Industry sign banking pennsylvania word now
good morning everyone my name is winnie branton i am here today as the moderator of the land banks 101 session today we're going to talk a little bit about land bank basics and then we're going to be uh we're going to be hearing from two pennsylvania land bank leaders joe from the northeast pennsylvania land bank and christy mahany from the erie county land bank we're going to share some insights and hear from them about their work getting their land bank started and up and running but first i'm going to offer you some uh information and background about the pennsylvania land bank law and set the stage for the stories that christy and joe will tell i'm going to share my screen now okay so land banks 101 is our session this is me just a little background about me i've worked for years now with the housing alliance as a consultant and trainer on land banks in pennsylvania and i have learned so much from those land bank leaders who are out there doing the job every day and i look forward to hearing christy and joe's story today with you as i mentioned we're going to start off with some land bank basics and then we're going to dive into some insights and lessons learned from joe and christy and just a little bit about joe and christy joe was there at the beginning a land bank pioneer in pennsylvania when the law was being passed and then advocating for its passage and then helping um his own land bank get started but then working to help others get started with land banks too christy is in erie county and she's in a unique position which i'm sure she'll share with us lots of stakeholders an erie city land bank as a partner and other municipalities who are now joining and adding on to uh the members that she is working with up in erie county so on to a little bit about land bank basics a land bank is a governmental entity and its sole purpose is to convert vacant abandoned and tax delinquent properties to productive use the pennsylvania land bank law which was passed in 2012 it authorizes the formation of land banks and then it sets some rules for operating and governance they take many forms and touch communities of all kinds in pennsylvania the law is flexible and optional in terms of options there are two for creating a land bank one is you create a standalone land bank which includes uh eligible counties municipalities and then multi-municipal jurisdictions and then the second option which was recently enacted allows land bank jurisdictions to designate their redevelopment authorities to act as land banks why land banks here are just some of the reasons that communities have uh based their decision on and which are also reasons for some of the uh land banks across the nation uh for for setting up land banks and using this tool it's a proven tool it removes barriers to getting problem properties back onto the tax rolls it allows for a uniform process for doing that and then it can also serve as that central hub for blight prevention because much of this work is disbursed among multiple government agencies in pennsylvania there are 25 now 27 established land banks in different states of operation and as you can see from the map they are uh dispersed across the commonwealth and in different stages of operation and many of these land banks um have uh been involved with the newly formed uh land bank network which uh the housing alliance is organizing and leading the effort to get that up and running this year so just a couple of slides on how does a land bank work land banks are mechanisms to allow for the transfer of uh vacant abandoned and blighted properties to new owners the key tool that a land bank has is its ability to acquire properties at judicial tax sales without having to bid against other bidders and be the highest bidder the law sets forth a process by which the land bank can negotiate with the tax the tax claim bureau or other taxing authority in order to acquire that property through a negotiated agreement many land banks are using that provision under the law in order to acquire properties and transfer them to new owners and again highlighting that this is a locally driven strategy so it's very important that we have our facilities and land banks ready and operating for the future so how does a land bank work here side lot dispositions here we want to focus on what comes after the blight that is what do we do with these blended properties or what do we ask the new owner to do with bladed properties when they go back um into the hands of that new owner sidelock dispositions brownfields redevelopment community spaces and green infrastructure so at this point i'm going to turn the program over to christy mahany from the erie county land bank and i'm going to stop my share and as i do that christy's going to come on and uh she will share her story hi good morning all right let me [Music] share my screen all right all right um this is me i'm christy mahaney i'm the executive director of the erie county land bank here in erie pennsylvania we are one of two land banks um in the area there's one within the city and then there is us within the county i come from a background of i spent about 15 years in the real estate industry i was a real estate agent for a long period of time dealing with different investors dealing with you know private homeowners um so i come at it from this this filter of the real estate side of things and realistically we as a land bank are like the worst investors ever we we get these properties that nobody else knows what to do with and we basically um invest either a lot of money or some amount of money into them and and try to get them back to some sort of productive use um so that's a little bit about me there's three basic topics that i was going to try to cover today i know we are semi-limited on time it's only about an hour and i definitely don't want to cut into any of joe's time here but the i wanted to cover a little bit about our setup and timeline so how this works is i ended up coming in a little bit after it was set up but before we were actually operational so there are some things not being very familiar with land banks in the beginning um approaching it from you know more of the public side of things there are some things that i wished i had known and there are some things that i'm really really proud of what we've done so far so i just wanted to cover some of those things so that if if you were new to it you had some idea of hey here's what to look out for here's what really worked well for somebody else so one of the topics was the land bank setup and timeline um the next topic that i'll cover after that is getting the municipalities and school districts on board we've got a lot of them that we needed to needed to get in touch with and i'll go over that what worked well and what didn't and then the biggest question that i was encountering even when i was going to conferences all over the country last two years ago whenever in 2019 when when it was still happening um was people who were unfamiliar with the pro unfamiliar with land banks were constantly saying we need to figure out how to get control over the properties whether they were in pennsylvania or they were in nevada it was the same question like how do we get control over these properties so those are the three topics that i'm going to touch on today okay what did your setup and timeline look like so my thing that i've been telling everybody lately when they say you know how long will this take my stock rent stock answer is now we aren't fast but we are good eventually like we will make there's still a lot of things that we're very new at i'm very upfront and honest about hey this is our first time doing it we may decide to do it a completely different way or second time of doing it but we're going to make sure that this is done right and it's done very well we just aren't sure how much time it's going to take so if you look at this basic timeline and those three bring those three green circles are the the topics that i'm covering today but our land bank was established in december of 2017 at the very end of december of 2017. that's when the legislation went through locally um we had a nine-member board appointed so we've got a nine-member board um they had their first meeting in april of 2018 and then public outreach and education began in february of 2019 is when i came on board um then we really ramped up we ramped up the public outreach we ramped up meeting with the municipalities and in june of 2019 our first member joined they actually they actually signed an old copy of our ica our intergovernmental cooperation agreement they signed they were so eager to join they signed an old copy and then resigned the new copy once we had everything finalized so they were pretty enthusiastic we kept up with the public outreach um and then in november of 2019 our first properties were acquired that december we used our priority bid at the judicial sale for the first time they can't remember how many properties that we ended up with i want to say it was six or seven um and then we did our first demolition in june of of last year so that kind of gives you an idea what what i realized after talking with all of these other land banks after after being in touch with um several of them and paying attention is that's not atypical it typically is taking a lot of land banks about a year and a half to two years to to actually begin to go from the setup to actually get to a point where they're able to take on properties and actually begin operations so i thought that was handy to know just in case you were starting in the very beginning or as i usually tend to think um you know are we are we being really slow with this or is this taking longer than it should no it's probably about where it should be so um the things that we did really really right is because this was so new to me and and i am a sucker for learning new things i immediately set up visits with several other established land banks that were around you know within a two-hour drive of me and i actually went and visited them in person and that was hugely helpful because you were able to pick up on again this will this may need to be a virtual visit for you but um or you know once once the pandemic has lightened up a little bit you might be able to go out and visit again um but it was hugely helpful as far as being able to see not only the properties that they were taking on we got a tour of several properties it really uh it was enlightening as far as how much hoarding happens and and how much damage is in certain properties and how how actually not damaged some properties are they were also able to share with us a lot of their documentation a lot of their operations and their checklists for things and it was just really really helpful to see how other places do it um also from the beginning we were looking at long-term scalability i mean we only took on six or seven properties in the beginning um i think we're up to 12 or 13 or 14 right now it depends um but knowing the size of other land banks that they were taking on hundreds or sometimes thousands of properties over a decade or more that is we we knew we wanted to set it up right from the beginning or as right as we could we can always change things later but we wanted to set up as right as we could from the beginning so we were looking at scalability we've got quickbooks into place we got a website into into place we started using e property plus right from the beginning um and we we really set that up long-term scale also we're in a unique position where we actually have quite a bit of funding that's built in we're getting about a million dollars in gaming funds per year we are fiercely defending that money as far as making sure that it is it is being spent appropriately making sure that it is um there are a lot of people who have a lot of ideas of how it should be spent so we wanted to make sure that we were staying on task uh again possible changes that i would make is i would stop guessing with the time estimates because everything's taking way longer than we think is that it should so um at this point i just keep saying by the end of 2021 we think this demo you know i feel safe saying that by the end of 2021 could be march could be may we don't know but it'll happen and then um we actually were approached several times about applying for different grants and we weren't in a position where we were able to and then the county hired a grant writer and i would say if you've got the opportunity to work if you whether you've got the funding or you don't have the funding and you're looking for it work with a grant writer early and often if you can in order to try to secure some of that funding any funding that you can because when you don't have to worry about where the money is coming from or if you know that you have a certain pocket of money that you can work with it really helps be able to make some some really great decisions that way all right how did we convince members to join um so low pressure transparency plus a dose of storytelling what does that mean so if you look at this map right here this map the gray let's start with the gray area right in the center of the top there that is the city of erie that is um that is the territory covered by the erie land bank they had you know the eries they have one school district they have one municipality and then of course the county executive and the tax claim bureau needed to sign off so they had five signatures that they needed to get in order to operate if you look at the rest of it we've got 37 municipalities that we cover 12 different school districts that we cover um when i added it all up in the in the beginning when it was looking a little bit overwhelming when i added it all up i realized that we had 52 different signatures when he counted county executive tax claim bureau and then the land bank itself signing we had 52 different signatures that we needed to keep track of and the city land bank had five so they had a deck of cards and we or i'm sorry they had a poker hand and we had a deck of cards so now that's not uh that's not anything against them because they're fabulous and they have entirely different issues that they needed to deal with but the scale of who we needed to be in contact with and what we needed to keep track of was big so what we started doing is right away started getting face to face again face to face i don't care if it zoomed to zoom but started having real conversations with the local municipalities and the local school districts and i'd take whatever i could get if they wanted me to show up to a meeting i'd show up to a meeting if they wanted to have a one-on-one conversation about it or start smaller and just show up and talk to one person in the municipality whatever they would give me i would take and i'd get face to face with them um also it was very it was very low pressure as far as one of the places that i showed up to they said so you want us to sign up for the land bank and before i could stop myself before i could stop myself i was like oh i don't care if you sign up for the land bank or not it's not like i get a bonus if you sign up but i do want you to know about it i want you to know that this is an option for you and then you make your own decision and go from there so um it's very it's it was just very much like i want you to be aware i want you to be educated because i come from a really big family i can't see offering one member and not telling another member about it so anything here that you see you can see who's been signed up for so far this is a current map the areas that are not signed up are not because they're not interested it's just because we haven't had a chance to talk with them yet or we haven't had a chance to get in front of get in front of them yet um let me just double check here uh oh so the other thing that i did is that i made sure that we told stories about local stories that made this real because there were a lot of questions especially when you're in a rural area it was it was a lot of why should i care if this property is blighted if the other houses around it are fine i mean won't somebody do something with it eventually an
in most of these cases no these ones had been a long time coming so this one on cherry street um what i ended up telling i ended up telling this story just about everywhere that i went where this property it's not this property that the story is about it's about another one on the block and another house on the block the owners had purchased the property they had they purchased it within the last decade or so invested quite a bit of money into redoing it rehabbing it um and and really sinking a lot of money into it and then they went to refinance it when they went to refinance it the um the bank came back and said oh i'm sorry this appraised lower than what you bought it for you know almost 10 years ago and they said how in the world you know we bought it it's thing the the neighborhood has been appreciating we bought it we put money into it how is it possibly lower and they said when they pulled up the appraisal they said because you have a blighted property directly across the street from you and it is sinking the value of your home that much so that person ended up luckily the timing of it was really well was really good because uh they ended up going to both the municipality and the school district right around the same time that i was talking with them and suddenly signing up with the land bank became a very very very big priority for them so i'm i think there's a lot of value in telling stories that are local that are real and showing how it is affecting the the uh the members of the community all right so what we did right we did a lot of face-to-face we told real stories about real people everything was very no or low pressure um oh the other thing is we stayed really consistent with our icas there are some municipalities who are like well we want this change well we want that changed we have 38 you know 37 municipalities and 12 school districts that we're dealing with i'm not going to remember who has what line in their ica and what needs to it's going to be consistent we're going to keep it the same the other big thing is we stayed out of the municipal and the school relations sometimes they were like well we want the the school district wants the municipality run it by them first great you need to work it out with them you need to have a side agreement or you need to have an additional rider or whatever it may you need to have that with them we don't need to be in the middle of it we just need to know that you're okay with us operating here and the other thing that we did really really right is we realized really early on we needed one point of contact for each community some of our communities have a lot of active members and some of them know that um some of them have a lot of active members and some of them know that uh you know that we were we were looking to be there and it it really it became really important to have one point of contact and one really um yeah one point of contact per community um and then the other thing that we do is some of the school districts had to sign a bunch of times some of them had up to six different municipalities i would have separated out and just had us had a school district ica and had them sign once and make it easy for them all right how do we get control over the properties uh the so superpowers emergency exits in a lot of patients basically what it is is we don't have any teeth as a land bank but what we can be is we can be the good guy or we can be the emergency exit if somebody needs to um if somebody if somebody has a property that has now become a burden for them and they don't know what to do with it anymore so this property right here i've realized that we had to get really familiar with code enforcement and what has and hasn't been done this property right here is very obviously a blighted property i mean it's missing a roof in two walls i found out very recently that it hasn't even been condemned yet because the local communities were trying to work with the owners all very admirable but they wanted to know when the land bank could step in and take it over and i said the thing is you need to do your part you absolutely need to do code enforcement you need to you need to send them out you need to get it condemned you need to you need to start your process and then we can be an option for them kind of an out an emergency exit for them um where they could donate their property to the land bank if they needed to this property was our first donation a tree fell on the house insurance totaled it luckily the owner was talking with uh the municipal official that is our point of contact and he said i'm just gonna quit paying the taxes on it and let the county take it back at the tax sale she said why don't you talk to christy at the land bank and see if they'll take it as a donation we did and it was our very first demolition last year so that worked out really really well and uh okay so what we did really well is we kept it it's like we're the good we're the good guy we are we don't have any teeth but we are an option for you if you need us um so we encourage the donations we've gotten some great donations that way we kept it voluntary with the municipalities as far as um there was no minimum or maximum number of properties that they could ask us to acquire so we made sure that each of the municipalities knew what other municipalities were doing so that they knew what the options were it kind of kept those uh kept planting that seed of the possibilities kind of kept to top of mine and then we use a process of instead of a process of selection we use process of elimination so everything's a possibility until it's not that's with judicial sales it's with property dispositions as far as the end use goes everything's a possibility until it's not so we might have a favorite but at least we're keeping all of our options open and then possible changes and this is more these are really little things but i make sure to call the utility companies way earlier than you think that you need to because we've had a couple that got missed during storms and then it delayed some demolitions um we've got demolition funds that i wish we had really tacked into earlier and then uh tracking contact info for interested parties right away people start calling and are very interested in it and sometimes it seems so far away and we we have gotten much better about tracking that earlier and then also sometimes it seems like a good idea to bring in our municipal officials to answer questions about a property i wish that we had done that a little bit less the board sometimes needs to discuss some things and and go from there so um that is it that's what i summed up i hope we made it in time and now i'm gonna turn it i'm gonna stop i'm going to stop sharing and i believe we're going to turn it over to joe all right good morning everybody let me share my screen here okay so a little bit about me my name is joe chock i am the executive director of the northeast pennsylvania land bank authority um that's kind of my uh after hours job i guess you would say my main job is i am the executive director of the city of pittston's office community development and the redevelopment authority of the city of pittston a little bit more background about me before i joined the city of pittson back in 2012 i served with as a government services manager for the northeast pennsylvania alliance which is a local development district assisting counties or municipalities in the seven county region on everything from act 47 to grant writing and also i served on the other side of the table as you say i was an elected official in a in the borough of 44 for 12 years where i served as its council president for 10. and i earned my degree in political science from penn state so let me get into the story of the northeast pennsylvania land bank so how it started so back in 2012 the city was well into its downtown revitalization and we wanted to take a greater look um at a more comprehensive approach to a citywide revitalization so we developed a quasi-what we call quasi-white paper that identified eight prongs of a plan to address the city's revitalization and the second prong was what we call the neighborhood housing initiative the city faced a multiple multi-generational issue of not addressing residential properties and we had a lot of issues that needed to be addressed so we needed to develop a comprehensive plan just i'll throw some statistics at you um in 2012 when this paper was written um we identified that 63 percent of our housing stock was built before 1939 and 80 percent was built before 1959. we had an 11 residential vacancy rate and we had a 47 43 owner rentals split so we developed this plan we presented it at a public meeting where we invited municipal officials from the greater pittson region county officials state officials school districts bankers contractors and county judges from there um at the same time and right after that the land bank act passed and the city of pittson had identified the land bank as another tool to help us uh address the blight issue in the neighborhoods within that land bank law at the time of its adoption it required ten thousand residents to form your own land bank the city of pittsburgh has about eight thousand residents so we were required to identify some partners so we reached out to the housing alliance for some assistance and guidance on how to go about doing this so in september of 2013 the housing lines came up here we held a meeting with several neighboring municipalities we invited officials from the school district and we went over what land bank we did you know we did this we did a land banking one-on-one with them and immediately we had two municipalities um sign on to to join the land bank with us we were just looking for one and we got two that night uh within several days we were up to ten people ten municipalities that were interested in joining joining us we ended up with only five but it was a exciting time there so the first step in our process was forming these municipal agreements uh the first page of our our municipal agreements there each municipality adopted this by ordinance uh it adopted the land bank's policy that was the simplest step in this whole entire process our next step was going out to the school districts to enter into agreements with them um some of the things that i want to point out to help you as you go out and do this is that school district officials board members they don't deal with blight they deal with curriculum so they don't really understand the impacts that it has on municipalities so we had to educate the board members what blight does the impacts it has not just economically but we had to tell them the story of what kind of impacts it would have on the educational system [Music] then the other the other thing is you have to talk to the business managers and superintendents who are more focused on the financial implications of the idea of revenue sharing which brings me to my next point which we dealt more readily with in the county approach was um ghost revenue so the county in particular in the school districts to a lesser extent when they they look at their tax assessments they see a property at one two three main street and they see it's assessed at a hundred thousand dollars and that means you know that means two thousand dollars in tax revenue to them the problem is is for three five six seven years that tax revenue has not been paid so when you're discussing it with them they they they think they're losing revenue and when in the event they're not getting any revenue now so they're not losing anything so you have to explain that whole ghost revenue idea to them some of the other issues we faced at the county were the misconceptions of what the land bank was the term bank itself caused great consternation among the elected officials in the public they thought we were creating another financial institution that was going to make money off of properties so we had to explain you know the basics of what a land bank was um we also had to address you know false narratives of the mission of a land bank we had some of uh public officials and we had some members of the public who said that we were going to go after the best properties in the county and we were going to make enormous profits when everybody that does this knows that that is not what we are doing we are going after properties that we i affectionately refer to as a dog's breakfast um they are the worst of the worst properties um some of the other things luzerne county had some political scandals the kids for cash if anybody's not familiar so that was right before we we went out on this adventure so we had to address the public's trust of another governmental entity and then we had to the biggest struggle that we had after we got through all that process was our ability to exercise a trumpet as a non-county land bank and to make matters worse is we had to deal with a third party that the county had engaged to administer their tax sales so i'll get into that a little bit later so the land bank forms late 2013 early 2014 we were the fourth land bank in the state and we were the first multi-municipal one each municipality appointed one voting representative and then those board members appointed one at-large citizen member we adopted some bylaws which identified our policies and procedures for operations of meetings and um my role in abilities to function and the articles of incorporation were filed with the state and the land bank is staffed by the redevelopment authority of the city of pittston which it was part of the policy that was adopted by ordinances the next step we took was the adoption of policies and procedures that guide us on how we do our day-to-day operations the first of which was our acquisition and disposition policy where we identified priorities of what types of properties we would acquire and then how would we go about returning them to the tax rolls it also established how we could transact business to the extent that i could do it without board approval and times when the board would need to step in we then we also developed a pre-qualification application where developers and or individuals that were interested in acquiring these properties from us could pre-qualify so they would submit an application they provide us all their information we would check on to make sure that they don't have any code deficient properties in our jurisdiction we check on to see if they have any tax delinquencies we check to see if they have any sewer or water liens if they meet all that then they become eligible and then when we have properties they're notified of that they can go ahead and acquire any of these properties that we have they're qualified and when we were forming these policies um we affectionately borrowed from you know several other municipal or entities that were doing this westmoreland county had some very good ones that we used and then across the nation we found a couple others so our first property that we acquired was a donation from the remnants of the lehman brothers mortgage company it was located it's right there on your screen it was there in west pittsburgh it would had sit sat vacant for five years i believe before we acquired it and this was the condition we this is the day we acquired it the next time next acquisitions were the repository we acquire properties from the repository in 2016 we acquire 10 properties and three different municipalities behind the shrubbery there is a house that's here in the city of pittston the next one was uh judicial cell acquisitions and as i said earlier we could not use our trumpet um because of the uh miscommunications i guess is the most polite way i can say it despite several meetings with both the county and the third party entity about the our powers and their requirements to publish our powers they continue to fail to do so to allow us to use our trump or priority bid so we went to the tax sale in october 2016 we completely bid for multiple properties um and we acquired several on that day a lot we paid a lot more money than we should have the first time we got to use our trump trump bid was uh just two years ago and we acquired 11
roperties across four municipalities the property on the screen there is a a house in a vocal borough that has been vacant and ransacked for several years so then we went out and our next mission was to demolish some of these properties i've been standing so this property on your screen here is at 525 new street in duryea we were able to take it down because we were successful as christie said uh to a lesser extent with some lsa the gaming funds money we got a small grant to do some acquisition and to start up our land bank and uh this was the first one the neighbors across the street when we tore this down were crying and gave some great remarks to the newspapers they had to live with that for 20 years this is what it looks like to post demolition the next one here is 117 121 pine street in the city of pittston this property looked like this since 19 the late 1970s um the city had numerous citations and hearings and fines we had hundreds of thousands of dollars of fines against the the owner who just ignored them did not address the property it sat like that since the 19 late 1970s and we were able to take that down also with some lsa funds there's a property in 425 liberty street west pittston and it's just another example of a demolition here's a property this is um kind of a signature project for the land bank we partnered with the revamp authority in the city of bits and here and here's two properties that we had that were located on main street um that we acquired and uh here's some in progress photos of the demolition and post demolition and this is what it looks like today we took nine parcels there and converted into a multi-million dollar project where a new dollar general and a loser and bank are located now all those properties were blighted we partnered with the as i said regional authority and a private developer to acquire all nine parcels and we took properties that were valued together assessed at about two hundred thousand dollars to it's assessed at almost 1.2 million dollars today so returning the properties to the tax rolls uh the first property that we returned to the tax rolls was in the west pittson property it was sold to the neighbor as a side yard and it has been it's now it's in its third year of being back in the tax rolls today we've returned 10 properties and we have four more properties that will be sold over the next two or three months we've returned almost one 1.35 million dollars in tax assessments and the four properties are pending we'll add another 250 000 back to the tax rolls and in 2020 our tax sharing uh generated three 3 33 dollars for the land bank to further its operations and that is the end of my presentation so at this time i'm going to open it up for questions thanks joe and thank you christy for sharing your stories with us as i was hearing from both of you i was thinking to myself wow the uh the approach that you both took there are similarities but there's also differences and thinking about having um christie having that million dollar budget from the start and able to invest in certain processes that other land banks don't necessarily have but also even given that your need to go personally and do the outreach to local governments and school districts joe i know we've talked previously about um that process and how um it takes time and christy underscoring what you said things that you think may take a couple months to accomplish when you look at all the parties that are involved and have a say in land bank operations you see that it's going to take longer than you originally expected so building that extra time into whatever part of your program you're working on is critical um we've had a couple questions from the audience and i'm going to toss these questions out to both of you and ask you to respond the first one is does a member mean a school district or taxing body that is willing to work with you christy do you want to start with that yeah i think that came across when i was when i was talking about our members um that's that's the word that i just used for kind of lumping them both in together so yeah that's any municipality any school district that has signed an ica or is was possibly interested in signing an ica with us absolutely great thank you and then i think you answered this in your discussion uh christy but i'll throw it out to joe are the land bank agreements the same with all school districts yeah and i think christie hit that nail on the head is if you if you try to start doing these uh nuanced agreements with each musical or municipality or school district or even the county you're never going to be able to keep track of that especially with you know especially from my entity where it's myself and the administrative assistant so you can't you can't do that you'll never be able to comply with all the agreements that way and here are a couple other questions when you talk about um impact um would you share a little bit each of you on the impact that your land bank is making on the community uh on a broader scale i know you shared your stories about individual properties but you just weigh in a little bit more on your impact well i'll i'll take this one first if chrissy's okay with that so i threw in my presentation i threw out some statistics so some you know we're doing other things than the landmark but some of the measurable statistics that i have is that as i said in 2012 we had 63 of our housing stock was built pre-1939 and because some of our efforts that number is now down to 54 um 80 was built pre 1959 now we're down to 74 so we're making headway uh and getting rid of some of that older housing stock and getting new stuff developed so that's some of it some of it is is anecdotal right so i mentioned in my durian story the the homeowners across the street when we knocked that house down they literally were crying on the street and doing interviews with the local media crying they were so ecstatic the same thing with the people in pine street who were living next to that property for almost 50 years in the condition it was and they were just so enthusiastic to see it finally something finally happening christie yeah i would say we don't have we don't have specific numbers or stats that we can share necessarily yet but we do have the stories um and i was just on the phone yesterday from with a person who is going to be purchasing one of our properties as a side lot and initially like uh [Music] two years ago or a year and a half ago really um we had purchased we had we had used our priority bid at the judicial sale and we had acquired this property and i got a phone call saying hey i was going to purchase that property and this has been such a headache for me for such a long time i mean for for the last you know eight or ten years he's had blue tarp pieces every storm fall flying off the house next door and going into his yard i mean he's just cleaning up stuff from this all the time and so i told him i said here's the deal i know you were going to purchase it you were going to spend your money you'd have to bid against other people i said because it looks it's it's one of those houses that looks cute from the outside but it required everything from foundation all the way back once you got into it it required everything to be redone from the foundation all the way through the roof so it was definitely a demo he wanted to buy it in order to demo it i said this is going to benefit you because you're a neighboring property we're going to take it we bought it we don't want to keep it we're not in the ga again we're the worst real estate investors at ever we don't want to keep a property we are going to get rid of it one way or the other you're in a perfect position to get it once it's demoed let us spend the money to get it let us demo it and then you can purchase it and so um the building has now been taken down the they're going to reseed it in the spring once the snow melts a little bit and um he's purchasing the property for i believe it was 680 from us because it's ten dollars per linear foot of frontage so it's a killer deal for him he is beyond ecstatic he's incredibly patient with us while we're getting it all done and i as i told him yesterday i said hey you're done with the blue tarp you're done with blue tarp in your yard he's like i am so happy you can't even tell me how happy i you can't even tell how happy i am so i to me it's what are what's the community impact it's those one by one stories that we get that it just affects everybody thanks christy so what i'm hearing from both of you is you're serving the communities that are part of the land bank to improve their quality of life to prepare for reinvestment and to try to help these communities build prosperity and growth locally by dealing with these problem properties that have sat um untouched and uncared for for sometimes decades at a time in the in the interim a couple other questions have come in and i'll start by answering this very basic question and then turn it over to you both where does the money come from to purchase the properties what happens after the property is acquired and where does the renovation money come from and how are professionals and contractors engaged i'll start by where does the money come from the land bank law authorizes land banks to finance their operations through a number of mechanisms public and private loans and grants proceeds from sales bonds which no land banks have uh issued yet there are uh provisions in the law that allow for the land bank to share tax revenue it's called the 550 tax recapture so for five years after a land bank owns and then transfers a property the tax collecting authorities again their partners so they have to agree to this agree to share up to 50 of the tax revenues from those properties for up to five years those and then member contributions and general fund allocations some land banks are lucky where they get um general funds from the local governments that just can or they participate by being a member and contributing a certain set amount so those are the mechanisms that are authorized for finding funding and then after the property is acquired the goal is to clear the title if possible and then transfer the property to a new owner who will then take care of the property uh and that sometimes involves a redevelopment agreement where there are promises made as to how long it will take for them to to take the steps to bring it up to code and then i'll ask both of you to answer uh weigh in too on where the renovation money comes from and how are professionals and contractors engaged like how do you engage your demolition contractors or rehab contractors so joe do you want to start with that yes so we have not done any renovations yet we have written a few grants uh and we're fingers crossed we're hopeful to hear in the next couple weeks that we're successful on doing some renovations uh we have just strictly done acquisition uh selling back to the to neighboring property owners and demos um so the demo money came from the first demo money is i had briefly mentioned that we got a uh a small local share account uh grant for a couple hundred thousand dollars two hundred thousand dollars and we were able to take down five or six properties with that with that funding so we you know the process for selecting for the demolition for that was you know just like a municipality or any other governmental entity would do is you develop plans and specs and you publicly bid it and you publicly award it uh hiring our solicitor engineer is the same process that a municipality would take as you would we we did at a informal rfp process and uh the benefit for the solicitor is that he got to do the work pro bono um so we got we had a lot of responses on that one so we've had a lot of pro bono work that's the other thing uh to address the where does the money come to start startup is is a lot of the money to start our land bank came from the city of pittston paid for my time and staff to create this land bank and then people like our solicitor did the work for free and has only been paid you know he only makes money really when we sell property makes a little bit on the transaction so um you know you have to find people that are interested in doing that christy yeah i mean we we're in a little bit of a different situation where we did have we do have money to start um there's also demolition funds where 14 and 25 cents off of every real estate transfer in erie county is put into a fund for demolition so um we use that along with the erie land bank we're actually administering it but you know we're using it between us but um once a property is acquired and i this is this this answer will lead into that that next the answer for the next question is once a property is acquired some of them we know are demolitions because they've already been condemned by the municipality but there's some properties especially when we're getting them at the judicial tax sale we don't know which way it's going to go is it going to be a renovation or is it going to be a demolition we actually hire a contractor to go out and evaluate the property from top to bottom and put in we've got estimated dollar figures for what everything's going to need and it's a really thorough report that we borrowed from borrowed and and modified from another land bank um that helps us decide whether or not it's going to go the renovation route or the demolition route then what we do is we haven't done any renovations ourselves yet either i mean you're right now you're looking at the ceo cfo ceo and janitor of the erie county land bank so putting on a tool belt is not going to be my next thing and and managing something like that is not something that we've got time for right now with everything else that we have going on so the renovations that we do have are really just putting out for development you know we're putting them out for sale with development agreements that these things that were addressed in the um in the contractors report those all are in the application and those will all be put in the developers agreement once it gets transferred and there'll be a timeline for that so we're not coming up with any money for that right now those are whoever purchases the property needs to know this is what you need to uh this is what you need to do to the property and this is approximately how much it's going to cost in order to do that great and then another question which i think uh you addressed partially during your presentations what were some of the most effective stories statistics or arguments you used to illustrate the impact of blight to school districts was there any particular story that worked best if you want me to if you want me to start i would say that one that i told about the albion property where it wasn't the neighbor it was the neighbor of this property it wasn't this property that was making a huge impact on the this property was making a huge impact on the neighborhood if you look at just the numbers the biggest argument that i use with the school district is it's never just that property it's never you you can say oh well how much are we really losing from this one particular property it's never just that property it's a funnel effect and the neighboring properties can lose i've seen numbers where it says neighboring properties can easily lose 20 percent of their value the other big thing is we are due for another tax assessment seems to come through about every 10 years we're due for another tax assessment so if you've got a blighted property in an area and your your tax revenue is you know yay high but now there's this blighted property in this area that can easily come down and that's going to affect your taxes as well or your tax revenue is the school district and then just the like like joe was talking about like blight affects so many different areas of of the lives of the community members it definitely plays a role in the education thanks um there's a couple more questions oh go ahead joe i'm sorry i was going to say chris christie kind of hit the nail on the head about there about the you know the impacts of the neighboring properties but the other thing is that we kind of t
ok the um our mayor the city's mayor is a former school psychologist so he talked he gave me some information statistics about how and you know the housing alliance is addressing this is with you know housing insecurity if you're living in one of these blighted properties the odds of you being successful in school are extremely low and then in these neighborhoods where there's a lot of blight um if you if you pull out extrapolate their testing scores their scores are are not the same as those people in more higher income neighborhoods so we had we presented the school boards those types of statistics as well so jay that leads to our next question which i'll ask you to start with about addressing systemic inequities in the enactment of housing policies and the alignment of goals as it relates to for example industrial decline redlining disinformation distrust environment do you have any thoughts to share on how you address those or what you're um doing now to try to address those inequities i wish i had the time to be able to to really get into those in our job so you know we're not really i mean honestly we're not really don't even have the time to consider those types of things we're literally just trying to identify the worst properties and get them down we're not thinking about the other than you know some of the surface issues we're not really getting into that we're not delving into that i don't know if kristi is we're not we're not far enough along in the process where the good news is we haven't had to turn any properties down yet it's all been what's been available and then what's going to be the best end use and i know that the city of erie has they're much more they're obviously in a city they're urban um the areas that i'm dealing with are much more rural and it comes down to we we just haven't had an opportunity we haven't had an opportunity to make that kind of impact or address those types of things yet it's on the it's on you know it's on our radar as far as making sure that um it's on our radar as far as being aware of but it's not something that you know as of right now we might not be able to get a property in an area yet right so something to come um one final question before we wrap up and it's how can someone buy a property from land bank do not profit developers or neighboring property owners get a priority do you want to start with that one christy do you offer any kind of priorities to purchasers um so yeah if the if the then the neighbors get a priority if it's if the lot is going to be a side lot so if we know that it's not going to be redeveloped and we know it's going to be a side lot then the neighbors get a priority um they also get a little bit of a set price break um in order to in order to address the um how do some how does somebody buy it there's applications on our website uh with every property that's available we've got an application and it spells out what they need who can apply you know what what needs to happen and what the end use of the property is going to be that's great do you have any priorities on your end yeah so if if same thing all of our properties are listed on our website thenepalanbank.com and anybody at any time can go on there and review those and our policies and our applications are all on there so we're always it's a rolling application we take them whenever and yeah we we established within our policy nine priorities of what so we focus on the end use not who's buying it although we do talk about the people who can or can't buy it but we have nine priorities so depending on what you want to do with the property uh if there's a competitive bid we would we take it based on the higher priority you know our priority is owner-occupied residential housing great well thank you joe and thank you christy for the time today i appreciate and the audience appreciates and the housing alliance appreciates your efforts to share your stories with attendees today thank you so much and that's it thank you thank you
