systematic, system; and it will continue unless what is described here is created and succeeds.
On July 28th of 2023, I met with a major bank and discussed with them the possibility that they might establish such an entity, to do all of this — first as a pilot project, and then, once it’s ready for roll-out, to go national. The funder would be providing a service to each and all of the participants in the system, and would be lending for the purposes of renovation and repair, instead of only for new construction. They were very encouraging about the bank’s possible interest in doing this, but told me that a business plan must be done first.
If this is to be done, then perhaps it would be a new division of the funder, or else it could be independent. It could be done as a nonprofit, but if that would be the business-model, then the lending-decisions (which would be key) wouldn’t be driven by a profit-motive, but would instead be supported by ‘charity’, and its growth would therefore be greatly limited, and would be subordinated to the objectives of its donors (whomever they would be). (The 1981 book by James H. Jones, BAD BLOOD: The scandalous story of the Tuskegee experiment — when government doctors played God and science went mad, well exemplified the problems that arise when charitable, instead of government, funding, guides the direction of programs for the poor. Charities represent the donors, maybe euphemistically called ‘science’ or even ‘pure science’, not the recipients; and this Improvement Corporation must represent the recipients, who are the poor, the actually needy. But it also must represent all of the system’s other stakeholders — such as the owners of the other buildings in the neighborhood of one that is boarded-up, abandoned, or declining year-by-year and thereby reducing the property-values of all of those nearby buildings.) If it’s not government-funded, then it’s not a public purpose. (Should charities — tax-write-offs that empower the richest to set the objectives, instead of the public’s government to do that — even exist at all?)
If that funding comes not from the government, but from the investors, the lenders, it will have to be only the government payouts from the guarantees that government will be providing that the loans will be paid back even if not from the borrower. This will free these lenders from that worry. (That is so important to do, in order to END “red-lining.”) The loans will therefore be even safer than regular real-estate loans. The legislation must state that the interest-rate on these loans will be the same as on normal real-estate loans (which have no such government-guarantee behind them). Consequently, profits on these loans will actually be higher than on normal loans. A requirement of the program must therefore be that no lender will continue red-lining (and that requirement needs to be enforced). Instead of red-lining those neighborhoods — the neighborhoods that are the most in need of gentrification — there will be green-lining there, because (by means of the taxpayer-backed guarantee fund) this is where the real-estate lending will be the most profitable. Thus, for the benefit of the entire society, this ought to be a profit-making corporation, working in conjunction with the Government (perhaps on a 51-49 basis — controlled by the Government), which will provide the legislation including the guarantee fund. Its objective will be to expand the economy in a constructive way, and to be an important part of, and participant in, that expansion. This is not a nonprofit objective. It is very much a growth-objective. It is an economic objective, driven by economic incentives. It might work in conjunction with the Center for Community Progress, which is the only nonprofit that’s at all comparable in its stated objectives (though, of course, not otherwise). It might be complementary to that.
The other possible profit-center from this enterprise would be the home-improvement and related expenses, because this corporation would be national in scope and would therefore be able to negotiate with suppliers discounts, much as Home Depot and Lowes do, and thereby to book those discounts as additions to profits. That portion of the business would be a national home-improvement contractor, which would specialize in improving buildings that are located in depressed parts of the country. Strict requirements need to be put in place to evaluate constantly the performance of this monopoly Government contractor and to regulate its expenses and its profits — all of which must be published annually.
A possible name for this corporation would be Improvement Corporation, because it would be improving not only existing under-utilized real estate but homeless people, and entire neighborhoods, and municipalities, and the entire economy. Only something that is necessary in order to be able to get the system’s parts to function more synergistically with one-another can possibly do this. And the potential from this is enormous, because, right now, the system’s parts function to a large extent independently of one-another, far more than synergistically with one-another; and, so, we have a very long way to go; and 100% synergism will always be only the goal, never the reality. The need for Improvement will be permanent, everywhere. 100% synergism will always be the goal. And Improvement Corporation will be the means toward it (toward approaching ever-closer to it).
Profits to the Corporation could come from the lending side, in the long-term perspective, and from the remodeling and construction side, in the nearer-term perspective. Since this venture is to be a long-term driver of long-term growth to the entire economy, the ideal would be for it (the private 49% part) to be a part of an existing major real-estate lending institution (or else to be established as being a new entrant to that field — which I would prefer). The corporation should be answerable both to the Government and to such a private institution. If an existing lender would be used, it would already have the Governmental contacts that might facilitate the needed changes affecting tax laws and other laws and regulations, so as to put into place the best possible new system, not just locally, but ultimately nationwide. If a new lender would be used, it would need to be set up to include such contacts.
This would be a lender that would be green-lining instead of red-lining: it would predominantly lend in today’s red-lined neighborhoods, but whose loans would be guaranteed by the municipality, state, and national governments, and it would specialize in this market, which no current lender does, because the legislation that will enable this to happen doesn’t yet exist but will need to be lobbied for, which will be a major function of this Corporation to do. These lobbyists will also be working with associated nonprofits to promote the need for this, and — to the extent possible — the Corporation will have an advertising budget to promote legislators who are cooperating to bring this about (or at least regularly publish the names of legislators who vote for and against each of the Corporation’s proposed laws). That is what will be required in order to reverse what till now has been the red-lining-driven, totally capitalistic, system, that has been producing America’s decline. The new governmental guarantee fund that will enable this new system will be crucial. Without that, it can’t succeed; but to rely ONLY on the private sector in order to eliminate red-lining etc., will definitely NOT succeed. It never did succeed. Government must invest in the nation’s success, and this is one of the ways in which it must invest, in order for it to succeed. Red-lining happens because until now, loans in declining and depressed neighborhoods have not been as profitable as are loans in rising and thriving neighborhoods; but I have designed this new venture so as to not only eliminate that barrier but to reverse it so that these loans will actually be more profitable than loans in rising and thriving neighborhoods. Part of the lobbying for this corporation will be for clauses to be included that will be like the 20-year-term period in patents, which exclude competitors for 20 years; but in this case it would be instead that for the first 20 years the only loans that will be covered by the guarantee-fund will be from this lender — the only lender that will be specializing in loans to improve distressed real-estate properties. This will be the pioneer, and, so (like patents do), it deserves to be receiving this exclusivity, in order to establish the first-of-its-kind. That will jump-start this transformation of the U.S. landscape. (After that 20-year period, the only advantage it will have over competitors will be the cumulative experience it will have gained from its having been the first.)
An alternative to this being a subsidiary of an existing major for-profit lending institution would be for it to be an entirely separate and independent lending institution that is owned proportionately by all real-estate lending institutions and so the bigger the lender’s real-estate book is, the larger a proportion of its ownership of the Improvement Corporation will be.
Though this corporation would have a higher rate of profit from its loans (because of the government’s guarantee-fund) than most real-estate loans do, it would also entail higher costs than they do, because unusually large lobbying expenses will be added to its costs of doing business at its start. This will have to be stated clearly in its business plan, if there is to be a business plan for this.
Finally, to conclude here, something should be said also about the home-improvement-contracting (or renovation) part of Improvement Corporation, because that side of the business wouldn’t be serving to upgrade only empty buildings and empty rental units, but also to upgrade ones that are declining — getting worse, year-by-year — and this is an even larger market, affecting perhaps nearly half of all real estate. Each municipality suffers declining tax-revenues from this physical decline, as well as from empty or boarded-up buildings and spaces. Consequently, all real estate needs to be periodically re-appraised, and the rate of taxation on declining properties ought to be increased each year by a percentage which is proportional to the percentage of the property’s physical decline, up to a maximum of a 10% increase in the taxation-rate, and the funds that are collected from this should then, first of all (after paying for the annual reappraisals), be made available (in an escrow fund, as was previously referred-to) to those properties’ owners, so as to subsidize them to rectify and reverse their property’s decline in value. This subsidy will significantly increase the expenditures in the renovation and home-improvement fields, and, thus, in that side of Improvement Corporation’s business.
All of this pertains to restructuring the financial incentives. New technologies are being developed that can make the process of doing this more effective and less costly to implement. One that I have noticed is Satellogic. It’s described here and here. They claim that their satellites (proprietary system and lenses) have the world’s highest resolution for satellites — so sharp that the monitoring of the performance of Improvement Corporation’s projects would be able to be tracked and evaluated on a real-time basis with the minimum of man-hours input (and maximum of remote control) and thus at the lowest operating costs. (I don’t know whether they are making use of this 2023 technological breakthrough.) A small number of competitors to Satellogic have been identified and should also be considered prior reaching the final decision. In any case, application of this new technology to both the lending-side and the renovation-side of Improvement Corporation is obvious. Also, this is a technology that can enormously facilitate identification of the neighborhoods that are in the biggest need of being green-lined; so it could be crucial to doing this in the most cost-effective way.
Finally, before proceeding to the evidences for this understanding of the problem (the evidences that are provided below), one example will be provided here of the extremely negative consequences from just one of the many piecemeal approaches to this and to all related problems — the only type of approach that has, till now, been applied:
In March 2024, “Good Jobs First” headlined “Ohio’s Lost Opportunity: How A New Economic Development Subsidy is Failing to Help Disinvested Communities”, and opened the report with:
Opportunity Zones were established as part of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Acts, ostensibly as an economic development tool. They are designated low-income census tracts where individuals or corporations may receive federal capital-gains tax breaks for investing through vehicles called Quality Opportunity Funds. Thanks to a unique disclosure provision of a state incentive in Ohio, this study analyzes the program in the Buckeye State. Our findings include:
Although there is currently federal legislation looking to extend and expand the program, we recommend that the program be allowed to sunset in 2026.
Good Jobs First gratefully acknowledges Policy Matters Ohio for collaborating on this project, especially Gavin LaPlace for his census tract-level analysis.
Their “Policy Recommendations” at the end are:
Good Jobs First recommends that the federal Opportunity Zone program be allowed to expire on schedule in 2026. Although there is proposed legislation to extend the duration and expand the scope of OZs, our findings are consistent with other research that shows OZs are limited in impact and, by design, drive benefits to some of the wealthiest individuals and companies.
The new legislation has provisions to designate more rural areas as OZs, but subsidized development usually fails to bring prosperity to poor communities, and OZs have proven to be no exception.
Opportunity Zones are investments only accessible to the already wealthy, and this analysis and others show that OZ investments favor areas that are already gentrifying.
OZs lack any community benefits, or “strings,” such as affordable housing, living wages, local hiring, MWBE contracting set-asides, or green construction. Making OZs a little more transparent won’t repair their inherently flawed structure. Our findings reinforce our longstanding recommendation that the program be allowed to sunset and that states also sunset their OZ add-on incentives.
We can either continue in the future the failed ‘solutions’ that have been tried till now, or else replace them with an authentic plan for the rebirth of America. Which way forward will America now take?
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THE EVIDENCE UPON WHICH THIS PROPOSAL IS BASED
Here are some relevant research-sources I’ve found. All of the research shows — all over the country — that homeless people, boarded-up and abandoned storefronts, declining real-estate property values, declining tax-receipts, and ‘racial’ segregation, are mutually dependent, instead of separate-and-distinct, problems. And the numbers show that they are mutually dependent in the same way. So, at least in broad terms, the solution will be basically the same everywhere. It just isn’t being applied everywhere (if anywhere), because, though, from a systems-standpoint, the needs are the same everywhere, no entity exists that is applying the necessary basic solution on a broad scale. The following is a fair sampling of these findings, and might be appropriate to mention in a business plan for this venture:
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SIZE OF U.S. REAL ESTATE MARKET:
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https://www.statista.com/outlook/fmo/real-estate/united-states#value
The value of U.S. real estate in 2023 is $113.58T, comprising $88.9T Residential and $26.7T Commercial. In 2018, that was a total of $82.91T, comprising $61.76T Residential and $21.15T Commercial.
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U.S. ANNUAL REMODELING COSTS
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https://www.statista.com/statistics/890264/homeowner-renovation-expenditure-usa/
c. $1.8T (including only residential improvements & repairs, not commercial). This venture would increase that $1.8T, because the remodeling in distressed and red-lined neighborhoods woud soar because of the government-guarantee backing up the remodeling loans in these neighborhoods — the neighborhoods that are the most in need of these improvements and that are currently the least likely to receive loans.
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https://www.thehousingcenter.org/remodeling-inequities-analyzing-geographic-trends-in-home-improvement-loans-in-cuyahoga-county/
“Remodeling Inequities: Analyzing Geographic Trends in Home Improvement Loans in Cuyahoga County”
25 May 2023
Home improvement loan originations are clustered in predominately white census tracts in Cuyahoga County, while denials for home improvement loans are predominately clustered in minority-majority census tracts. There are significant differences in accessing home improvement loans in Cuyahoga County between white and Black applicants. Next, it demonstrates that banks and other lending institutions are serving white neighborhoods and white applicants differently than nonwhite neighborhoods and applicants. Notably, neighborhoods with a higher percent minority population are denied at a statistically significant level compared to white majority areas. Taken together, these findings illustrate that home improvement loan origination and denial rates possibly further solidify patterns of racialized wealth inequality, racialized disparities in home value, uneven home value recovery in the wake of the 2008 mortgage foreclosure crisis, and uneven access to loans to improve the long term safety and viability of homes in minority-majority neighborhoods and for Black homeowners. Moreover, Figure 13 and Figure 14 illustrate that home improvement loan dollars are flowing into predominately white, affluent areas.
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EFFECT OF HOMELESS ON NEARBY REAL ESTATE:
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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/25/nyregion/nyc-homeless-shelters-property-values.html
“How Homeless Shelters Affect Property Values”
25 September 2019, by By Azi Paybarah
Nothing packs a community meeting like word that Mayor de Blasio wants to open a homeless shelter in a neighborhood. From Tompkinsville in Staten Island to “Billionaires’ Row” in Midtown, many residents, especially homeowners, share the same concern: Does being close to a shelter have a negative effect on property values?
The answer is yes. At least in Manhattan.
Your home would most likely sell for less if you live within about two blocks of a shelter, when another shelter is a few more blocks away. The city’s Independent Budget Office looked at sales in Manhattan and estimated that in such a situation, a homeowner would get about 24 to 25 percent less for a house or a condominium than for a residence farther from a shelter with no other shelters nearby.
That’s the difference between getting $1 million, or getting $750,000.
Residences within 1,000 feet of two or more shelters would sell for an estimated 17 percent less. That situation was most common in Central Harlem, said Doug Turetsky, a spokesman for the budget agency.
The agency analyzed 6,237 sales of Manhattan residences within 1,000 feet of 39 congregate shelters that were open continuously from 2010 through 2018. The agency did not look at hotels and private apartments that the city used temporarily as shelters. Residences included condos and one-, two- and three-family homes. The agency did not look at the value of a residence before a shelter opened.
The analysis found that a residence within 500 feet of an adult shelter would sell for an estimated 7 percent less than a residence 500 feet to 1,000 feet away from an adult shelter. A home within 500 feet of a shelter for families with children would sell for about 6 percent less than a home 500 feet to 1,000 feet away from a shelter for families with children.
The sales price would plunge even more precipitously when a location was compounded by a shelter within 500 feet and at least one other shelter within 1,000 feet, the rough equivalent of about four blocks.
Gale A. Brewer, the Manhattan borough president, requested the recent analysis of shelters. She said she had always been skeptical of Mr. de Blasio’s plan to open 90 new shelters over five years as a solution to homelessness.
“He should be focused on bringing his quote unquote affordable housing down to their needs,” she said, referring to people living in shelters.
The mayor’s office questioned the budget agency’s methodology. “The City has a moral and legal obligation to provide shelter for all those who need it,” said Avery Cohen, a spokeswoman for Mr. de Blasio, in an emailed statement. “Fulfilling this responsibility means opening quality shelters in every neighborhood across all five boroughs. We remain committed to meeting the needs of our most vulnerable individuals and families.”
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https://ecobear.co/knowledge-center/lower-property-values/
“Authoritative Research on How Homeless Encampments Lower Property Values”
In the past few years, a growing number of residential neighborhoods have faced the establishment of homeless encampments in their environs. Because this is something of a newer phenomenon, there is little definitive research on the precise impact homeless encampments have on property values in residential neighborhoods in which these camps exist.
Historically, homeless encampments tended to rise in city centers, including in commercial and industrial zones. In this day and age, in many metropolitan areas, homeless encampments can fairly be said to be cropping up everywhere.
Understanding the dearth in more definitive data specifically directed at the impact of homeless encampments on residential property values, we present a fair, reasonable extrapolation of data on matters impacting residential valuations that have a real, affirmative connection to the impact of homeless encampments.
Comparative Drag on Property Values: Cross Referencing Property Value Decrease From a Homeless Shelter
The National Association of Realtors has done extensive research on the impact the establishment of different types of businesses in or near a primarily residential neighborhood has on property values. One type of entity that the National Association of Realtors has examined is a homeless shelter. Through its research and analysis, the National Association of Realtors has concluded that a homeless shelter in a residential neighborhood has the potential for lowering property values by 12.7 percent.
As of this moment in time, the National Association of Realtors has not undertaken a comprehensive study on the impact homeless encampments have on property values in a residential neighborhood. With that noted, a fair extrapolation can statistically and realistic be made when using a homeless shelter in a residential neighborhood as a starting point for calculating the impact of a homeless encampment.
A basic fact is that a homeless encampment brings all of the same negative considerations to a residential enclave that are found with the presence of a homeless shelter – and then some. The negative elements homeless encampments share with homeless shelters include:
In addition to these factors homeless encampments share with homeless shelters, camps have other negative features that outpace those associated with shelters:
Anecdotally and statistically, it is correct to conclude that the presence of a more harmful entity in a residential neighborhood in the form of a homeless encampment will cause an even greater drag on residential property values.
Curb Appeal Extends Beyond Immediate Residence To Entire Block and Beyond
A great deal of attention is paid to curb appeal when it comes to the marketability of a residence. Million Acres, a service of Motley Fool, defines curb appear as:
At its core, the term “curb appeal” refers to the way your home looks when it’s viewed from the street. It’s a combination of all the eye-catching design elements that are used to make your home’s exterior look its best. Homeowners often do their best to add curb appeal because they want their home to be aesthetically pleasing when they pull into their driveway at the end of a long day. However, it becomes even more important when thinking of putting the property on the market.
Spectrum, a support organization for homeowners’ associations across the United States, emphasizes that curb appeal is not limited to the state of an individual residential property. The concept of curb appeal extends to a block or neighborhood in its entirety. Spectrum asserts:
Neighborhoods with plenty of curb appeal tend to maintain property values better. Surprised? No, we didn’t think you would be. While it is obvious that well-kept homes, yards, and common areas help neighborhoods stay desirable, it’s hard work keeping neighborhoods in like-new condition!
While not trying to sound overly superficial, the stark reality is that any type of eyesore on a block or in a neighborhood impacts the curb appear of those individual residences in the area. The word eyesore has become something of a technical term when it comes to the impact of something unsightly and its impact on surrounding property, including homes. A common place definition of eyesore is something that is largely “considered unpleasant or ugly.” From a technical standpoint, the usage of eyesore is considered as “an alternative perspective” to a landmark.
Common examples of eyesores impacting the curb appear and associated property values of homes include:
A number of these common examples of eyesores are generally connected to homeless encampments, including litter, dilapidated structures, polluted areas, mud, and feces. Added to the list usually is used hypodermic needles used from illicit drug consumption.
Residential Property Unsellable in Neighborhood With Homeless Encampment
If a neighborhood is the site of a homeless encampment, a real issue arises as to whether a home can be placed on the market effectively for sale. This becomes even a more significant issue if a homeless encampment is on the block where a particular residence is located.
We’ve already discussed the impact a homeless encampment can have on residential property values. The market value of a residence can experience a significant drag if a homeless encampment is in the neighborhood. That alone may be a reason to hold off putting a home on the market, if at all possible.
On a related note, if a homeless encampment is in a neighborhood in which a house is on the market, odds are strong that attracting prospective buyers to even take a look at the property will be next to impossible. Not only will the value of a residence drop significantly while a homeless encampment exists on the block or in the neighborhood, a homeless encampment in and of itself very well may have the same impact on prospective buyers as a crucifix has on a motion picture vampire.
Property Values After a Homeless Encampment Is Eliminated in a Neighborhood
Depending on ordinances and related factors in a particular community, a homeless encampment may prove relative transient. With that said, even in a county or municipality that has more aggressive regulation of homeless encampments, such camps may remain in place for a matter of months, not days or weeks.
On a closing note, issues regarding property values and homeless encampments, homeless encampments can persist even after camps are removed or otherwise eliminated. First of all, a comprehensive cleanup and sanitization process needs to occur to attempt to restore the property to a sanitary and safe condition.
Secondly, even after comprehensive cleaning and sanitization has occurred, the fact that a homeless encampment existed in a neighborhood may hang like something of a fog over the residences in the area. This can continue to impact property values into the future for what also can be a matter of a number of months.
In closing, the reality is that homeless encampments can and do have what oftentimes prove to be significant impacts on property values in residential neighborhoods. The residential property value drag is even likely to persist for some period of time once a homeless encampment in a neighborhood has been removed.
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EFFECT OF VACANT LAND ON REAL ESTATE VALUES:
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“Urban decline and residential preference: The effect of vacant lots on housing premiums”
Youngre Noh , Galen Newman and Ryun Jung Lee
Texas A&M University, USA, Urban Analytics and City Science, 2020
Consistent with much of the existing literature, lower-income neighborhoods tended to have more negative impacts from VL [Vacant Lots]. In lower-income neighborhoods, when more VL exists, property values tend to decrease and larger-sized VLs tended to result in lower housing prices. When VLs cluster in lower-income neighborhoods, however, housing premiums tend to increase. This is a unique finding as it is incongruent with much of the literature in lower-income neighborhoods. This finding indicates a possible increase in the rate of gentrification in lower-income communities in Minneapolis. Large clusters of VLs are more easily developed in such neighborhoods. In most low-income neighborhoods, VLs tend to be relatively small, oddly shaped, and located at less preferred locations around poorly maintained streetscapes and infrastructure. In these conditions, VL types are typically abandoned structures or too small to possess much development potential. For this reason, larger VLs which are spatially clustered are more appreciated for their revitalization potential.
Inversely, this research finds that being closer to a VL increases housing price values in high-income neighborhoods, staying consistent with literature related to VL with high development potential. A greater number of and larger VLs actually added value to the neighborhood. In high-income neighborhoods, VLs are usually greenfields or subdivided lots waiting to be built out. This type of land possesses a potential for development which positively impacts nearby residential areas.
Only middle-income neighborhoods agreed with what much of the literature found in regards to the impact of the existence of high and low development potential VLs. Middle- income neighborhoods corresponded to what was expected for VLs, negatively impacting in terms of their size, clustering, and proximity. Also, when VLs cluster in middle-income neighborhoods, prices decrease significantly.
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EFFECT OF VACANT BUILDINGS ON REAL ESTATE VALUES:
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https://www.gao.gov/assets/720/712854.pdf
U.S. Government Accountability Office, March 2021
Conclusions
Foreclosed, abandoned, and vacant properties — including REO [foreclosed properties — known as real estate-owned (REO)] properties, which reached historically high levels in 2010–2013 — can have negative effects on communities. FHA, VA, and RHS have emphasized financial goals for their REO programs. But these agencies generally lack metrics to measure how their REO programs support their respective missions to strengthen neighborhoods and communities or serve veteran populations or low-income rural homeowners. Developing and using such metrics could help the agencies assess how their REO programs might help stabilize communities experiencing economic stress, and how they might better serve agency missions and goals. Although the future economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the housing foreclosures rise and federal entities see their REO inventories increase.
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“Understanding the True Costs of Abandoned Properties: How Maintenance Can Make a Difference”
January 2017, by Aaron Klein, Former United States Treasury Department Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy
Minimizing Foreclosure Impact:
All About Maintenance
Having established the significant impact that foreclosed and vacant buildings have on communities, the question is what can be done about it. The answer depends on the root driver of the loss of value. There are many potential causes, but one repeatedly stands out: the failure of the owner to maintain the property.
Foreclosed and abandoned houses have broken the incentive between homeowner and the person who lives in the home. Unlike a rental property where the renter and the owner share incentives for upkeep and maintenance, an abandoned property has no such incentive.
Research from the Boston Federal Reserve that was overall skeptical on the magnitude of value loss by foreclosure was still definitive as to why it occurred: “Properties in all stages of distress exert downward pressure on nearby home values… The estimates are very sensitive to the condition of the distressed property, with a positive correlation existing between house price growth and foreclosed properties identified as being in ‘above average’ condition. We argue that the most plausible explanation for these results is an externality resulting from reduced investment by owners of distressed property.”33
Similarly, research from the Cleveland Federal Reserve focusing on Columbus Ohio, came to a similar conclusion: “Where vacancy cannot be avoided, the finding highlights the importance of maintaining a property throughout the foreclosure process, so that although foreclosed and vacant, a property retains its value so that abandonment is unlikely to occur.” The paper goes further to recommend that “A city’s housing/code enforcement department could play a strong role here, taking a proactive approach in identifying and targeting recently foreclosed properties.”34
The findings from this study merit special note as the study actually quantified the change in value destruction attributable to the condition of the foreclosed or abandoned property.
Using a standard scale of rating the condition of the property as “very good,” “good,” ”fair” or “poor,” the author ran controlled regressions attempting to isolate the impact of just the property condition, holding other variables constant. These other variables included not only the standard metrics of home value, such as number of rooms, bathrooms, air conditioning, lot size, construction quality, but also school district, distance to the central business district, and the stability of the specific neighborhood within Columbus Ohio.
The results show that property condition is incredibly important. …
Conclusion
Under a conservative set of assumptions, a vacant property causes losses of approximately $150,000 in its first year: $133,000 from reduced property value for its neighbors, $14,000 in increased crime and $1,500 in increased costs for the police and fire departments. If this house were to catch fire, which is almost twice as common among vacant properties, there would be another $30,000 in damages, on average.
These costs last over time. For every additional year the property sits vacant, the crime and police costs add up. Even after the property is sold, neighbors will lose at least $25,000 for two years and quite possibly longer.
Further, we know that the majority of these costs are not simply derived from the property’s status as being foreclosed, but rather from its position as being vacant. Abandonment drives the loss of property value and is the cause of increased crime and likelihood of fire.
Within abandoned properties we know that the main driver is the deteriorating condition of the house. A large driver of this is when the property is boarded shut. Boarding a property is an investment by the owner that signals to the neighborhood and community at large that this house is going to stay vacant for some time. Simply put, no one boards a property that they are going to have vacant for a few weeks during maintenance before renting or selling. Instead it is a longer-term signal that no one will be home for months or even years.
Boarding techniques that purport to be secure are not. Vacant buildings that are “secured” have higher incidence of fire caused by people having broken into those units. They serve as hubs for crime and criminal activity.
A solution that really secured a vacant building and would reduce the characteristics of abandonment, namely blight, would produce tremendous savings. Given that more than $85,000 of these costs are driven by the property’s status as vacant, a solution that obscured that condition – that is, made the home appear to the external viewer as occupied, would reduce and potentially eliminate those costs. In fact, securing the vacant property is likely to create value itself that could go beyond the costs of being vacant as the building becomes in better condition than it would have been when occupied. In that case, even more savings would be realized. This is especially true when the solution makes the house impenetrable to vagrants and criminals, the costs of crime, policing and fire would be subsequently significantly reduced.
These savings would, in turn, reduce the probability of future foreclosures in the affected neighborhood. By stabilizing property values, reducing crime and reducing blight, the solution is directly attacking the cycle of foreclosures. Programs and policies created with foreclosure mitigation in mind must turn their attention to ways to better secure vacant properties. Realizing the potential economic savings, value creation, the opportunity to reduce future foreclosures and to combat crime, fire damage and all of the other additional non-economic value that is destroyed by vacant properties, researchers and policymakers can and should incorporate smarter methods to secure vacant and abandoned buildings into their analysis, foreclosure research, and foreclosure mitigation and prevention strategies.
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February 2017, by Aaron Klein
A new study commissioned by Community Blight Solutions and Founder and Chairman Robert Klein, completed by Aaron Klein (no relation to Robert Klein), reports on the costs and benefits of using clearboarding [a nearly indestructible polycarbonate that resembles glass] versus plywood for vacant and abandoned properties. The white paper, “Curing Community Blight: A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Clearboarding versus Plywood to Secure Vacant and Abandoned Properties,” quantifies that even under the most conservative assumptions, property owners and their communities enjoy significant economic returns when clearboarding, a nearly indestructible polycarbonate that resembles glass, is used rather than traditional plywood to secure vacant and abandoned property. …
The findings are conclusive and demonstrate that under even the most conservative assumptions, significant economic returns are achievable by simply switching from traditional plywood to clearboarding to secure the doors and windows of vacant or abandoned property. The seemingly simple substitution of clearboarding rather than plywood produces large economic returns for the immediate, surrounding community. A conservative estimate of the total net return on investment is on the order of 34:1 when clearboarding is substituted for plywood. However, estimates could range from an 800% return to figures in excess of 100 to 1, depending on what assumptions made. Most of this value is returned to the community at large, through reduced blight, increased property value, less crime, and reduced police and fire department costs. However, the property owner who takes over the vacant or abandoned property also will come out ahead from making this switch, with a positive return of 200% or more, depending on circumstances.
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January 5, 2017, 4:48 pm By Ben Lane
The fight against neighborhood blight took a giant step forward this week, as Ohio just became the first state to ban use of plywood on vacant and abandoned properties. …
Robert Klein is the founder and chairman of the board for [mortgage] field services provider Safeguard Properties and also chair of polycarbonate sheeting company Secure View.
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[This is a gold mine: a What-to and How-to guide:]
Contents Introduction .................................................................................................................................... 2
Acknowledgements ……………………………………………………………………………. 3
GETTING STARTED: What We Know About Blight ……………………………………… 4
The High Cost of Blight ............................................................................................................. 4
Positive Impacts of Eliminating Blight .......................................................................................... 5
Four Crucial Strategies to Eliminate Blight .................................................................................. 5
One: Establish an Enforceable Legal Framework ........................................................................ 5
Two: Target Limited Resources and Collaborate with Key Partners ............................................. 5
Three: Change the Culture to Improve Compliance ...................................................................... 6
Four: Transfer Worst Properties to Responsible New Owners ...................................................... 6
Data-Driven, Progressive-Discipline Code Enforcement .............................................................. 7
SECTION 1: Tools to Prevent and Eliminate Blight and Keep Properties Up to Code ................ 8
Chapter 1. Adopt Legal Framework to Hold Properties to Clear Standards.……………………. 9
A. Enact International Property Maintenance Code or Adopt Individual Ordinances................. 10
B. Adopt Quality-of-Life-Violation Ticketing Ordinance ........................................................... 12
Chapter 2. Register Rental, Vacant, and Foreclosed Properties to Better Monitor Condition ..... 15
C. Mandate Rental-Property Owners to Pay Fee to Cover Costs of Inspections and Complaint Response ……………………………………………………………………………………….. 16
D. Mandate Vacant-Property Owners to Pay Fee to Cover Costs of Inspections and Complaint Response ……………………………………………………………………………………….. 18
E. Require Lenders to Register Properties in Default and Oversee Security and Maintenance .. 20
Chapter 3. Require Buyers to Bring Properties Up to Code Within a Specic Time Frame After Sale and Disqualify Tax-Sale Bidders Who Have Tax Delinquencies or Code Violations ......... 23
F. Require Presale Inspections Before Sale of Property to Identify Deciencies .......................... 24
G. Require Buyers to Bring Property Up to Code Under Municipal Code and Compliance Act .26
H. Disqualify Tax Sale Bidders Who Have Delinquency or Code Violations ………………… 28
Chapter 4. Offer Grants and Loans to Homeowners and Small Landlords Who Lack Resources to Keep Their Properties Up to Code …………………………………..…………………………. 31
I. Home Repair and Rental Rehabiltation Assistance ………………………………………… 32
Chapter 5. Prioritize Severely Blighted Properties That Threaten Health and Safety, and Use Fines, Permit Denials, or Criminal Charges to Encourage Repair and Maintenance .................. 35
J. Impose Fines for Each Missing Door or Window .................................................................... 36
K. Deny Permits to Owners Who Have Tax Delinquency or Code Violations............................. 40
L. Attach Owners’ Other Assets to Remediate Blight .................................................................. 42
M. Bring Public Pressure to Bear Using Hall of Shame .............................................................. 44
N. Impose Criminal Misdemeanor Sanctions for Multiple Code Violations ............................... 46
O. Extradite Out-of-State Property Owners ................................................................................. 48
SECTION 2: Tools to Address Long-Term Vacant and Abandoned Blighted Properties .............51
P. Demolish Unsafe Structures and Prepare for Reinvestment .................................................... 52
Q. Establish Blight Fund .............................................................................................................. 54
R. Open Estates of Deceased Property Owners to Transfer Blighted Properties ......................... 56
S. Appoint Conservator to Make Improvements........................................................................... 58
T. Condemn Properties Using Blighted Property Review Committee......................................... 62
U. Create a Land Bank to Acquire, Manage and Market Vacant Properties ................................ 64
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EFFECT OF VACANT APARTMENTS ON RENTAL PRICES:
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“Big drop in Manhattan apartment prices begins to lure back younger renters”
12 November 2020: Manhattan real estate may be turning the corner, as new rentals increased for the first time in over a year and sales activity started to creep higher after the Covid collapse.
A big drop in rental prices appears to be luring new, younger renters back to the city, even as office workers and wealthy New Yorkers remain in the suburbs and more rural resort towns. New leases in Manhattan increased 33% in October, making it the best October in 12 years, according to a report from Douglas Elliman and Miller Samuel.
The typical rent paid for apartments including discounts, or the median net effective rent, fell 19% from a year ago to $2,868 — a record decline. Smaller apartments, which cater to younger renters, fell the most. The price of studio apartments was down 21%, and one-bedroom apartment prices dropped 19%.
“I think we’re at a tipping point where the consumer starts coming back to the city,” said Jonathan Miller, CEO of Miller Samuel. “Sellers are slowly recalibrating what the values are, and the lower pricing is beginning to bring more people in.”
Manhattan real estate still faces major challenges. There were 16,145 unrented apartments in October — an all-time high. The vacancy rate, which typically hovers around 2%, is now over 6%. All those empty apartments mean landlords will have to continue to lower rents and offer incentives to lure people back to the city.
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How Vacant and Abandoned Buildings Affect the Community
https://communityprogress.org/blog/how-vacant-abandoned-buildings-affect-community/
“How Vacant and Abandoned Buildings Affect the Community”
24 March 2023
Vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated (VAD) properties — referred to by some as “blighted properties” — pose significant costs to public health, property values, local taxpayers, and more. Failure to address problem properties, just like ignoring a leaking faucet, costs more in the long run and causes more harm over time. Understanding the true and complete costs of blighted properties is critically important in building the case to reform the broken status quo and implement more equitable, effective, and efficient solutions.
How Vacant and Abandoned Buildings Harm Public Health
Physical health: Individuals living in substandard housing can be exposed to dangerous toxins such as mold, lead, and asbestos, increasing the risk for asthma, cardiovascular disease, increased aggression, learning disabilities, sexually transmitted diseases, and poor health outcomes.
Emotional wellbeing: Visual evidence of vacancy and neighborhood disinvestment — such as boarded up properties, trash and dumping, and overgrown weeds — has been shown to harm the mental health of neighbors, putting them at greater risk of sadness, depression, stress, and elevated rates of intentional injury.
Violence and crime: Studies have shown that violent crime, including assaults and gun-related crimes, increase in disinvested neighborhoods with vacant and abandoned properties.
How Vacant and Abandoned Buildings Harm Individual Wealth
Property equity: Owning a property is often an individual’s greatest investment and financial asset. Research has consistently shown that vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated properties reduce the value of surrounding properties, leading to decreases in owners’ equity and personal wealth. For example, In Cleveland, Ohio, properties within 500 feet of a vacant, tax-delinquent, and foreclosed property lost 9.4 percent of their value.
Financial liabilities: Homeowners within close proximity to abandoned properties are often charged higher insurance premiums or even face policy cancellations because of the unstable nature of the neighborhood created by the vacant properties leaving homeowners with greater financial liabilities.
How Vacant and Abandoned Buildings Harm Public Finances
Municipal revenue: Property taxes are typically the largest source of revenue for local governments. Research has shown vacant and abandoned properties lead to a decrease in taxable values of surrounding properties and increase the likelihood of mortgage and tax foreclosures nearby creating a harmful domino effect that creates revenue challenges for local governments. For example, the total costs of distressed vacant properties in Atlanta, Georgia, range from $55 million to $153 million in lost property values. This translates into lost property tax revenues of $1 million to $2.7 million annually.
Maintenance and abatement costs: Local governments incur the costs of remedying nuisances and unsafe conditions, including boarding and securing structures, cutting grass, removing trash and debris, and demolishing unsafe structures. For instance, Toledo, Ohio spent $3.8 million in 2016 on services related to VAD properties, including $1 million on code enforcement, $800,000 on nuisance abatement, $600,000 on police dispatch, and $1.4 million on fire dispatch.
Public safety costs: Higher violent and property crime rates and the associated costs to dispatch police and fire services to respond to these crimes are commonly associated with vacant and abandoned properties. For example, a study in Austin, Texas found that “blocks with unsecured [vacant] buildings had 3.2 times as many drug calls to police, 1.8 times as many theft calls, and twice the number of violent calls” as blocks without vacant buildings.
What Happens if You Do Nothing About Vacant and Abandoned Properties?
The costs of the status quo are significant. Inaction is not an option. Communities across the United States have shown that investing in solutions to reverse the harms caused by vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated properties has not only been cost-effective but generated more equitable and positive outcomes. Understanding the costs of vacancy, abandonment, and deterioration is a critical first step in addressing problem properties and honing existing strategies for more equitable, efficient, and effective outcomes.
If you’re struggling with vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated properties in your community, check out our free online resources, webinars, and publications. The Center for Community Progress also provides customized, expert guidance to state and local governments to assess the state of vacancy in your community and recommend policy and practice solutions for equitable neighborhood revitalization. Contact us at technicalassistance@communityprogress.org to learn more!
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THE LACK OF PROGRESS:
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https://www.latimes.com/la-xpm-2012-oct-21-la-fi-lew-20121021-story.html
“Don’t let a run-down house next door lower your property’s value”
BY LEW SICHELMAN, 21 October 2012, Los Angeles Times
[This could just as well describe today; what progress has been made in ten years? Foreclosure rates are way down but now are heading back up again. And a recent German study showed that most foreclosures in Germany were due to “income and liquidity rather than loan-to-value (LTV) ratios.” False assumptions about how to optimize the system abound. That’s what first needs to be fixed.]
With millions of homes in foreclosure — and millions more owners having difficulty paying their mortgages — there’s likely to be one in every neighborhood: the property that has gone to seed.
Maybe the lawn next door that you once envied has turned brown or the flower beds have been overtaken by weeds. Or perhaps the grass hasn’t been cut in weeks and the house is surrounded by what looks like a wheat field.
If the neighborhood eyesore has been abandoned, the house itself has probably deteriorated. The windows may be broken or boarded up, the gutters could be sagging, the garage door might be hanging off its frame and the roof could be covered with debris.
Perhaps the place has been taken over by rodents. Or maybe the neighborhood kids are using it as a hangout. Worse, squatters could be using it as shelter or drug pushers might be using it as their place of business.
It’s not a pretty picture. Yet scenes like these are playing out everywhere. No neighborhood is immune, and the effect on local property values can be chilling, even when the distressed property is still occupied and well-maintained.
Research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland shows that neighboring property values sag by up to 3.9% when a nearby house is in the foreclosure process but still occupied. When the offending house is vacant and the taxes aren’t being paid, the value drop can be twice that much.
“Vacant homes can be more than just an eyesore,” Federal Reserve Board Gov. Elizabeth Duke said in a recent speech in New York. “They can have substantial negative impacts on the surrounding community, impacts that are felt most acutely by the neighbors and communities that must cope with the dangers and costs of vacant buildings.”
All of this raises the question: What can you do if you are trying to sell your house and a ramshackle property happens to be next door or down the street?
For starters, if the offending property is still occupied, try being neighborly by explaining your situation and offering whatever assistance you can. You might even enlist your real estate agent to help; after all, it’s in his or her best interest too. And sometimes agents can help organize a communitywide effort to help a distressed neighbor.
If you live in a community governed by a homeowners association, let the property manager or the association board know of your problem. Associations often will pay to cut the grass and correct visible exterior maintenance issues. The cost will become a lien on the offending property that will have to be discharged before it can be sold.
Homeowners are generally free to choose how their property looks. However, if your neighbor rejects your offer or otherwise refuses to bring the outside up to a reasonable standard, you may be able to prod the local authorities to force him or her to act. Many jurisdictions fine owners for not maintaining their properties. And with the ongoing foreclosure problem, some state and local governments have enacted ordinances that hold lenders’ feet to the fire.
If the place is abandoned, you need to find the owner. That may be your neighbor’s lender, depending on where the property stands in the foreclosure process.
Several communities are enforcing vacant property registration ordinances that require lenders to secure and maintain the property and call for stiff fines and penalties if they don’t, whether or not the foreclosure is completed. To force lenders to fix up houses that are in disrepair, for example, Chula Vista, Calif., requires holders of troubled mortgages to pay fees and post a bond for each such property. Springfield, Mass., and Albany, N.Y., also command that each foreclosed property be registered.
“The last thing [lenders] want is an unhappy neighbor,” said Joseph Bada of default management company Five Brothers in Warren, Mich. “They are very concerned. They look for such calls. Then they notify us, and we go out and take care of it.”
If you’ve still had no success, you might want to take matters into your own hands. Not by going onto the property or into the house without permission — that could be considered trespassing — but by erecting an obvious border between your place and the run-down house next door.
That might be a fence or even tall shrubs to help block the view. Either one is a fairly fast fix that could be worth the investment, said Margaret Innis, who operates Decorate to Sell, a home-staging company in Andover, Mass.
“If you have a great neighborhood, you want your buyers to see it,” Innis said. “But if the house next door is an ugly duckling, you really have to think on your feet.”
One possibility is to try to make sure that prospects use a route to your house that doesn’t take them by the offending property. Another might be to install plantation blinds angled so that light can stream in but the view does not, Innis said. “Minimize the distraction.”
At the very least, laws in every state afford you the right to prune trees, shrubs and roots that cross the line and intrude on your property. But proceed cautiously.
Make sure that you don’t go over the property line, be careful not to prune so much that the plant dies and clean up your mess. If the debris is on your side of the line, it becomes your responsibility, not your neighbor’s.
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7 July 2023
In Alameda, an island located in the San Francisco Bay, there’s an old federal maritime training center built in 1942 that has been sitting vacant for years. For almost as long, residents there have been batting around ideas for what to do with it. In 2019, they finally decided, approving a measure to use the space to house older homeless people.
The nonprofit Alameda Point Collaborative was given the nod to build a medical center on the 100-acre campus where homeless seniors would be able to stay after they’re released from hospitals, rather than ending up back on the streets.
The federal property sits by a park. So as they recover, said Doug Biggs, the nonprofit’s executive director, the seniors would be able to gaze out on San Francisco Bay.
“It's conducive to healing,” he said. “This is a very calming, very soothing place. It's just an amazing location to be able to offer this type of service.”
The plan also calls for building permanent housing for 100 seniors, which make up the fastest growing part of the area’s homeless population.
All of this is made possible by a 2016 federal law that says that properties the federal government doesn’t believe it needs anymore should be turned over to state and local governments or nonprofits to be used to help the homeless. But because of the way the program is being run, the project in Alameda remains just a plan on paper.
Alameda’s situation is far from unique, say housing advocates from the National Council of State Housing Agencies and the National Homelessness Law Center. At a time when cities are struggling with homelessness, they contend that there are many other federal properties sitting unused that could be converted into housing, like empty office buildings on a patch of land west of Denver.
In fact, there are nearly 8,000 federal properties that are sitting unused, according to Sen. Gary Peters, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee. Another 898 buildings, he said during a hearing last month, are underutilized, perhaps in part because fewer workers are actually going to work.
“There are many thousands of obsolete federal office buildings that are unneeded [and] just sitting empty,'' said Stockton Williams, executive director of the National Council of State Housing Agencies. “Even if a very small fraction were deemed to be suitable for conversion, you could still be talking about a significant number of new affordable housing for people who are living on the streets.”
The problem is that a complex process involving several federal agencies is making it basically impossible to use these vacant buildings to help the homeless, according to Antonia Fasanelli, the executive director of the National Homelessness Law Center.
Under the 1987 McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, vacant federal properties are supposed to be made available to help the homeless. For years, the federal government interpreted the law to mean they had to be used for temporary housing.
And indeed, they have been. According to the 2013 report by the law center, vacant properties have been used to provide services to millions of homeless people, including one instance where an empty Veterans Affairs outpatient clinic in downtown Boston was converted into a drop-in homeless shelter.
But lawmakers wanted to broaden the use of vacant properties, and in 2016, the bipartisan Federal Assets Sale and Transfer Act expanded the law to allow unused properties to be made into permanent low-income housing.
The way it works is this: When a federal agency finds it has property it doesn’t need, it turns it over to the General Services Administration to decide whether another agency needs the space. If not, the Department of Housing and Urban Development gets to take a look and decide whether it can be used to assist the homeless. If it determines that it can, another agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, then takes applications from state and local governments or nonprofits to take the property over for free.
If no one wants the property to help the homeless, it can then be used for other purposes that serve the public. And failing that, the government can then put the unused property up for sale.
Getting federal properties like the maritime center in Alameda or the office park outside of Denver for free is a huge opportunity for low-income housing developers, “especially when inflation and other drivers have pushed construction costs through the roof,” Williams said.
The problem, he said, that Health and Human Services Department is imposing requirements that essentially make it impossible for properties the federal government no longer needs to be used for low-income housing.
While the property may be free, the department is requiring that nonprofits and governments have the money upfront to redevelop and maintain them. Many housing projects rely on tax credits like the federal Low-Income Housing Trust Fund to fund building costs and maintenance. But having the credits in HHS’ view does not meet the requirement.
“They have the process almost exactly backward from how affordable housing and really almost any other type of commercial real estate development occurs,” said Fasanelli from the law center.
The lack of upfront capital is what is keeping the Alameda project from being built. “We’re stuck between a rock and a hard place,” Biggs, the group's executive director, said.
It is a similar story just west of Denver, said Cathy Alderman, the chief communications and public policy officer for the nonprofit Colorado Coalition for the Homeless. If not for how the federal program is being run, her group would have already begun building 600 units of permanent low-income housing with medical services and vocational training, “where some older federal buildings were sitting vacant and much of the land was vacant as well.”
However, HHS rejected the project in 2018 because the coalition did not have the money in hand to develop the housing, a ruling the group called in a letter to the department “erroneous, arbitrary and capricious.”
The coalition had intended to pay for part of the project by leasing out brownfields on the site for a solar farm. “You don't go and get a mortgage or a home loan, and then walk around with cash in our pocket,” Alderman said. “We had enough funding in multiple funding sources that were lined up and ready to go. The federal government said well, that money's not in your bank account.”
HHS on Thursday referred questions to the General Services Administration, which did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
These agencies and the Department of Housing and Urban Development have all come under scrutiny after the Government Accountability Office said in a report in October that they are not moving quickly enough to get rid of the properties the government no longer needs.
The three agencies did propose a number of changes in March on how it handles unneeded property, but none, says Fasanelli, will address the problems governments and nonprofits are encountering as they try to build housing for the homeless.
“The proposed changes really wouldn’t move the needle at all,” she said.
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28 June 2012
Homelessness has been on the rise in America's cities since the start of recession, but it's not for lack of housing. According to some reports, there are now an estimated five vacant properties for every homeless person in the U.S., many left empty as the result of the foreclosure crisis.
Actually putting this property to good use, however, is harder than it seems. Or maybe, given the legal complexities of owning property, it's exactly as hard as it seems.
There are some models for converting vacant housing into space for the homeless. Under the Title V program (part of the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act), the federal government requires that empty or "underused" properties that it owns be made available to homelessness advocacy organizations. Every week, a list of the available properties are printed up in the Federal Register. Non-profits (along with state and local agencies) can submit a proposal for how they'd like to use the space. The only rule: it must benefit the homeless.
If the Department of Health and Human Services approves the application (they have 25 days to do so), the property is transferred. Between 1988 and 2003, 91 such properties (worth some $105.4 million) were handed over to help the homeless. One of them, in Little Rock, Arkansas, was a former VA hospital converted into an apartment complex for homeless families. The facility also offers job training and child care includes over 40 units of housing. "The cost of real property can be prohibitive to any homeless service provider," says Tristia Bauman, the housing attorney for National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. "With this program, [organizations] are able to engage in work they might not otherwise have been able to do."
There's also the 1994 Base Closure Act, which converts closed bases into homeless housing (run by a local redevelopment authority).
It's a decent model for state and local governments, but converting privately owned homes is much, much more complicated. A large chunk of the current vacant housing stock is made up of homes that were foreclosed upon, meaning they're now owned by banks. Banks, of course, don't want to hang onto vacant properties any longer than necessary lest they get stuck with additional property tax bills, and it's tough to act as a landlord for thousands of homes across the county.
Some banks have solved this by bulldozing foreclosed homes and giving the property over to the city. Bank of America, for example, donated 100 lots in Cleveland after bulldozing the properties; they've made similar contributions in Chicago and Detroit. Other banks have done this as well. According to the New York Times:
“JPMorgan Chase has donated roughly 3,300 homes to nonprofits or municipalities since 2009, according to a bank spokesman. Last year, Citibank donated 205 properties.”
Wells Fargo gave 100 properties to the Cuyahoga County Land Reutilization Corporation. Municipal governments like Cuyahoga County prefer the empty land, in a lot of cases, because they can assemble bigger parcels for development or park use. And banks say it's more economical to knock the houses down than fix them up.
This frustrates many homeless advocates. Picture the Homeless, a New York City-based advocacy organization, issued a 2012 report calling on the city to convert its vacant housing stock into affordable housing. The group also wants the city to mandate that residential buildings vacant for more than three years must be turned over to the city and converted to affordable housing.
There have been pushes to do just this. In her 2009 State of the City address, New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn unveiled a plan to convert unsold condos into affordable housing. “These vacant apartments now represent our best asset in the fight for affordable housing," she said at the time. Quinn launched the Housing Asset Renewal Program, a $20 million pilot program to transform unsold condominiums and stalled residential construction sites into affordable housing units. Only 154 units were built.*
It comes down to a housing philosophy. Though the city has the right to take over properties in tax foreclosure (in the 1970s and 1980s, it took over tens of thousands of spots this way), it prefers to rely on private developers to buy and refurbish the properties. The city acts as a facilitator, says Catie Marshall of New York's Office of Housing Preservation and Development, pulling these properties together and making sure builders know about them.
This strategy makes sense for other cities, too: they don't want to be strapped down refurbishing and selling property. And the parcels banks want to give away often house the worst, most decrepit homes. Instead, the best many municipalities can do is offer land up to people who know what they're doing and hope for the best.
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“New York Doubles Down on Tracking Empty Storefront Problem”
25 July 2019, Lily Katz
Take a stroll down Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, one of the most famous shopping thoroughfares in the world, and you’ll find the emptiness hard to ignore.
New York’s vacant storefront epidemic doesn’t end there: Walk one block east to Madison Avenue, and nearly 30% of all shops are available for rent, according to a report by brokerage Cushman & Wakefield.
Business owners across the city have increasingly been forced to close up shop amid soaring rents and competition from e-commerce companies, but just how pervasive is the problem?
Local lawmakers are keen to find out. The New York City Council passed legislation this week that requires the government to track numerous metrics for commercial properties, including vacancies. The effort, aimed at creating a more comprehensive data set to monitor the health of the city’s small businesses, seeks to replace the existing patchwork of available information, which doesn’t paint a complete picture of the state of the market.
“The vacant storefront epidemic has been spoken about by New Yorkers from all zip codes, but there’s never been any real data behind it,” Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer said in an emailed statement. “My hope is that with this now-publicly available information, we can begin to understand the problem and come up with functional solutions to combat it.”
The NYC Department of Small Business Services released a study in May that found the city’s average storefront vacancy rate climbed to 8.9% in 2018 from 5.6% the prior year, though the data was self-reported by individual business districts and didn’t span the whole city.
Int. 1472-B, one of five bills focused on small businesses that was passed by the city council this week, requires the department of finance to collect from owners details about which properties are vacant, lease lengths, upcoming expirations, store sizes and rental rates. It also mandates a public online database of the information. …
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https://manhattan.institute/article/the-truth-about-bloombergs-record-on-homelessness
“The Truth About Bloomberg’s Record on Homelessness”
26 February 2020. As Michael Bloomberg’s presidential campaign has risen in the polls, scrutiny has increased over his record as mayor of New York. A recent report in THE CITY provides a critical overview of the Bloomberg legacy on homelessness, noting the 71% rise in the shelter census under his administration. …
In homelessness circles, the conventional wisdom on why the shelter census increased during the Bloomberg years is that he slammed the back door shut: He didn’t offer enough subsidized housing to facilitate shelter exits.
The truth is slightly more complicated. Bloomberg believed in housing subsidies, but he thought they should be structured in a certain way. He had a program that towards the end of his tenure was called “Work Advantage” (more often, “Advantage” for short), which offered time-limited rental subsidies to shelter clients. It was jointly funded with state government, which slashed its contribution amidst the Great Recession’s budget chaos, thus ending Advantage.
Advocates criticized Advantage for its paternalistic overtones. Indeed, their scorn ran so deep that they supported Albany’s cuts. Former Bloomberg officials have spoken with great bitterness about the Advantage funding saga. …
After talking to reporters, Bloomberg turned to then-Coalition for the Homeless leader Mary Brosnahan, and snapped, “The problem is these people need to learn now to save.” …
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https://archive.is/MEGN4#selection-435.0-461.68
“What Is the Actual Housing Vacancy Rate?”
by Wolf Richter, 2 February 2023
On page 4, we see that in Q4, 2022:
Total number of housing units: 143.95 million.
Year-over-year increase in housing units: +1.34 million
Total number of vacant housing units: 14.55 million.
Total vacancy rate: 10.1% (14.55 million divided by 143.95 million).
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https://unitedwaynca.org/blog/vacant-homes-vs-homelessness-by-city/
https://archive.ph/ZFtfe#selection-1135.0-1139.310
“VACANT HOMES VS. HOMELESSNESS”
28 March 2023, United Way
Sixteen million homes currently sit vacant across the U.S. In every state across the country, many homes remain empty while hundreds of thousands of Americans face homelessness. Vacant homes and buildings often succumb to the elements and deteriorate due to leaks, damage and general lack of maintenance before ever finding a buyer. … There are currently 28 vacant homes for every one person experiencing homelessness in the U.S.
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https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/rental-vacancy-rate#excessive-vacancies
“The effect of one vacant property on the block could reduce the value of nearby properties by 20% or more”, as-of 5 January 2024.
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ENTRENCHED INSTUTIONS’ DISINTEREST IN SOLVING THE PROBLEM:
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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/california-homelessness-housing-crisis/674737/
“The Root Cause of the Homelessness Crisis”
Researchers at UC San Francisco have released the largest representative survey of homeless people in more than 25 years.
By Jerusalem Demsas, 18 July 2023
Thirty percent of the American homeless population and 50 percent of its unsheltered population live in California, more than 170,000 people total. Homelessness is primarily a function of the broader housing-unaffordability crisis, which in turn is primarily a function of how difficult local governments have made building new housing in the places that need it the most.
Pundits and politicians routinely claim that the California homelessness crisis is actually a result of people moving from other states for better weather or better public benefits. But new research casts doubt on this theory. Last month, researchers at UC San Francisco released the largest representative survey of homeless people in more than 25 years. It comprises survey data from 3,200 homeless people in California and in-depth interviews with more than 300 of them.
The overwhelming majority of homeless people surveyed were locals, not migrants from far away: 90 percent lost their last housing in California, and 75 percent lost it in the same county where they were experiencing homelessness. Of the 10 percent who came from elsewhere, 30 percent were born in California. Most of the others had familial or employment ties, or had previously lived in the state.
Taking a step back, the idea that tens of thousands of people move to California after becoming homeless makes little sense. …
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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/19/us/politics/housing-aid-rent-costs.html
“As Need Rises, Housing Aid Hits Lowest Level in Nearly 25 Years”
Rents have surged and homelessness is at record heights, but fewer of the poorest tenants are getting housing assistance — in stark contrast to growth in other safety net programs.
19 December 2023
As the safety net has expanded over the past generation, the food stamp rolls have doubled, Medicaid enrollment has tripled and payments from the earned-income tax credit have nearly quadrupled.
But one major form of aid has grown more scarce.
After decades of rising rents, housing assistance for the poorest tenants has fallen to the lowest level in nearly a quarter-century. The three main federal programs for the neediest renters — public housing, Section 8, and Housing Choice Vouchers — serve 287,000 fewer households than they did at their peak in 2004, a new analysis shows. That is a 6 percent drop, while the number of eligible households without aid grew by about a quarter, to 15 million.
“We’re not just treading water — we’re falling further behind,” said Chris Herbert, the managing director of the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, which prepared the analysis at the request of The New York Times. “That was an eye-opener, even for me.”
In an exception to the trend of falling aid, the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit helped build several million subsidized apartments, but most are not affordable to the neediest renters without additional aid.
Nearly two-thirds of renters in the bottom income quintile face “severe cost burdens,” the Harvard analysis found, meaning they spend more than half their income for shelter. That is a record high, up from about half two decades ago, and it coincides with government findings of record homelessness this year. …
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Vermont Public | By Carly Berlin
Published January 18, 2024 at 5:20 PM EST
When temperatures plummet across Vermont, and traditional shelters are full, the state eases eligibility requirements for its motel housing program to get unhoused Vermonters out of the cold and into a room.
But this winter, many motels participating in the program — which acts as a safety net to the safety net — are regularly full, or very nearly so, said Miranda Gray, deputy commissioner of the Department for Children and Families’ economic services division, in an interview.
“What we have to do is tell people that they are technically eligible, but we don’t have a room for them and then to call back,” she said.
Currently, the department is turning away around 60 households a day because of lack of space, Gray said. That number could count the same household more than once if they call multiple days in a row, she added.
The department posts expected availability in participating motels and hotels by region daily. As of Thursday, it listed 11 out of 12 regions as having no rooms available or having “extremely limited” capacity, defined as five rooms or fewer. …
“People are sometimes sent to other areas of the state, which is not ideal for folks in order to access, you know, the supports that they have in their communities, in order for their children to attend school, for folks to work,” said Kara Casey, director of economic empowerment for the Vermont Network against Domestic and Sexual Violence and a board member of the Housing and Homelessness Alliance of Vermont. …
“People are sometimes sent to other areas of the state, which is not ideal for folks in order to access, you know, the supports that they have in their communities, in order for their children to attend school, for folks to work,” said Kara Casey, director of economic empowerment for the Vermont Network against Domestic and Sexual Violence and a board member of the Housing and Homelessness Alliance of Vermont. …
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“The Revolt Against Homelessness”
Michael Shellenberger is betting on the frustration of California voters—even though most experts disagree with the solutions he’s selling.
2 June 2022, by Olga Khazan
…
The problem with Housing First is that actually implementing it strains even Californians’ progressiveness. Giving people cheap apartments in some of the most expensive cities on the planet—the median monthly rent in San Francisco is nearly $3,000—and letting them do drugs there is not necessarily a political winner. Many evidence-based policies fail in the face of intense political opposition: Supervised drug-consumption sites have been shown to reduce overdose deaths, but even liberal cities such as Seattle have struggled to overcome local opposition to them. Citizens who claim to want more affordable housing discover their NIMBYism and environmental objections when it comes time to actually build the apartments.
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“Homeless crackdown gains momentum in California as US Supreme Court test looms”
2 March 2024, By Daniel Trotta
SAN DIEGO, March 2 (Reuters) - Seven months into a crackdown by the city of San Diego on homeless encampments, many of the tents that once lined downtown sidewalks are gone.
Now two California state senators - a Republican and a Democrat - have joined forces to propose a statewide version, opens new tab of San Diego's ordinance, which allows police to roust many homeless people even when shelter is unavailable.
But advocates for homeless people said the enforcement strategy has merely chased the homeless onto riverbanks and other unseen places, as the number of shelter beds still fails to meet demand.
The debate reflects growing urgency, as polls show, opens new tab homelessness and affordable housing as two of the most important issues to California voters. The state has spent more than $20 billion, opens new tab on housing and homelessness programs since the 2018-19 fiscal year but still has more than 180,000, opens new tab homeless people.
The U.S. Supreme Court is set to weigh in. The justices are scheduled to hear arguments on April 22 in a case from Oregon that may determine the legality of enforcing anti-camping laws and other regulations affecting homeless people when there is nowhere for them to go.
The justices will hear an appeal by the city of Grants Pass in southern Oregon of a lower court's ruling that found that local ordinances that outlawed camping on sidewalks, streets, parks or other public places violate the U.S. Constitution's Eighth Amendment prohibition against "cruel and unusual" punishment. A ruling is expected by the end of June.
SHOPPING CARTS AND DUFFLE BAGS
Homeless people still congregate in downtown San Diego, pushing their possessions in shopping carts or sitting on duffle bags, awaiting city services such as referrals for shelter, food or clothing, or mental health and substance abuse treatment. The city has about 6,500 homeless people, according to a census, opens new tab conducted a year ago. About half found some kind of roof, but that still left 3,285 in the street.
Homeless advocate Michael McConnell said a game of Whac-A-Mole has emerged, with politicians who failed to provide affordable housing now resorting to police force.
"It hasn't solved homelessness, it's just scattered homelessness," said McConnell, a former vice chair of the board of the Regional Task Force on Homelessness, an organization that administers public funding for shelters and other services.
McConnell sold his coin shop business in 2018 to dedicate his time to the issue.
San Diego in June 2023 passed the Unsafe Camping Ordinance, opens new tab with a 5-4 vote on a city council made up entirely of Democrats, allowing police to enforce camping laws at transit hubs, parks or within two blocks of a school or shelter, regardless of whether beds are available.
It is an example of bipartisan agreement to prioritize enforcement, despite a consensus among government officials and advocates that a better solution is more affordable housing.
Democrats including California Governor Gavin Newsom had asked the conservative-majority Supreme Court to take up the Oregon case. In a brief, opens new tab, Newsom said rulings by the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals against measures in Grants Pass and Boise, Idaho, have "paralyzed" efforts to address unsafe and unsanitary encampments.
'TWO LEFT SHOES'
In the meantime, San Diego is enforcing its law. Other municipalities have faced civil lawsuits challenging camping bans by plaintiffs, citing the Grants Pass and Boise rulings.
A San Diego homeless man who identified himself as Brother Shine said that as a result of the city's enforcement efforts he is constantly being asked to move along, even if just around the corner.
"That's as wrong as two left shoes. It doesn't make a lick of sense to Brother Shine," he said shortly after an encounter with two uniformed police officers.
A monthly survey, opens new tab by a business alliance shows the number of homeless people in downtown San Diego peaked at 2,104 in May 2023, before the law took effect on July 31. By December the number had fallen to 846, though it picked up to 1,019 in January, according to the survey.
Advocate McConnell said many people are simply pushed outside the boundaries of where the survey is taken. …
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JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR, with whom JUSTICE KAGAN and JUSTICE JACKSON join, dissenting. [p. 47:]
Sleep is a biological necessity, not a crime. For some people, sleeping outside is their only option. The City of Grants Pass jails and fines those people for sleeping anywhere in public at any time, including in their cars, if they use as little as a blanket to keep warm or a rolled-up shirt as a pillow. For people with no access to shelter, that punishes them for being homeless. That is unconscionable and unconstitutional. Punishing people for their status is “cruel and unusual” under the Eighth Amendment. See Robinson v. California, 370 U. S. 660 (1962).
Homelessness is a reality for too many Americans. On any given night, over half a million people across the country lack a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence. Many do not have access to shelters and are left to sleep in cars, sidewalks, parks, and other public places. They experience homelessness due to complex and interconnected issues, including crippling debt and stagnant wages; domestic and sexual abuse; physical and psychiatric disabilities; and rising housing costs coupled with declining affordable housing options. …
Over 600,000 people experience homelessness in America on any given night, meaning that they lack “a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence.” Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, T. de Sousa et al., The 2023 Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress 4 (2023 AHAR). These people experience homelessness in different ways. Although 6 in 10 are able to secure shelter beds, the remaining 4 in 10 are unsheltered, sleeping “in places not meant for human habitation,” such as sidewalks, abandoned buildings, bus or train stations, camping grounds, and parked vehicles. See id., at 2. “Some sleep alone in public places, without any physical structures (like tents or shacks) or connection to services. Others stay in encampments, which generally refer to groups of people living semipermanently in tents or other temporary structures in a public space.” Brief for California as Amicus Curiae 6 (California Brief ) (citation omitted). This is in part because there has been a national “shortage of 188,000 shelter beds for individual adults.” Brief for Service Providers as Amici Curiae 8 (Service Providers Brief). …
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HOMELESSNESS in Russia v. U.S.
Russia had 64,077 homeless in 2010 but 11,285 homeless in 2021.
U.S. had 649,917 homeless in 2010 and 582,462 homeless in 2022.
Russia had 144,237,000 people; U.S. had 333,288,000 people.
If America in 2010 had the same percentage homeless as Russia did in 2010, it would have had 144,660 homeless then. If America in 2021 had the same percentage homeless as Russia did in 2021, then it would have had 26,666 homeless then.
America’s record on the homeless is atrocious. But will it continue to be ‘acceptable’?
On 27 December 2024, HUD headlined obscurely (perhaps so as not to draw attention to it) “HUD Releases January 2024 Point-In-Time Count Report” and reported: “The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) today released its 2024 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report: Part 1: Point-in-Time Estimates, an annual snapshot of the number of individuals in shelters, temporary housing, and unsheltered settings. The report found more than 770,000 people were experiencing homelessness on a single night [the average night from among the final 10 days] in January 2024, an 18% increase from 2023.” 1 out of every 448 Americans were homeless in 2024. And this has been going on for a long time. Is that ‘acceptable’?
On 3 January 2025, NPR (National Public Radio) headlined “Trump wants to address homelessness by working with states to ban street camping”. The reporter noted that Congress was expected to legislate such a ban nationwide, “because this past summer, the Supreme Court said in a landmark ruling, it's OK to punish people for sleeping outside, even if they have nowhere else to go. Since then, more than a hundred cities have passed their own such bans, including some led by Democrats.”
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
