The City After Abandonment

Chapter 8. What Helps or Hinders Nonprofit Developers in Reusing Vacant, Abandoned, and Contaminated Property?

CHAPTER 8 What Helps or Hinders Nonprofit Developers in Reusing Vacant, Abandoned, and Contaminated Property? Margaret Dewar Where vacant, abandoned, and contaminated properties concentrate, community development corporations (CDCs) operate as the major developers along with other nonprofit developers such as Habitat for Humanity. CDCs, committed to place, remain while for-profit developers seek higher returns on investment in areas with stronger demand for housing. Other nonprofit developers, committed to housing people who would otherwise be homeless or to p roviding decent housing for everyone, also work in these areas. In these roles, they function as key actors in remaking cities after abandonment . When they do their jobs well, their projects improve the quality of life for residents who remain. Their work can demonstrate projects’ financial viability and therefore attract other development that would not occur without corrections in investors’ assessments of high risk in disinvested areas. Further, non profit de velopers c an c reate ma rkets w here i ndividuals a nd businesses will invest in their own properties when the nonprofits’ projects make places attractive for living and working. Because nonprofit developers play such a n important role in remaking abandoned areas of cities, they also have a major role in the reuse of vacant, abandoned, a nd c ontaminated property. Factors t hat help or h inder t hat reuse in part determine what such developers can accomplish and what disinvested areas of cities become. This chapter investigates what causes nonprofit developers to succeed or fail in reusing this land. What Helps or Hinders Nonprofit Developers 175 No consistent data exist on the extent of vacant, abandoned, and contaminated properties in cities that have experienced extensive population loss and property disinvestment, but fragmentary information indicates extensive p roperty o f t his t ype, e specially i n t he N ortheast a nd M idwest. Baltimore had 1 2,700 h ousing u nits t hat t he c ity had j udged u nfit for habitation by the early 2000s; the city had nearly 14,000 vacant lots. As of 2000, Philadelphia had 26,000 vacant houses and 31,000 vacant lots. In 2001, between 10 and 11 percent of Cleveland’s properties were vacant. In Detroit, about 90,000 properties, including residential, commercial, and industrial , had no structures in 2001, about 18 percent of the city’s land area. Data on contaminated sites and on brownfields (abandoned, idled, or underused sites with contamination or possible contamination) are just as uncertain because local governments use different definitions in their counts and because no one knows which untested sites have contamination. In 1996, the Urban Land Institute estimated that about 150,000 acres of abandoned or underused industrial land existed in major U. S. cities. Responding to a survey of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, city officials made widely varying estimates . Cleveland officials reported the city had 14,000 acres of brownfields, while Newark, New Jersey, officials estimated 203 acres. Efforts to count all brownfields show very large numbers. In Flint, Michigan, a historically industrial city with a population of slightly over 102,000 in 2010, for instance, about 5,000 brownfield properties existed in 2005. The next section of this chapter e xplains the research design. Th e sections that follow discuss findings on reuse of land by nonprofit developers in Cleveland and Detroit and the reasons for the differences in the two cities’ experiences. Design of the Research This study compares the experiences of nonprofit developers in Detroit and Cleveland, a useful comparison because the two cities had nearly identical indicators of demand for land (changes in population and employment, income levels) in the time period of the study, from the late 1980s through about 2007, but nonprofit developers’ reuse of property differed considerably . In Cleveland a visitor would see many new housing structures in areas that had lost most of their original housing; in Detroit, a visitor would observe much less new housing. The two cities had lost close to half their 176 Margaret Dewar peak population by 2000 and had the same poverty rates. Detroit’s median household income stood somewhat higher than Cleveland’s in 1999, but per capita income in the two cities was virtually identical. Both cities had lost la rge sha res o f t heir ma nufacturing a nd r etail em ployment b y t he early 1990s, although Detroit had...