The Center for Community Progress, with support from Enterprise Community Partners, has compiled a “Building American Cities Toolkit” featuring guidance and ultra-specific fact sheets on dealing with nuisance property owners, choosing the proper way to reuse vacant properties, managing problem properties, and managing equitable neighborhood revitalization.
Though each attempt at neighborhood change faces unique circumstances, the strength of the Toolkit is the breadth of the challenges it covers and the comprehensiveness of the content, including links to relevant research and journalism. The “Maximizing Capacity for Strategic Code Enforcement” tool, for example, not only offers a background for how ensuring enforcement of city building codes is integral to redevelopment and the variety of ways to make it happen, but links to specific reports and case studies and how it has worked in the past (including through Baltimore’s Vacants to Value Initiative).
All of this is available on the Center for Community Progress website. Keep it bookmarked in the likely event your community faces one of these challenges!
