Brian White’s Post

https://zurl.co/rLh3 A new CBRE report https://zurl.co/gEaV illustrates opportunities & challenges w/ converting slack downtown space to "mixed use." This is a hot topic in big cities and metros, as downtowns face a glut of empty office buildings. The glut stems in part from people working remotely during the pandemic, but also because of changes in how people work more generally. Increased automation of administrative functions for example =less workers. With AI, that trend will continue. Companies are also shedding real estate and the associated overhead expenses, simply to save on costs. Conversions can help revitalize urban cores and in many respects are viewed as essential. So why are we building more office buildings? The same CBRE report finds that while we have 43.5million SF of excess office space, there are projects in queue to add 19 million SF of new space by 2029. That only adds to the pressure on existing office space and will likely cannibalize existing spaces to occupy new. In Chicago, where I live and work, there are numerous new shiny towers surrounding our downtown, with plans for more on the way. Simultaneously, Chicago is committing hundreds of millions of dollars to help defray the costs to convert aging office buildings into mixed-use, with hopes that the city's historic financial district may become a live-work community. The Chicago downtown office sector vacancy rate is 22.6%, an historic high. What gives? I ask this question: should cities like Chicago limit permits for new offices and force the development capital into conversions? It's a similar argument for why urban planners propose limiting greenfield development on the outer fringes of metro areas: restricting outward growth redirects capital and development activity into infill development. It makes a ton of sense, yet still we see metro areas build further and further into the outer edges, where land is ostensibly cheaper and sites can be built to suit more easily as compared to tackling legacy infrastructure issues in an urban core. Theoretically, cities and their planning departments are evaluating the demand for office space, the same way they anticipate residential demand. Those forecasts may project demand out based on historic trends, however, making them of limited use when a major disruption like a global pandemic or the advent of AI completely changes how work happens almost in an instant. Moreover, building an office tower may take many years, so the lag between the data used to develop a forecast and the time a building comes online can be as much as a decade. It's a vexing problem, for sure. I don't have any ready answers. I would love to hear what folks are seeing in your communities and how your cities and towns are tacking these challenges.

I am thankful today for @Center for Community Progress for holding the VAD Academy for folks attacking the sources and consequences of vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated property. I am among nearly 900 attendees from across the US and beyond learning and sharing how to protect and advance equity for residents and communities. It's great to see lots of our current partners and subscribers and lots of names and faces that are new. As the leader of eProperty Innovations, I continue to listen and learn from experts in this space and from the people working at the front lines. I apply the learning to our #ePropertyPlus software application and to technical assistance projects that help local communities implement context sensitive strategies for address VAD property. This work is complicated. It involves being aware of and committing to address historic and persistent patterns of exploitation and discrimination. And at the end of the day, it involves aligning people, processes, and policies to produce better and more equitable outcomes. It's more than any one group can manage, but CCP does an amazing job of keeping things organized and clear.

We celebrate the success of land bank/land trust partnerships, like the one in Richmon, VA at the @Maggie Walker Community Land Trust . Such partnerships exist in multiple places: @Metro Atlanta Land Bank @Houston Land Bank come to mind, not to mention the COCIC: Franklin County Land Bank / COCLT: Central Ohio Community Land Trust in Ohio, which has also produced at least 100 new homes and counting. People sometimes ask what the difference is between land trusts and land banks. Land banks are generally established to acquire and hold property short-term. The meaning of "short-term" varies, but it can be understood as "the least amount of time needed" to prepare a property for ultimate disposition. Most land bank policies have a 3-year cap on holding property. Many will acquire and dispose of property in much less time. Others may hold it longer, but only if there are attenuating circumstances and the land bank board expressly approves. They are not intended to "bank" property indefinitely and I describe a land bank as a "way stations" for property on its ultimate redevelopment journey. If a land bank is a way station, a land trust is the final stop. Land trusts serve as long-term owners of land, maintaining control over how it can be used in perpetuity. Land trusts are used to reduce costs to end users of the improvements (the structures) and in doing so, help maintain some level of affordability. There are differences in how they are governed, but I find those distinctions to be less important than their role in a property's redevelopment lifecycle. https://zurl.co/VrW1

Property taxes fund public education, emergency services, public health, roads and transit, and other public services. When taxes aren't paid by one property owner, other taxpayers bear the cost. Counties are responsible for collecting property taxes and distributing the proceeds to various uses. When taxes go unpaid after the deadline, a county may attempt to recover unpaid taxes by selling a delinquent owner's debts to a third party and letting that party collect. If that fails, the county may take title to the property as a trustee and sell the property to a new owner. The proceeds of the sales are supposed to cover the cost to recover the debts, plus the debts themselves. Research shows most counties process of collecting unpaid taxes result in disproportionate harm to vulnerable populations and may cause families to lose out on built up property equity. A lot of this stems from how and when delinquent owners are notified, whether a county offers adequate time for an owner to bring debts current, and how counties handle the proceeds of sales. There are any number of reasons why owners don't pay their taxes and balancing the owners' interests with those of the public at large can be a delicate balancing act. We recommend this set of thoughtful proposals from the National Consumer Law Center and others for how counties can navigate tax collection, especially in light of the Supreme Court's ruling in Tyler v Hennepin. With the advent of technologies unavailable when most states drafted their tax collection statues, it is easier and easier for counties to implement equitable tax collection policies. Reforms can involve better systems for sending notice to parties of interest prior to a tax sale, giving delinquent owners more avenues for paying debts, setting up better systems for running sales and tracking sales proceeds, and setting aside sales proceeds to ensure any party entitled to excess proceeds can have time to claim those proceeds. It's a lot to digest, but this brief does a great job of summarizing different pathways for creating a more equitable tax collection process, without sacrificing or minimizing a county's right - and obligation - to collect property taxes. https://zurl.co/z9Nm

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Establishing a data-driven culture is hard, for sure. I have worked 10+ years with a technology-centered organization. In the course of my tenure, I have heard various experts extoll how successful organizations have to be "data-driven" so many times I can't even begin to count. It's one of those catchy phrases that sounds compelling, but what the heck does it even mean? When I was in grad school many moons ago, we learned a valuable lesson about doing data analysis. It was "garbage in = garbage out." What the professor meant was if you collect poorly organized or poorly specified data, your results will be crap. You put in garbage and that is what you get out. More broadly, it was a shorthand way of reminding analysts to take time to understand what data were being collected and for what reasons. This meant thinking through the question(s) we wanted to answer. Next, we had to decide what data to gather and analyze to help us answer the question(s). Then, we had to test the model numerous times and assess if it provided enough explanatory power and within an appropriate confidence interval to be reputable. I am sure I am missing some other steps, but the point I took away was to take time and let the questions drive the project, not the data. Today, with data being such a huge buzzword, I suspect lots of folks feel compelled to be "data centered", but don't really have a good idea where to begin. This article offers some insights. https://zurl.co/UWNq

For the last 10 years, I have been working with & in support of organizations putting vacant property back to productive use. I started out consulting with eProperty Innovations, helping the company think about how clients can use (their) data and (our) software to restart a property's lifecycle. Our clients were/are tackling vacant and abandoned property challenges. The last decade, I've been witness to - and had my hand in, the slow and steady evolution of how we intervene to break the cycle of disinvestment using land banks. They've evolved from distressed property depositories to innovative community revitalizers. I see a ton of innovation and creativity in this space and I am happy to still be a part of it. Today, I run eProperty Innovations and do my best to apply my passion for community revitalization, my affinity for the underdog, and my influence over our software to deliver useful improvements that can hopefully "move the needle". I am fortunate to have a small, but capable team and lots of community partners who inspire and push us to be better. We had an accomplishment this week that I think is pretty damn cool. It's a new auction function built into our ePropertyPlus portfolio management system that's helping the Region 1 Land Bank in Northern Illinois manage two county property tax sales. Some might question is that a good thing? Don't tax sales stink? Yes, they do, but at least in part because of how they operate in most parts of the country. A property tax sale is a blunt-force object designed to recover unpaid property taxes. How and from whom is less a concern as compared to simply getting taxes paid up. Tax sales attract speculative investors profiting on someone's hardship. Dealing with the repercussions of the lousy tax sale process falls on everyone else: the person risking losing their home, the city dealing with a blighted property, and a community experiencing continued disinvestment, as the tax sale process just kicks the can down the road. Land banks try to break that negative cycle. Region 1 is the only land bank I am aware of that actually runs their county tax trustee sale. (Mind you, they are not selling tax liens and helping displace people out of their homes. The properties they are selling are long-vacant, many are vacant lots, and most have been collecting debt and dust for years). Region 1 is affirmatively reaching out to find willing buyers who will purchase those properties and hopefully put them to constructive reuse- as community gardens, side yards, sites for infill housing, or who knows what. We're able to help, because we modified ePropertyPlus so Region 1 can run their auctions from within ePropertyPlus. This is our way to say kudos to Region 1 for asking "can it do that thing?" It did not before. Now it does. https://zurl.co/TtSL