Blight is a frequent topic in the headlines and in hallways of city and county governments. Numerous local governments have launched citywide campaigns to eradicate blighted properties—from Detroit to Birmingham, Ala., and New Orleans. Detroit’s 2014 Blight Removal Task Force plan identified more than 80,000 derelict structures and vacant lots with about 50 percent in need of demolition. In nearby Flint, Mich., more than 30 percent of all properties in the city—roughly 20,000 homes, businesses and vacant lots—are seriously derelict and will cost the city an estimated $100 million to demolish and reclaim during the next decade or more. In a recent Economist story, Karen Freeman-Wilson, mayor of Gary, Ind., spoke about her city’s residents, “Their biggest concern is the abandoned buildings.” Gary, which borders Chicago on the southern tip of Lake Michigan, is reported to have 5,000 abandoned buildings.
Blight is no longer just a pressing problem for older industrial, legacy cities. The recent mortgage foreclosure crisis spread the blighting influence of vacant homes throughout fast-growing cities in California, Arizona, Nevada and Texas. Moreover, this isn’t simply an urban issue; suburban cities and even rural towns are no longer immune to the economic, social and environmental consequences of blighted properties. The cost of addressing the issue can be staggering for any local government as code-enforcement officials and public-safety officers—the first responders to blight—abate vacant properties every day, often with little chance of recouping all of their costs against neglectful property owners.
The term “blight” continues to evolve as communities confront different types of blighted properties—from littered and vacant lots to foreclosed and abandoned homes. But the impact of blight is manifold: It decreases community engagement; it negatively influences property values; it impacts basic city services; and it can create the right conditions for increased crime.
In response to the multiple meanings of blight, Stamford, Conn.-based Keep America Beautiful, a national nonprofit that envisions a country where every community is a clean, green and beautiful place to live, recently released “Charting the Multiple Meanings of Blight: A National Literature Review on Addressing the Community Impacts of Blighted Properties”. The report provides a contemporary snapshot of how researchers, experts and practitioners describe and understand the complex conditions that create blight and the many policy responses that communities are taking.
Prepared by researchers through the Vacant Properties Research Network, a project of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Va., in collaboration with Econsult Solutions Inc., a Philadelphia-based consulting firm, the national report examines more than 300 academic articles, as well as special policy and practitioner reports devoted to the concept of blight. The review provides one location for research and other information categorized by economics, social, health and crime indicators.
Motivation for the Study
Keep America Beautiful has been preventing and fighting litter and blight for more than 60 years. In fact, the nonprofit developed the Litter Index in 1999; it still is widely used by communities nationwide to measure accumulated litter. In 2008-09, Keep America Beautiful conducted pivotal studies in the realm of litter, replicating and expanding upon research it conducted on littering behavior and causes of litter in the 1960s and ’70s. The study, “Littering Behavior in America”, focused on the composition of litter across America and attendant costs to communities and businesses. The research also explored litter on a granular level—how often people litter, the individual and contextual variables that contribute to the behavior, and the effectiveness of different approaches to reducing littering rates.
The focus on metrics that measure the scale of litter has evolved more recently to capture additional elements of a community’s appearance. Keep America Beautiful’s Community Appearance Index, which includes its Litter Index and optional indices for illegal signs, graffiti, abandoned/junk vehicles, and outside storage, is a tool that its network of more than 600 community-based affiliates use to better measure a community’s quality of life.
PHOTOS: Keep Cincinnati Beautiful