Demolishing abandoned homes might be considered a last resort policy, but for some cities in New York State, it’s a way to survive.At the U.S. Conference of Mayors held at the end of January, mayors from all over the U.S. gathered to discuss the problems and challenges besetting cities everywhere, including the failing school systems, the obesity epidemic, and the economy. The discussion on rehabbing and demolishing abandoned properties, despite the national economy’s recent improvements, was standing-room-only.
“We’ve got a massive amount of new investment that is coming into the city, but vacant and abandoned buildings serve as a tremendous drag on all the other positive things you have going on,” said Mayor Paul Dyster of Niagara Falls.”People who are potential investors, people who are potential residents, if they see a third of the buildings are abandoned, that’s the image they take back with them.”
While the ideal solution would be filling the vacant homes, most cities need to resort to demolition as a result of their declining populations. Recently, Florida passed New York as the third-most populous state in the country. In Rochester, the population has fallen from over 332,000 to about 210,000 over the past 60 years.
Among the Flower City’s 1,300 homes that have been vacant for a year, 200 have been targeted for demolition, because, as Mayor Lovely Warren put it, “you don’t need as many houses as you used to need.”
What makes the problem more disheartening is the fact that the housing market is improving. In 2013, 5,090,000 existing homes were sold across the country in 201, with construction on another 923,400 new homes being started, the highest annual total since 2007. Plus, Congress approved almost $7 billion in funding between 2008 and 2010 for the Neighborhood Stabilization Program, which was designed to help cities, counties, and states handle the collapsing housing prices that led to the Great Recession.
However, people aren’t coming to fill the empty houses, and if left standing in the hopes of someday being filled, the abandoned homes could wind up scaring off potential investors. As Mayor Dyster of Niagara Falls explained, one blighted building in a residential neighborhood could turn a dozen people away because they fear the deterioration of their street.
All things considered, demolition is the most pragmatic choice in such circumstances.
“You have to prepare your housing stock for what your community is telling you, and that’s going to take some time,” said Mayor Warren, who also explained that single-family homes don’t appeal to empty-nesters nor young professionals. “What we learned in the past is that you can’t do spot development. So you don’t want to demolish a house and then build a house next to a drug house, a boarded-up house,” said Warren. “You want to really be able to transform neighborhoods in a real way so it’s safer for the families who are moving in there.”
Our city’s population loss is not an inevitable natural phenomenon that we need to react to. Monroe County’s population is slowly increasing, and Rochester can and should (like many other cities in the US) hold or even grow our population. We need to understand that the decline in population is the symptom of problems in many urban neighborhoods, not the cause of it.
We simply cannot demolish our way to a better neighborhood; we need to address the underlying problems that have caused residents to leave and have led to homes to become deteriorated in the first place.
We have too many negligent landlords whose business plan is to milk a property without making an effort to keep the property in good repair, and the city’s NSC offices (in all but the SE) are way behind on enforcing code violations. These properties drive down the property values on the block long before they become vacant. Once a block becomes deteriorated, there is little reason for new people to move into the neighborhood.
What we really need are more proactive policies for addressing deteriorated properties before they become vacant and before structural deterioration forces demolition. Demolition alone will not address the reasons why the property became deteriorated and vacant. If we don’t address root causes, then we will just face another wave of vacant houses, and then another… and another… until Rochester becomes even more hollowed out than Detroit is today.