News

By Corilyn Shropshire, Chicago Tribune | February 2nd, 2017

Aiming to curb Chicago’s vacant lot epidemic, the Cook County Land Bank Authority has made more than 4,000 once tax-delinquent vacant lots available for sale.

The 4,437 properties are available in 22 community areas, primarily on Chicago’s West and South sides and in 12 west and south suburbs, for $3,000 to $5,000. Many of the lots have sat vacant for a decade or more, and are among 8,000 tax-delinquent properties the land bank aims to sell to local developers, not-for-profits, block clubs and community organizations to help revive neighborhoods hit by the foreclosure crisis and the decline of manufacturing.

The land bank, which owns the properties’ tax certificates, has removed the red tape for potential buyers by extinguishing back taxes, liens, unpaid city fines or utility bills.

“We’re trying to give an adrenaline boost to development in these communities by eliminating barriers to getting access to the property,” said Cook County Commissioner Bridget Gainer, chairman of the 3-year-old land bank.

“The thing we wanted to address … is to say, ‘Look, I can’t make someone develop the property, but I can remove the barriers to that decision,'” Gainer said.

The for-sale properties were identified based on their proximity to what Gainer described as “other economic engines,” such as CTA and Metra stops, railroads or open space, such as parks.

The program shares a similar goal to the city’s Large Lots Program: Make it easier to purchase and redevelop vacant properties in communities where private investment has been scarce.

In the city, vacant lots are available in Auburn Gresham, Austin, Belmont Cragin, Brighton Park, Calumet Heights, Chatham, Chicago Lawn, Englewood, Garfield Park, Gage Park, Grand Boulevard, Greater Grand Crossing, Hermosa, Humboldt Park, Morgan Park, Roseland, South Shore, Washington Heights, Washington Park, West Englewood, West Pullman and Woodlawn. The suburban communities are Bellwood, Chicago Heights, Country Club Hills, Dixmoor, Matteson, Maywood, Melrose Park, Midlothian, Olympia Fields, Posen, Riverdale and South Holland.

In the city, potential buyers are required to provide a letter of support from the local alderman if they don’t live in the same ward as the property. Suburban properties must have the support of the municipality if the buyer is not local.

Closings could take up to six months and once closings occur, new owners are responsible for paying property taxes from that point on.

Is slashing red tape enough to lure buyers to invest in blighted properties, many of which are in struggling communities?

“It’s much better to incentivize development and get things moving than to wait and see if someone is interested,” Gainer said. “I can’t read the minds of the developers, but why not try it — maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t, but I’m not going to give up trying.”

The land bank’s work, which includes buying 400 vacant homes in blighted neighborhoods and selling roughly 350 of them, demonstrates that eliminating barriers to purchasing blight properties creates a new network of potential buyers and boosts a community’s potential for revitalization, according to Gainer.

The land bank plans to market an additional 500 commercial and industrial properties this spring.

If there are challenges to rehabbing a residential property, imagine the hurdles to redeveloping an industrial site, Gainer said.

The city of Chicago’s vacant lots program, known as the Large Lots Program, sells vacant city-owned parcels to nearby homeowners for $1 each. The city requires the lots be for residential uses only, and most are turned into side yards, gardens or landscaped open space. Buyers must also agree to maintain the lot, pay property taxes and hold the land for at least five years before selling it.

So far, the city has sold 550 lots in greater Englewood, East Garfield Park, Austin, Roseland, Pullman and Auburn Gresham. The city has received 2,800 applications for another 4,000 available properties in 33 communities, according to Peter Strazzabosco, deputy commissioner of the Chicago Department of Planning and Development.

Those interested in browsing or buying the land bank’s vacant lots can visit the organization’s website.

“Now we get to tap into the ingenuity of the people who think, ‘You know what, this is what I’ve always wanted to do,'” Gainer said. “This allows them to bring imagination to our community.”

By Dennis Rodkin, Crain’s Chicago Business | January 30th, 2017

More than 4,400 vacant lots in Chicago and the suburbs are going up for sale in an effort to attract development to areas that need it.

With the new offering of vacant lots to be announced today, “we’re trying to speed up the process of empty land being put back to use,” said Bridget Gainer, a Cook County commissioner who chairs the four-year-old Cook County Land Bank.

Until now, the land bank had been selling only vacant homes, to rehabbers or families who fix them up for their own use. The land bank sells formerly delinquent properties after cleansing them of red tape, such as back taxes and fines.

Because of the land bank’s ability to wipe past problems off a property’s title, “we can make it more affordable and faster for a developer or a next-door neighbor or a garden club to start a project, or to just put a fence around the lot and keep it up.”

More than 85 percent of the lots are in residential areas. Rob Rose, executive director of the land bank, said the pricing had not yet been finalized but that most of the lots would cost $3,000 to $5,000.

“It’s lower than any land transaction that has taken place in the community,” Rose said.

Every lot is within half-mile of a CTA or Metra rail stop or a stop on a major bus line, making them appealing for redevelopment. But Rose and Gainer said they expect the buyers will be a mix of residential and commercial developers, residents near or next to the lots, and garden or civic clubs.

“Build a garden or a basketball court,” Rose said. Buyers will not be required to build within a specified time frame or, if they build housing for resale, to conform to any city-sponsored affordability requirements, he said.

“We’re trying to stimulate the market without any market-limiting activities,” he said.

Gainer and Rose will announce at a City Club of Chicago event today that the land bank has 4,437 vacant lots available for sale, 3,208 in the city and 649 in Cook County suburbs. Another group of about 3,000 will be offered later, Rose said.

“These lots have been vacant for anywhere from five to 10 years,” Gainer said, and were all sold for delinquent taxes by the Cook County treasurer in 2015.

The lots are scattered around the 27 city neighborhoods and suburbs where the land bank is focusing its effort this year to try to concentrate improvements in areas that need a boost. The 12 city neighborhoods include Austin, Chatham and Greater Grand Crossing. Among the suburbs on the list are Burbank, Maywood and Riverdale.

They’re all areas where developers are reluctant to spend the money required to clear up a property’s legal status. “The property may not have been worth as much as the back taxes, so nobody’s going to take it on,” Rose said.

“If you’re a developer looking at Finkl Steel’s old site on the North Side,” Gainer said, “you can afford to cover the legal costs” because of the high potential for profit on the other end. The land bank’s lots are in areas where both profit margins and investors’ pockets are much smaller, she said.

Click here to view the official press release.

Chicago Tribune Editorial Board | December 23rd, 2016

Outsiders like to define Chicago with convenient, obvious imagery. Obama and Capone. The Cubs and Ditka. The Daleys and the Blues Brothers. We know, however, what the genome of our city is. Belmont Cragin and Bronzeville. Avondale and Avalon Park. Roscoe Village and Roseland. The patchwork of bungalows, graystones and two-flats, its schools and corner grocery stores, gives the city its defining contours.

So, to fix a Chicago that’s deteriorating in some places and emptying out in others, you’ve got to fix its neighborhoods. Block by block, house by house. That’s how you seed real change.

There’s a dizzying array of public and philanthropic initiatives aimed at remedying what ails our neighborhoods. One of them has been steadily gaining traction. We’re here to wish it an increasingly prosperous 2017.

Three years ago, the Cook County Land Bank Authority launched as a way to turn back blight created by foreclosures. The Great Recession hit everyone hard, but it pummeled neighborhoods on the South and West sides, where legions of homes were boarded due to foreclosure. The land bank has been buying up those houses and selling them to local developers, who then revamp the homes and get them back on the market — and back on property tax rolls.

The focus on foreclosed homes is smart. A street dotted with boarded-up homes is a cancer on the march. People don’t move into neighborhoods with blight, they move out of them. The list of South Side neighborhoods with dwindling populations is long, according to recent census data: Auburn Gresham’s population dropped 13 percent from 2011 to 2015; Roseland’s population dropped nearly 11 percent; Chatham, a 10 percent drop; Englewood, 21 percent.

There’s a logic to the land bank’s methodology. First, the managers sell only to local developers, not to larger, outside firms with no stake in South and West side neighborhoods. They vet the developers before doing business with them, ensuring that their rehab work has been sound. Another crucial element in the land bank’s game plan: the managers try to eliminate red tape — back taxes, liens, unpaid city fines or utility bills — that could slow the developer’s acquisition of the property.

The land bank got off the ground with a $4.5 million grant, part of Illinois’ $1 billion share of the federal government’s $25 billion settlement with five of the nation’s biggest mortgage lenders. Cook County Commissioner Bridget Gainer, the driving force behind the land bank’s creation, boasts there’s not a single tax dollar in the land bank authority’s coffers. The money generated by selling the properties to developers is reinvested in the land bank. Gainer says the authority’s reliance on grant funding has gone from 94 percent in 2013 to just 12 percent this year. Self-sustainability is around the corner.

When it comes to saving neighborhoods, Gainer sees the land bank as “the cavalry. There’s no outside savior coming.” If that’s the case, the land bank needs to ratchet up its inventory. Since its inception, the land bank has been focusing on 13 West and South side neighborhoods and 13 western and southern Cook suburbs. So far, it has acquired 400 homes, selling 300 of them to developers. Across Cook County, there are roughly 20,000 vacant structures. Gainer’s goal for 2017: acquire 1,000 homes.

We’d like to see Gainer’s land bankers take on even more. The current roster of neighborhoods doesn’t include Roseland and Englewood, blighted, violence-wracked communities with falling populations. Gainer says in order for the land bank strategy to work, there has to be enough of a market in a neighborhood, enough momentum, to draw developer and homeowner interest. We’d like to see the land bank try its hand at seeding renewal in more challenging swatches of the city. Focus on one street in Englewood, turn it around, and developers may view that as the spark they need to rehab there — and the next street over.

On the South Side, a house in the 1100 block of West 101st Street in Washington Heights is an example of what the land bank can yield. Foreclosed in 2015, the house once had a hole in its roof and water damage that wrecked its walls, rugs and basement. Jason and Esther Williams, Bronzeville developers, bought it from the land bank for $16,000. They put more than $87,000 into an overhaul — new walls, new plumbing and electrical, central air and tuck pointing. It’s on the market now for $149,000.

“A house like this would be more than double the price on the North Side,” Jason Williams says. “It’s time to bring those values up here, because that’s what changes the landscape of a neighborhood. It makes people have pride in home ownership. That’s what the South Side is missing.”

By Lisa Fielding, CBS Chicago | November 29th, 2016

The Cook County Land Bank was established in 2014 as a result of the financial crisis.

“It’s meant to address one thing that is so important. ‘How do you make sure neighborhoods are sustainable?’” said Bridget Gainer, Cook County Commissioner, who spearheaded the program. “Right after the financial crisis, we started to see this spike in foreclosures and the foreclosures, because they were so many of them, lead to longer and longer turnarounds in court which lead to more vacant homes.”

“The acquisition process for housing is tough. You really want to figure out a way to rehab homes with people in the community and use the most local labor and business as possible because then that keeps the investment in the community and builds it up even further.”

Gainer said the Land Bank program buys vacant housing, clears the title, taxes and leans and connects with rehabbers and developers who then sell the home to new buyers. WBBM’s Lisa Fielding reports.

“For us, the important thing was how do we build and attract a group of developers in the community, how do we acquire the housing, and go through the court process? Part of the problem is going through those legal hurdles to make sure that housing was available,” Gainer said.

The Land Bank’s startup was funded by the Illinois Attorney General’s office in 2014 as a result of the national mortgage crisis settlement.

“In the course of that time, we’ve been able to buy 400 homes, we’ve sold 300 homes, but we sold those 300 homes to 135 unique developers so we’ve spent a lot of time in recruiting and investing in local developers in ensuring that they have the chance to get the benefit of these rehab dollars,” she said. “We aren’t just rehabbing housing, we’re also building these small businesses throughout the community.”

Gainer said the neighborhoods that have benefited the most are Chicago’s Auburn Gresham, Chatham and in Des Plaines where there was flooding and blight.

“We’re just about to relaunch 10 homes in Chatham. Chatham and Auburn Gresham have strong housing stock and is ripe for development,” she said.

Gainer said their goal is a 1,000 homes in 2017.

“Look, I don’t want to live next to a vacant home. Nobody does. It isn’t just that it brings down your property values, but it attracts crime,” Gainer said. “What The Land Bank is trying to do, is rehab homes and getting a family back into it, who is a homeowner and not just a renter is our highest goal and it’s something we’ve been able to do more than 300 times.”

For more information, log onto http://www.cookcountylandbank.org/

By Dennis Rodkin, Crain’s Chicago Business | November 22,  2016

A Cinderella story is playing on 101st Street in the city’s Washington Heights neighborhood, and there are more than 200 others like it scattered around the city and suburbs.

After lingering in foreclosure for almost six years, a modest 1960s bungalow started 2016 with mold growing on its basement walls, holes in its roof and busted pipes from standing empty for at least one winter. Now it’s a fresh-looking place with a new roof, stylish tile and fixtures in the updated kitchen and baths.

“This used to be one of the worst houses I’d seen,” said Jason Williams, who rehabbed the Washington Heights bungalow with his wife, Esther, after buying it from the Cook County Land Bank in August for about $17,000. “We had to do everything to it, all the way down to the studs.” The Williams’ foreclosure rehab firm, Ultimate Real Estate Group, put the house on the market in early November, asking $154,900.

The house is one of 230 properties, nearly all residential, that the land bank has sold to rehabbers since late 2015, according to a report the organization’s officials compiled for Crain’s.

Together, the 230 make up “a really good effort to help our neighborhoods get restabilized,” said Diane Limas, a longtime rental-housing activist who is part of Roots (Renters Organizing Ourselves to Stay). As part of a partnership, ROOTS acquired 19 apartments in nine foreclosed two- to four-flats in North and Northwest Side neighborhoods through the land bank. The group is rehabbing them and will then put them up for rent.

Of the 230 land bank properties sold, 187 were sold this year and 43 in the latter months of 2015. They are in 13 Chicago neighborhoods and 14 suburbs, according to Rob Rose, the land bank’s executive director.

In the previous two years, the land bank spent $7.2 million to acquire the 230 properties from foreclosing lenders and others. (The land bank paid nothing to acquire some one-third of the properties; banks and others gave them to the land bank at no cost.) It has sold them for a total of $8.5 million, clearing about $1.3 million.

The report did not specify what the land bank spent on the 126 properties it hasn’t yet sold.

Now, having unloaded about two-thirds of the 356 properties it has acquired since it started buying in mid-2014, the land bank “has reached self-sustaining status without using taxpayer dollars,” said Bridget Gainer, the Cook County Commissioner who quarterbacked its creation in early 2013.

The land bank’s startup funding was $4.5 million, provided in 2014 by Lisa Madigan, Illinois attorney general, out of the state’s $1 billion share of a $25 billion national settlement from the nation’s five largest mortgage servicers in 2012.

CLEANED-UP TITLES

The agency isn’t a pass-through, acquiring a property merely to turn around and sell it. Before selling the properties in poor physical condition to rehabbers, the land bank puts them through a kind of cleanup that can be complex. The land bank cleans liens, fines and other red tape off the property’s title, a process Williams estimates has saved his firm as much as $10,000 in legal fees on each of the four houses it’s bought from the land bank.

“Cleaning up the title is huge,” said Frank Montro, a Keller Williams agent who has represented more than a dozen former land bank homes after their rehab, including a three-bedroom on South St. Louis Avenue in Auburn-Gresham that is on the market now at $214,900. “The back taxes and liens can make it unfeasible for a small rehab firm to take on a house,” Montro said. As a county program, the land bank has access to red tape-cutting maneuvers a rehabber may not.

After selling a property to a rehabber, the land bank holds on to some controls: The contract requires that redevelopment happen within 12 months and that the land bank inspect all work. The land bank also holds a “soft mortgage” on the property until it’s resold to a homeowner. All of these controls, Gainer said, point to the bank’s goal of “harnessing the market to help stabilize communities,” and ward off fast-buck investors.

Williams said there’s one more control that works to his advantage: The land bank sells only to local firms in an effort to keep money and jobs in the area it serves. What that means for Williams and his wife is that “we’re not bidding against people from California. When they’re spending $300,000 to get properties out there but they can get them here for $50,000 or $100,000, they think it’s cheap, and they outbid us.”

Gainer said the 230 properties have been sold to 135 developers. The land bank has sold just 10 of its properties directly to end-user homeowners, she said, but a new effort next year may increase that.

By Yvette LeGrand, The South Shore Current  | August 2016

THE COOK COUNTY LAND BANK AUTHORITY (CCLBA) was created in 2013 to address the large inventory of vacant residential, industrial and commercial property in Cook County. Its goal is to return vacant land and abandoned buildings to productive use while preserving and revitalizing neighborhoods.

The Land Bank Authority can acquire, hold and transfer interest in real property throughout Cook County in order to promote redevelopment and reuse of the vacant, abandoned, and foreclosed properties too often prevalent in our community. “We want to save vacant properties and reduce their potentially blighting influence on neighborhoods” said Rob Rose, Executive Director of The Cook County Land Bank Authority. The Land Bank Authority supports efforts to stabilize neighborhoods and stimulate new development in line with the goals and priorities of community stakeholders and government partners. It can wipe out the liens and encumbrances that can make redevelopment and reuse of festering buildings here-to-fore impossible by neighbors and other local stakeholders.

The CCLBA can partner with a local organization or simply convey a parcel to an appropriate developer who has a plan to improve a block and/or create jobs and provide affordable housing stock to new owners seeking to put down roots and strengthen the community. On its website, the CCLBA features before and after photos of its first completed project, a home at 8301 S. Cregier. It was rehabbed by a local couple and sold to new owner-occupants. “ln this case:’ said Rose,” we took a house set for demolition, stopped the demolition process, found a husband and wife team to rehab it and it now has new owner occupants:’ “It set a great example for people in the neighborhood having ownership in the neighborhood:’

This unique community redevelopment and investment tool was created to specifically address the real property issues that are so difficult for locally focused residents to overcome. The CCLBA can acquire and convey previously tax-delinquent and/or municipally encumbered properties and efficiently transfer them to responsible new owners. It can sometimes even overcome the community challenges inherent in so called “heir property’; where a home or other small residential building that was previously occupied by a caring owner sits deteriorating for years. Neighbors suffer as relatives have waged a family battle over who should or who can afford to carry the property that has been the family asset into the future. The CCLBA can also strategically accept property donations.

To prevent further negative community impact, successful transferees must have sufficient capacity to acquire and redevelop the property awarded to them. Properties must be professionally redeveloped within 12 months of conveyance in accordance with code and the CCLBA places a removable lien on the property to prevent “flipping.” But the lien would be released prior to sale of a new homeowner moving into a newly rehabbed home.

Currently, there are 21 properties in and around South Shore that are being redeveloped by new owners through the Land Bank. If this way of moving the community forward is of interest to you and/or your organization, visit www.cookcountylandbank.org or call 312/603-8015 to learn about how this program can help you create a stronger community and a better life.