News

The Chicago Citizen  |  May 20th, 2020   (Click here for Original Article)

South Side developer thriving despite COVID-19, thanks to pipeline offered by Cook County Land Bank Authority

The mortgage crisis of 2008 put real estate developer Keith Lindsey, founder and CEO of Solar Energy Construction, out of business for four years. But this time around, Lindsey’s business is thriving, in spite of the COVID-19 crisis.

A general contractor for more than 20 years, Lindsey recently sold two single-family homes in Englewood since the pandemic hit Chicago, and he is now rehabbing a six-unit Englewood building that will be discounted housing for veterans in honor of his father, a veteran who died last year. He credits his success to being smarter with money, plus the Cook County Land Bank Authority’s vast pool of low-priced abandoned properties, tailor-made for small local developers.

“You learn from your mistakes,” said Lindsey, who has been back in business for five years. “You learn what not to do. You’re just smarter with money. And having a pipeline with the Land Bank makes it easy to keep going.”

Lindsey is one of several small developers who is putting bids on the 250 abandoned, vacant properties that the Cook County Land Bank Authority recently released for sale on its website: http://www.cookcountylandbank. org. In spite of the COVID-19 outbreak, the Land Bank is receiving more applications for its abandoned properties now – about 30 each day –than this time last year. Last year, the Land Bank averaged 300 applications a month from developers vying for its properties.

“Understandably, there’s a fair amount of trepidation among some small developers because of tighter lending criteria from banks, making it harder for small developers to get new loans to acquire property,” said Rob Rose, executive director of the Cook County Land Bank Authority. “But many of our developer clients are optimistic that transactions can move forward. The pandemic is not slowing down rehabs or new applications for our properties. For those small real estate developers who are well-capitalized, this economy presents a great opportunity to acquire property and revitalize communities.”

“I believe if you buy something very cheap and you put your good love in it and make it affordable, I think it will sale, I don’t care where it is,” Lindsey said. “Right now, with the interest rates being low, it’s cheaper to own than rent. So you should give people what they want to buy.”

The Cook County Land Bank Authority, an independent agency of Cook County, acquires properties that have sat tax‐delinquent, abandoned or vacant for years and sells them at below‐market rates to qualified community‐based developers who rehab the properties.

Since its inception in 2013, the Land Bank has worked with more than 400 small developers to rehab more than 600 single family homes and generate $77 million dollars in community wealth.

“The Land Bank offers a very fair program for small developers,” Lindsey said. “They make you crawl before you walk. They come and make sure your rehab work is up to par. It’s a very nice opportunity that came to Chicago, and for me, personally, the Land Bank changed my life.”

ABC-TV News  |  August 11th, 2019   (Click here for Original Article)

CHICAGO (WLS) — The Cook County Land Bank Authority is giving away a free, newly rehabbed home in the Washington Heights neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side this fall.

The Land Bank opened its lottery registration Saturday, and it’ll run through Sept. 15.

The winner would be awarded a single family home with a mortgage that has already been paid in full. The new homeowner would only be responsible for paying property taxes, insurance and utility bills.

The popular twin Downing Brothers of the HGTV pilot show “Double Down” helped rehab the home.

Anyone interested in entering the giveaway can register online at www.cookcountylandbank.org/homeownergiveaway.

Authority officials said the third annual home giveaway is intended to raise awareness about its Homebuyer Direct Program, which helps people purchase vacant, abandoned homes at below-market rates, rehab them and earn immediate equity.

The program has provided more than 140 homes to home buyers since 2017, the Land Bank said.

The authority will select a winner once the lottery closes next month.

By Manny Ramos, Chicago Sun-Times  |  September 7th, 2019   (Click here for Original Article)

Elaine Lee was facing an extremely difficult time in 2007.

Her husband had recently died. Her arthritis was getting worse. And then she lost her job. Like many homeowners in that year leading up to the Great Recession, she started falling behind on her mortgage.

“I was forced to sell or lose everything,” Lee said.

With the proceeds, “I was able to live on my own for a little more than a year.” But after that, money eventually dried up; she lived with her daughter or her sister for nearly a decade.

Then, in 2017, she received a call about a raffle that was underway; the winner would get the keys and deed to a newly renovated home. Naturally skeptical about “free” things, she assumed there was some sort of catch.

“I honestly thought this home giveaway wasn’t real because a lot of time people offer things up for free, and you just get a bunch of junk afterwards,” Lee said. “My daughter insisted it was real, and on the last day of registration I agreed to let her sign me up.”

Good thing, too.

The 68-year-old great-grandmother won the Cook County Land Bank Authority’s first Home Giveaway” that year, which she called a divine “blessing.”

This year, over 14,000 people have entered to win the Land Bank’s third annual giveaway.

That’s far more than the 3,700 who entered last year or the 2,800 in 2017, the year Lee won.

The deadline to register is Sept. 15.

The home being given away this year is in the Washington Heights neighborhood and is newly renovated. The winner is responsible for property taxes, insurance and utilities.

Entrants must be at least 21 and able to move in within 90 days of winning.

Plan on staying, too. The home must also be the winner’s primary residence; they aren’t allowed to rent it out.

South Side brothers Anton and Anthony Downing led the renovations with sponsorship from Fifth Third Bank.

“We are committed to helping people achieve affordable homeownership and enhancing their financial literacy, and that’s why we’re proud to sponsor the Land Bank’s home giveaway,” Nicole Johnson-Scales, a Fifth Third vice president and head of community development, said in a statement.

The Land Bank was formed in 2013 by the Cook County Board of Commissioners to address communities hit hard by the mortgage crisis. It promotes the “redevelopment and reuse of vacant, abandoned, foreclosed or tax-delinquent properties.”

The annual giveaway also raises awareness of the Land Bank’s Homebuyer Direct Program, which allows people to buy vacant land or abandoned homes at below-market rates to rehab them.

Rob Rose, executive director of the Land Bank, said many homes were lost during the foreclosure crisis and there wasn’t anything in place to address those issues early on. The homebuyer direct program does just that, he said.

“What we wanted to do at the Land Bank was to stabilize the housing stock,” Rose said. “As families started to recover and get stable jobs, we wanted to be able to provide them with a way to get into the housing market, earn home equity quickly while also stabilizing communities by getting families into homes that were often seen as eye sores.”

Rose said the annual giveaway shows how abandoned homes can be rescued.

“It feels good to be able to stand on my own two feet now and have a place where my grandkids and great-grandkids can visit me or stay the night,” Lee said. “I am able to enjoy and watch them grow up.”

By Erin Ivory, WGN-TV  |  August 28th, 2019   (Click here for Original Article)

CHICAGO — The Cook County Land Bank Authority is giving away a mortgage-free next month, with an assist from a pair of local celebrities.

One lucky Chicagoan will receive the keys to the Washington Heights home rehabbed by brothers Anton and Anthony Downing of HGTV’s “Double Down.” It was a perfect pairing for the job, taking place in the same neighborhood where they grew up.

“It means everything to us to get to make a difference in these neighborhoods across the South and West Side,” Anthony Downing said.

The three bedroom home sits on a tree-lined street, and has a newly rehabbed kitchen and hardwood flooring throughout.

It’s the third house the Cook County Land Bank Authority is giving away, and Executive Director Robert Rose says anyone can enter as long as they are over 21, can move in by October and commit to living in the home long-term.

“This giveaway changes lives. There’s no mortgage payment to worry about… the new homeowners have all the equity,” Rose said.

Anyone interested in participating has until September 15 to enter.

By Dennis Rodkin, Crain’s Chicago Business  |  July 8th, 2019   (Click here for the original article)

A pair of charismatic house-rehabbing twins who have a television show in the works at HGTV are teaming up with the Cook County Land Bank to makeover a house in the city and give it away.

Anton and Anthony Downing, who grew up in the West Chesterfield neighborhood and have been rehabbing homes for a decade, this spring signed a contract to create an HGTV show called “Double Down.” Production hasn’t yet begun, Anthony Downing said. They specialize in instilling stylish new looks into worn-out properties, such as this 1950s home in Pill Hill.

“We like to bring a freshness into the property,” said Anthony Downing who like his twin is also a firefighter, “but repurpose parts of it, like old doors, to keep the character that’s there.” They’ve flipped ten Chicago houses so far­­—none of them land bank properties—and in January, the “Double Down” pilot aired on HGTV’s subsidiary DIY Network. They’re the first semi-celebrities to emerge out of the South Side and south suburban rehab wave that has remade tens of thousands of Chicago-area homes in the past decade.

At a land bank lunchtime event July 9 at the Chicago Hilton and Towers, they’ll unveil plans to rehab a house on the Southwest Side for the land bank’s third annual year-end giveaway of formerly distressed, completely rehabbed home.

“The land bank has a very similar mission to us,” Anthony Downing said. “We want to see the neighborhoods improved through renovation and get people access to owning property so they can build that generational wealth.”

Bridget Gainer, the Cook County Commissioner who chairs the land bank authority, said having the Downings involved will help “get our message out to the people we want to reach,” that is, those who could take on a cosmetic rehab of a budget-priced home in their neighborhood. The Downings, she said, “started out doing it house to house, and they’ve grown into a sophisticated organization.”

While the Downings have handled their own purchases of foreclosures and legal issues, Gainer said they’ll be role models of sorts for the express lane that the land bank provides: it offers properties it has acquired and cleaned of any legal, financial and zoning red tape.  

The Downings and land bank officials won’t disclose the exact location of the house until the Hilton event, but they told Crain’s it’s on the Southwest Side and only needs cosmetic work like a rehabbed kitchen and baths, no structural or roofing work. While the Land Bank  often trades in properties that need structural and other significant work, those typically go to developers with expertise in such work.  There’s also an effort called Homebuyers Direct, whose mission is to get individuals and households to revamp homes in their neighborhoods, for their own use.

Gainer said the full cost of the Downing brothers’ project, which the land bank will pay for, has not yet been estimated. A cosmetic rehab typically runs up to about $50,000, she said. The Downings said they are not yet finished drawing up their plans.

Cook County officials launched the land bank in 2013 to help speed the process of returning casualties of the foreclosure crisis, vacant and derelict properties, to productive use and get them back on the property tax rolls. The Downings’ rehab business predates the land bank; after growing up watching their mother buy and run an investment property near their West Chesterfield home, the brothers started rehabbing properties in 2009, they said. They have recently expanded to new construction, building townhomes on property their mother owns in the Bahamas. 

The Cook County Land Bank is selling the Washington Park National Bank Building in Woodlawn, 6300 S. Cottage Grove Ave., after conducting public listening meetings to see what the community wants from the space.

Whenever possible, older buildings that showcase Chicago’s architectural legacy should be spared from the wrecking ball.

Every Prairie Style home and post-modern office build

By Odette Yousef, WBEZ Chicago  |  July 11th, 2019   (Click here for the original article)

George Porter wistfully remembers the Saturday morning smell of bacon and eggs wafting out of homes on the 6500 block of South Sangamon Street, where he grew up. Neighbors would be outside cutting their grass and sitting on their front porches.

“I … could walk down this street, and about six, seven elders would be like, ‘Son, you hungry?’” Porter said. “‘Here, here you go. Some Kool-Aid? You want pop? Take these bottles to the store and cash them in.’”

Porter, now 50 and no longer living on this block in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood, said the street was clean and neighborly. But he said that changed as the original homeowners passed away and left their homes to their children.

“Then, they can’t keep it up [and] end up losing it because of taxes,” he said.

This year, 13 homes on this block alone will be among those listed in Cook County’s biennial tax scavenger sale, which begins Thursday. That means they fell at least three years behind on taxes. The county will offer outside investors the opportunity to purchase their debt, potentially for less than what’s owed. In so doing, the investors become debt collectors and may charge homeowners interest that exceeds 48% over time. If homeowners don’t pay what they owe to the investor and the county, a process known as “redeeming” their taxes, they could, ultimately, lose the property itself.

Historically, the scavenger sale has yielded relatively little money for the county. In 2017, Cook County sought to recover more than $433 million in unpaid taxes through the scavenger sale. Private investors only bought under $12 million of that — less than 3% of the total. But in the last four years, the scavenger sale has presented an entirely different opportunity: a chance for the county to scale up its neighborhood revitalization efforts after the 2008 housing crisis.

“What we’re doing is unprecedented in the history of this sale, and we continue to do this because we think that this is a way for us to be a facilitator with solving blight in the county,” said Robert Rose, executive director of the Cook County Land Bank Authority (CCLBA).

Cook County created the CCLBA in 2015 to acquire vacant and abandoned properties. Rose said initially the CCLBA worked with lenders such as Fannie Mae to obtain real estate-owned properties that had been foreclosed. But he said that pipeline has started drying up. So now, the CCLBA is turning to the scavenger sale as its primary mode of property acquisition.

Illinois statute allows the county and the CCLBA to “bid” on properties without putting any money down. Rose said they target concentrated areas with the goal of ultimately acquiring the actual properties. Once the land bank does that, the county has the power to clear the title of any liens and wipe out back taxes. That allows the CCLBA to sell properties to nonprofits and community partners free and clear, and at rock-bottom prices.

Rose said it’s an awkward method for the CCLBA to obtain properties, one filled with bureaucratic red tape. But he said it’s the only way the authority has, for example, been able to go after eight properties on the 6500 block of South Sangamon Street at once. And he says it subverts a tax collection system that has disproportionately stripped wealth from low-income communities of color, all while yielding very little to the county.

“What we’re disrupting is this very cottage industry of acquiring [tax] certificates and then going through other methods to extract money from owners, but never satisfying the tax bill, and ultimately never trying to own the property,” explained Rose.

But some observers say the CCLBA’s strategy has, so far, appeared disorganized.

Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas criticized how the CCLBA used the 2015 scavenger sale. The Treasurer’s Office conducts the scavenger sale. Pappas noted that the CCLBA is returning nearly two-thirds of the 7,500 tax certificates it took in that sale. For many of those, enough time has passed that the land bank could pursue ownership of the properties themselves. Instead, it has decided to give them up for now and have those properties listed in the 2019 scavenger sale again.

“To the land bank, get your act together here,” Pappas said. “Research this property before you take it; that’s what the tax buyers do. They shouldn’t have any special position here to come take whatever they want without researching it, then come back [and] dump it on the county.”

Rose acknowledged that the land bank has had a learning curve when it comes to using the scavenger sale for its purposes. He noted that the Treasurer’s Office announces which properties will be listed in the scavenger sale only one month before the sale takes place, which is not sufficient time for field inspectors to visit thousands of properties. But Rose said he will not apologize for how aggressive the land bank has been in the scavenger sale.

For starters, Rose said communities are still hurting from the widespread damage of the 2008 housing crisis. Indeed, in 2007, the scavenger sale listed just 4,266 properties. This year, the Treasurer’s Office was preparing to list more than 28,000 — a more than sixfold increase.

Just as important, said Rose, has been the damage wrought by Cook County’s extractive method of collecting unpaid taxes from low-income communities of color.

“When you think about race and when you think about equity, you’re talking about systemic issues,” said Rose. “Right now, we’re a great Band-Aid. We’re a great fix for the symptoms. But as long as there’s a scavenger sale, there’s an issue.”