OverviewTo effectively address vacancy, we must understand and respond to the factors that cause and perpetuate it. Much of the story of vacancy in our city, like other cities, includes a legacy of racism, disinvestment, and disengagement that has led to a breakdown in trust. The challenge is beyond any single institution’s ability to address. Because the vacancy challenge requires a coordinated response from multiple stakeholders, the VC has engaged in an action-oriented planning process to identify the most immediate necessary next steps. In this process, the VC considered the key milestones that led to the creation of the VC, issue area findings from the 2018 VC Summit, priorities identified in VC meetings and workshops, and recommendations and ideas from foundational reports.
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Work Plan Purpose
This work plan is intended to:
The work plan prioritizes five action categories with long-term goals and next steps associated with those goals. Accomplishing any given goal may not be achievable in the next 18 months given known resources and the complexity of the issue. However, each specific next step is designed to move us closer to achieving the goal. One VC working group or committee is responsible for working on and implementing each step. Because vacancy is a complex issue that requires a multi-year commitment, the VC anticipates that its members will work together to create an updated work plan with additional next steps that will guide its work after the conclusion of this initial work plan.
- align and coordinate actions and resources of VC partners
- respond to priorities identified in VC meetings, workshops, and key events leading up to the creation of the VC
- build on and connect to existing efforts, future activities, and best practices
- help demonstrate the needs and support neighborhoods and new partners in becoming part of the solution
- track our progress and remain accountable to build trust
The work plan prioritizes five action categories with long-term goals and next steps associated with those goals. Accomplishing any given goal may not be achievable in the next 18 months given known resources and the complexity of the issue. However, each specific next step is designed to move us closer to achieving the goal. One VC working group or committee is responsible for working on and implementing each step. Because vacancy is a complex issue that requires a multi-year commitment, the VC anticipates that its members will work together to create an updated work plan with additional next steps that will guide its work after the conclusion of this initial work plan.
Action Categories and Associated Long-Term Goals
Category #1: Transparent and Equitable Development and Reinvestment |
- Understand and prevent displacement
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Why is this long-term goal important? What is the evidence?
- Addressing displacement concerns requires careful policy responses that consider historical context, market conditions, and qualitative and quantitative neighborhood data.
- Data collection and analysis that is specific to our St. Louis context will help us develop and implement effective anti-displacement strategies.
- Develop a shared understanding of consequences of historical inequities and population decline
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Why is this long-term goal important? What is the evidence?
- St. Louis has a long history of land clearance, housing discrimination, segregation, and population decline, the effects of which still linger today.
- Effective vacancy strategies are informed by an understanding of this history and strive to ensure impacts and outcomes of programs, policies, and interventions do not disproportionately impact vulnerable people.
- Increase opportunities and capacity for small-scale redevelopment, reuse, and reinvestment (SSR)
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Why is this long-term goal important? What is the evidence?
- While economics drives redevelopment and reuse of vacant property, law and policy can significantly affect whether and how the market responds to redevelopment opportunities and can be used to reverse a downward trajectory of abandonment, diminished quality of life, and decreased property values. However, significant investment is needed to see change. Strategies must be tailored to local neighborhood conditions, including market strength.
- Educating potential homebuyers and real estate agents about opportunities to purchase vacant property is an effective strategy to increase the number of responsible owners who acquire and care for distressed properties.
- Clear title and access to mortgage financing, along with technical and other support for small developers, are key drivers of market-driven reuse. In St. Louis, there are untapped SSR opportunities, including for LRA inventory.
- Historic tax credits are an important redevelopment tool for vacant structures in St. Louis.
- Enhance tax foreclosure processes to increase quality of title and quality of reinvestment
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Why is this long-term goal important? What is the evidence?
- The ways that local governments handle vacant tax-delinquent properties significantly impact whether those properties are likely to be reused productively.
- In St. Louis, the Collector of Revenue and Sheriff (both of which are elected officials and part of the City of St. Louis “county” government structure) are key actors in the tax foreclosure process.
- While the delinquent tax foreclosure system in the City is a beneficial tool in many respects, aspects of the system need to be modernized.
- Understand tools to prevent vacancy; facilitate development of additional tools
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Why is this long-term goal important? What is the evidence?
- The entry of additional vacant properties into our vacancy inventory can be slowed through vacancy prevention strategies, including home repair programs.
- In St. Louis, existing home repair programs are underfunded and oversubscribed, resulting in long waiting lists.
- Promote effective strategies for vacant lots
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Why is this long-term goal important? What is the evidence?
- Greening infrastructure and alternative land uses (both short-term and long-term) are valuable vacancy strategies that can stabilize neighborhoods, attract investment and increase property values, reduce the cost of maintenance, reduce illegal dumping, and bring other environmental, social, and economic benefits.
- In St. Louis, more than enough publicly-owned land is available for long-term greening uses and can have quantifiable economic benefits for surrounding property values.
- Tracking the location, number, status, and condition of vacant lots is key to appropriate planning.
Category #2: Vacant Property Owner Accountability |
- Use strategic code enforcement and related court processes to increase private owner accountability
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Why is this long-term goal important? What is the evidence?
- Traditionally, “code enforcement” means the legal and administrative processes that local governments use to gain compliance with ordinances designed to protect the public’s health, safety, and welfare. Modern problems—such as widespread vacancy—call for “strategic” code enforcement (operating within a dynamic system, used proactively to address problem properties to further community wellbeing, and often requiring new tools).
- Property owners who are local and live in or near their properties are more likely to maintain them. Neighborhoods with high levels of absentee ownership are more likely to experience crime and property deterioration. Non-local “investors” in areas of high concentrations of vacancy tend to invest little or nothing in the properties, hold them, and then abandon the properties after getting the anticipated return on their investment.
- To move toward strategic code enforcement, code enforcement agencies need to engage in process mapping, coordinate across city agencies and departments, and develop and disseminate code enforcement information.29 Agencies should continually evaluate whether code updates or other changes could increase their effectiveness in fighting vacancy.
- One key legal tool to address vacancy is receivership (i.e., legal tool that allows court to designate local government or qualified nongovernmental entity as the receiver of vacant property that an owner has failed to maintain that allows receiver to rehabilitate it and return it to productive use).
- Develop next iteration of the Vacancy Portal
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Why is this long-term goal important? What is the evidence?
- Access to accurate data and understanding how to interpret this data are key to addressing vacancy.
- Easily accessible data empowers residents to take action and increases transparency.
- Accurate vacancy data provides baseline from which to measure progress.
Category #3: Engagement & Capacity Building of Neighborhood Residents |
- Empower neighborhoods with information, tools, and resources; listen to residents to rebuild trust
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Why is this long-term goal important? What is the evidence?
- While the City has a variety of tools to address vacancy, neighborhoods and other private stakeholders also have powerful tools (e.g., nuisance, receivership, and Abandoned Housing Act lawsuits; collective pressure on problem property owners) and are essential parts of the solution.
- To reduce vacancy, relevant City departments, neighborhood associations, CDCs, and other nonprofits must routinely collaborate.
- User-friendly information designed to help stakeholders take action and proactive community engagement are key elements of effective collaboration.
- Regularly communicate about the work of the VC with the St. Louis community
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Why is this long-term goal important? What is the evidence?
- Stakeholders must develop a common understanding of the problem, coordinate initiatives, communicate effectively, and work toward a shared vision.
- Neither local government nor the private sector alone can solve the challenge, and public and private tools must be used together in strategic ways.
- Communication, respect, transparency of processes, sharing of information, and meaningful engagement are key elements of building trust with a community.
- Increase capacity of neighborhood residents to work collectively; strengthen neighborhood association ecosystem
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Why is this long-term goal important? What is the evidence?
- Local government’s ability to develop and maintain strong neighborhood relationships is a critical element of an effective vacancy strategy.
- Moving a neighborhood toward a more positive trajectory requires (i) financial, social, and psychological investment in the neighborhood, and (ii) increasing demand for what the neighborhood offers (both from the people who live there and from people trying to decide where to live). Without efforts to increase demand for what the neighborhood offers, values will remain too low to make rehabilitation economically feasible.
- Residents can work collectively to create positive neighborhood brands (which can help their market strength) and to shape redevelopment in their neighborhoods.
- An effective vacancy response includes supporting existing homeowners to enable them to remain in their homes, encouraging new homeowners to move into targeted areas, and strengthening neighborhood associations.
- Increase opportunities for neighborhood-based vacancy planning and decision-making
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Why is this long-term goal important? What is the evidence?
- Local residents are key actors in the design and implementation of vacant land strategies.
- In St. Louis, neighborhood-based planning has been a critical component of successful redevelopment in some areas with concentrations of vacant land, but these efforts are limited by the capacity of CDCs to partner and by the overall resources for community-based planning in the City. More neighborhood plans and planning resources could help support redevelopment.
Category #4: Government Process |
- Increase capacity within City agencies to address the vacancy challenge
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Why is this long-term goal important? What is the evidence?
- When developing vacancy resources, policies, and procedures related to vacancy, it is critical to engage “front line” inspectors and staff, both because they have practical knowledge and valuable feedback to improve systems and because their buy-in is essential for an effective system.
- Reducing vacancy requires modernizing current programs and looking to national best practices.
- Manage vacant properties comprehensively and increase transparency
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Why is this long-term goal important? What is the evidence?
- A critical step to increasing LRA’s operational effectiveness is a baseline LRA inventory analysis (i.e., a framework that develops a priority list of uses for each property in the LRA inventory and that helps inform the LRA’s strategies for property acquisition, maintenance, and disposition). This inventory analysis is also a key step toward tracking and reducing LRA’s inventory.
- Demolition activities have to be part of a larger strategy to stabilize and revitalize neighborhoods. Demolition must be partnered with rehabilitation and mothballing strategies, and limited demolition resources must be carefully targeted. Demolition priority should be based on demolition criteria, including a formal ranking or point-based system.
- Strategic demolition can increase nearby home values, but such benefits have been shown to accrue primarily in high and moderately functioning markets. Moreover, targeted demolition can reduce crime, but vacancy prevention strategies may be even more effective at minimizing crime.
- Written policies and procedures are a cornerstone for effective strategic code enforcement.
Category #5: Collaborative Leadership Backbone |
- Build political will to address vacancy on a sustained and longer-term time horizon
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Why is this long-term goal important? What is the evidence?
- Vacancy results in substantial costs to cities. In St. Louis, the fiscal toll of vacancy on the city’s operating budget in 2017 was nearly $66 million.
- Vacancy is associated with crime, and addressing vacancy helps reduce crime.
- Vacancy is also associated with reduced quality of life, elevated lead levels, and lower property values.68 Vacancy spreads like a disease, and homes close to vacancy are more likely to become vacant themselves.
- Identify and pursue financial resources to support ongoing work of the VC
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Why is this long-term goal important? What is the evidence?
- Given the scope of the vacancy challenge in St. Louis, the VC’s collective efforts to address the problem will be needed for many years to come.
- Managing and sustaining a collaborative and community-informed coalition to address the vacancy challenge requires considerable staff resources.
- Track VC progress towards goals
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Why is this long-term goal important? What is the evidence?
- Effective leaders facilitate a visionary agenda in a consensus-building way, and are results-oriented.
- Monitoring progress toward a goal increases the likelihood that the goal will be achieved, especially if that progress is publicly reported or physically recorded.
Foundational Documents and Glossary of Terms
ADWG: Anti-displacement Working Group, one of six cross-sector working groups of the VC
Backbone: leading organization or group that supports and facilitates collective impact by guiding vision and strategy, supporting aligned activities, establishing shared measurement practices, building public will, advancing policy, and mobilizing funding
DWG: Data Analysis Working Group, one of six cross-sector working groups of the VC
EPA: Environmental Protection Agency
LRA: Land Reutilization Authority, the agency that functions as the City’s land bank (i.e., receives title to certain tax delinquent properties and other donated property); the LRA is staffed by SLDC
MEWG: Marketing and Engagement Working Group, one of six cross-sector working groups of the VC
RRWG: Reinvestment and Reuse Working Group, one of six cross-sector working groups of the VC
PDA: Planning and Urban Design Agency for the City
SLDC: Saint Louis Development Corporation, the economic development arm for the City
SMDWG: Stabilization, Maintenance, and Demolition Working Group, one of six cross-sector working
groups of the VC
SSR: abbreviation for small-scale redevelopment, reuse, and reinvestment
VAC: Vacancy Advisory Committee of the VC, which is a community-oriented committee made of up private, non-profit, and community members who represent a variety of viewpoints and expertise
VC: St. Louis Vacancy Collaborative
VPWG: Vacancy Prevention Working Group, one of six cross-sector working groups of the VC
Vacancy Portal: the online tool that pulls publicly available data from 12 City databases into one place
Vacancy Resources: information, tools, and resources designed to help stakeholders (i) address existing vacancy, (ii) prevent future vacancy, and (iii) market neighborhood
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