Skip to main content
Jarrid Green

Jarrid Green

Researching equity and community control in the next system. more

Community & Place Democratic Ownership

Land banks are government entities that acquire abandoned, foreclosed, and tax-delinquent properties in order to convert such properties into productive use.

Though land banks can vary in legal structure and function among jurisdictions, they usually perform similar functions, including obtaining properties at low cost through either direct purchase or through a receivership or tax-foreclosure process, removing tax and any other debt burdens associated with the properties, and ensuring these properties have a clear title. These functions–which can be defined by enabling legislation and managed by a mix of community stakeholders–help prepare underutilized property for sale to any range of stakeholders, including local nonprofit entities, municipal agencies, and private developers.

Potential Impact

Land banks allow communities to repurpose blighted or abandoned properties to meet community and economic development needs. In fact, many of the estimated 170 land banks around the country have been leveraged to support affordable housing, urban agriculture, and green space development, among other activities. For instance, the Cuyahoga County Land Bank sells some of its properties at a low cost to Neighborhood Services of Greater Cleveland, a community land trust that develops permanently affordable housing. This collaboration helps the land bank meet its affordable housing disposition policy requirements while enabling a local organization to steward vital land resources in a way that meets the needs of underserved populations locked out of housing markets.

Transformative Characteristics

In cities where blight, vacancy, and abandonment are prevalent, policymakers typically look to private developers to breathe new life into their communities. Baltimore, for instance, established a “Vacants to Value” program that leveraged a host of local, state, and federal resources to encourage developers and homebuyers to invest in formerly vacant and abandoned properties. While the program features some community engagement practices, initiatives like these inherently favor developer interests and priorities, as properties are auctioned off to developers with little in the way of accountability mechanisms and institutionalized community engagement and ownership. Land banks offer an alternative approach by embracing the community’s participation in the decision-making over how abandoned and vacant properties are used to meet unique and local needs.

Examples

Philadelphia Land Bank

Confronted with 40,000 vacant parcels of land in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, community groups and housing activists associated with the Campaign to Take Back Vacant Land led the creation of this land bank in 2015. The bank has acquired more than 2,000 vacant parcels since its 2015 launch. In 2017, the land bank’s strategic plan was amended to increase the amount of land to be redeveloped for affordable housing after the Philadelphia Coalition for Affordable Communities presented the land bank with stories of long-time residents struggling with potential displacement.

Cuyahoga County Land Bank

A quasi-government, nonprofit corporation, the Cuyahoga County Land Bank was established in 2009 to address the foreclosure crisis in Cleveland, Ohio. By 2011, the land bank, in partnership with Fannie Mae, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and leading bank institutions, had acquired more than 1,2000 abandoned properties that would either have become blighted or been snapped up by speculators seeking cheap properties to flip for profit. Today, the land bank has more than 3,000 properties in its portfolio and a $25 million budget. It collaborates with a diverse range of local community partners focused on affordable housing development and preservation, blight demolition, and the creation of green/community space.

Challenges

In addition to an overall limited awareness of land banks as a community and economic development tool, challenges land banks encounter include a lack of clear, standardized information about local vacancy and abandonment, which can limit the amount of property a land bank can acquire; differences in local tax foreclosure and delinquency laws, which can slow the land-banking process; limited ability to establish who has clear title to underutilized property; and inconsistent local code enforcement.

More Resources

The Center for Community Progress maintains the Land Bank Information Headquarters, including a National Map of Land Banks and Land Banking Programs.

Download and Share

Jarrid Green

Jarrid Green

Researching equity and community control in the next system. more

More related work

Stories

Los elementos de una economía democrática

Los elementos de una economía democrática

Las políticas y prácticas tradicionales evidentemente nos están fallando frente a las tendencias decadentes de largo plazo en cuanto a la desigualdad de ingresos, la concentración de la riqueza, la desinversión y desplazamiento de las comunidades, la pobreza persistente con carácter racial y geog read more
Public pharmaceutical

Public pharmaceuticals

Public pharmaceutical enterprises are free from the constraints of profit maximization and can define their bottom line based on such values as their contributions to public health and local economic resiliency. read more
Public holding company

Public holding company

The effects of a local firm facing economic disaster can ripple destructively through a community. Public holding companies could take either partial or full ownership positions in distressed firms to prevent the economic and social dislocations associated with liquidation or collapse. read more
Community development financial institution

Community development financial institutions

CDFIs are committed to providing services that create and broaden economic opportunities in neighborhoods that have faced historical disinvestment. read more
Low-income limited liability company

Low-profit limited liability companies

An L3C straddles the line between a nonprofit and for-profit venture, an enterprise with a profit goal that is subordinate to its charitable mission. read more
Participatory budgeting

Participatory budgeting

Participatory budgeting democratizes public investment by giving people the power to decide how public dollars are spent. read more
Credit union

Credit unions

Credit unions are financial cooperatives owned by their account holders and can concentrate on maximizing their impact in the community and on the financial well-being of their members. read more
Element of the Democratic Economy: Social Wealth Fund

Social wealth fund

A social wealth fund embraces the collective ownership of assets to provide services and democratically distribute resources within a society or community. read more
Worker cooperative

Worker cooperatives

A worker cooperative provides for both democratic ownership and democratic governance of the workplace, unlike traditional businesses in which ownership is often antagonistic to the workers who create value for the firm. read more
Municipal enterprise

Municipal enterprise

Municipal enterprises are businesses or services owned by local public authorities that provide services or generate revenue for local communities. read more
Employee stock ownership plan

Employee stock ownership plan

Description An employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) enables full or partial ownership of a business by its employees through a pension plan or trust. The first ESOP was created in 1956 by a San F read more
Element of the democratic economy: Public bank

Public Banks

How financial institutions owned by and accountable to the people help create a nonextractive economy. read more
The commons

The Commons

The commons are collective resources—encompassing things as varied as land, seed banks, and open-source software—managed by self-organized social systems under mutually acceptable terms. read more

Community Land Trust

CLTs are nonprofit organizations that acquire and steward land in a “trust” for the permanent benefit of low-income communities. read more
Green Bank

Green Bank

A green bank can help communities transition away from fossil fuels and build resilience against climate change. read more
Community benefit agreement

Community Benefit Agreement

A legally binding product of negotiations between a developer and community members who have banded together to safeguard their community’s interests. read more

Resident-Owned Community

Resident-owned communities (ROCs) are manufactured housing neighborhoods (sometimes referred to as mobile home or trailer parks) in which the land is community-owned and managed. read more

Limited Equity Housing Cooperative

A limited equity housing cooperative is a residential development owned and managed by a democratically governed, nonprofit cooperative corporation, such as a tenants’ union. read more
Democratic energy utility

Democratic Energy Utility

Democratic energy utilities are nonprofits run by the public or community members in a way that enables their engagement in decision-making and distributes ownership. read more