Philadelphia Land Bank releases plan to tackle vacancy

The Philadelphia Land Bank, a nascent agency organized to streamline the redevelopment of thousands of Philadelphias vacant and tax-delinquent properties, releaseda draft of a strategic planon Wednesday recommending a number of goals the new body should pursue over the next five years.

The plan, which was written by a team led by Philadelphia-based Interface Studios, is the result of four months of analysis of data provided by various city agencies and meetings with dozens of advocacy groups and city officials who wrestled the Land Bank into existence.

The Land Bank board will solicit community feedback at a public hearing in mid-October and complete a final draft of the plan by the end of the month. The plan will then be sent to City Council for its approval.

Those whove followed the development of the Land Bank closely over the past few years wont find any major surprises in the draft plan. Its overarching goal is simple: to return vacant and tax delinquent property to productive reuse. Deceptively simple, perhaps, given that the Land Bank itself wouldnt have been created if those few words didnt represent an intricate, elusive goal for Philadelphia and other cities around the country.

The Land Bank is intended to address the vacancy problem by consolidating ownership of city-owned properties, acquiring privately owned tax-delinquent properties, clearing tax liens and tangled titles, and selling or otherwise transferring properties in its inventory for development or other community uses. According to the plan, it will seek to promote new affordable and market-rate housing development, the creation of new businesses and the expansion of existing ones, the vitality of urban agriculture, and the availability of open space and green infrastructure.

As part of the strategic planning process, Interface Studioalong with partners Real Estate Strategies, Inc. and Lamar Wilson Associatesprovided an updated inventory of vacant and tax-delinquent parcels in Philadelphia.

Roughly 8,000 vacant parcels are currently under some form of public ownership in Philadelphia and not committed to a specific project.

Another 24,000 properties are vacant and tax-delinquent but privately owned, according to the plan.

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Philadelphia Land Bank releases plan to tackle vacancy