At levels like these, “the market effectively ceases to function,” the report’s author Allan Mallach, a city planner and housing advocate, notes. “Houses sell, if they sell at all, only to investors at rock bottom prices while neighborhoods become areas of concentrated poverty, unemployment, and health problems.”
The number of vacant homes in the U.S. surged during the Great Recession. Many cities recovered and fewer homes are standing empty, but not everywhere. The number of homes that have been abandoned has risen 2.1 million nationally in recent years, and vacant properties continue to be a drag on former industrial epicenters or the nation’s “legacy” cities, according to a newly released report. These are properties that are sitting unused and are not for sale or rent.
Vacancies have grown more widespread since the 1990s in cities like Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis, all former industrial powerhouses, according to the report from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, “The Empty House Next Door.” The vacancies are driving nearby property values down, hampering the city’s financial health, and leading to higher crime rates, the report notes.
The number of effectively vacant homes has grown from 3.7 million in 2005 to 5.8 million in 2016, according to the report. Hypervacancies—areas in which one in five properties sit vacant—have also continued to plague a handful of cities. For example, in 2015, more than 49 percent of tracts in Flint, Mich., 46 percent of tracts in Detroit, and 42 percent of tracts in Gary, Ind., saw “extreme hypervacancy,” where more than a quarter of units were vacant in each tract, the report notes.
READ MORE: http://realtormag.realtor.org/daily-news/2018/05/16/report-abandoned-homes-still-drag-in-some-cities
