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The Best Idea Detroit’s Never Tried 8 I first met Dan Kildee at a Starbucks coffee shop midway between Detroit and his hometown of Flint, Michigan. While writing stories for the Detroit Free Press, I had been hearing his name from more and more people who described him as the most important innovator in the urban redevelopment field. His job as the elected treasurer of Genesee County (the county with Flint at its center) seemed a fairly modest perch from which to garner so much praise. So I asked for an interview. Kildee, as people had told me, was a big, genial Irish-American pol. To break the ice I mentioned all the good ink he was getting about his work, and he laughed. “You pick an obscure enough topic, you can become an expert on it,” he joked.1 Such self-deprecatory humor aside, Kildee in fact has become the face and the voice of one of the few truly new and important trends in urban redevelopment. If the single biggest intellectual leap we’ve made is accepting that getting smaller can prove an opportunity for cities, perhaps the single most important tool to make smaller cities work is the land bank. And that’s Kildee’s passion. At the beginning of 2010, Kildee resigned his elected post to become head of a Washington DC–based national nonprofit group called the Center for Community Progress, whose mission it is to help cities deal with issues of foreclosure, land banks, and vacancy. We may as well distinguish up front between a land bank and the more general process known as land banking. First, all cities own property, and in healthy cities this property consists mainly of land for civic uses—parks, playgrounds, city halls, police and fire stations, jails, schools, and the like. In troubled cities (which include not only Detroit and Flint but what are by now other familiar names—Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New Orleans, and on and on), city governments also own lots of land that once rested in private 02 Ch6_Concl.indd 135 7/16/10 1:51 PM Chapter 8 | 136 hands. Municipalities take ownership of these parcels through tax foreclosure. In truly distressed places like Detroit, the volume of land held by the city can prove enormous. The city of Detroit alone owns somewhere around forty thousand once-private parcels of land, mostly vacant lots, empty houses, and old factories. To hold on to this land in hopes of redeveloping it one day is known as land banking. In the years after the Detroit riots of 1967, land banking got a dirty reputation. Conspiracy-minded citizens believed the city was allowing neighborhoods to rot for the benefit of wealthy suburban developers who one day would swoop in, grab all the land assembled for them by the city, and make a killing off it. The city of Detroit, of course, like other distressed cities, was doing nothing of the kind; it had simply proved too weak to stop its citizens from fleeing town. Detroit and other cities became land bankers not by preference but by default. An entity like the Genesee County Land Bank, though, is a much different thing. A legal entity set up under state statutes, a land bank is a legal authority that can take ownership of a municipality’s abandoned land and deal with it in some productive way. It can assemble land for redevelopment, or sell it off to people ready to put it back on the tax roles. Now, if that’s all a land bank did, it would be more or less indistinguishable from a city’s previous land-banking role—taking possession of tax-foreclosed property and selling it off as need arose. It was Kildee’s stroke of genius (and, as he modestly points out, the genius of a bunch of legal and urban-development experts working with him) that a land bank could do so much more—that a land bank could, in fact, prove a sort of urban alchemist, turning worthless, abandoned vacancy into redevelopment gold. It worked like this: When Kildee took his post as county treasurer in 1997, he inherited the same system most other municipalities use, that of auctioning off supposedly worthless tax-foreclosed land each year to raise some revenue. That process left him dissatisfied. As someone who likes to tinker with systems, Kildee began to talk to folks about wringing the inherent value of real estate from these vacant...

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