Empty, blighted, and abandoned properties are a problem for communities across west central Illinois, whether that’s dilapidated homes, vacant commercial properties, or former industrial sites.
A proposed regional land bank would be a collective approach to getting such properties in five counties back to productive use.
There are already nine land banks in Illinois that serve as intergovernmental agencies, located in places such as Cook County, the Quad Cities, and central Illinois.
In west central Illinois, the new land bank effort is being led by Prairie Hills Resource Conservation and Development — with the goal of forging partnerships that stabilize housing markets, combat community deterioration, and spur economic growth.
Executive Director Vickie Livingston said this grew out of work Prairie Hills was doing to help revitalize commercial and industrial sites in the region. As the organization worked through a couple Brownfield grant cycles, Livingston said they kept running into the same problems.
“It was things like absentee landowners, uninterested landowners. Landowners who for one reason or another were just argumentative about this being a problem,” she said.
Livingston said trying to revitalize these properties while managing public health and safety concerns becomes a real pain for smaller municipalities, whose staff are already wearing a lot of hats.
Many properties are simply never revitalized. Tax sale after tax sale, they get passed on to new owners — sometimes sight unseen to out-of-state developers who do nothing to improve them.
The properties continue to decline, and eventually they fall down or need to be demolished, leaving those small municipalities with the cleanup bill.
Livingston said a land bank can fill gaps so properties don’t get to that point.
“Everybody chips in a little bit, and everybody gets access to some staff people, and this is their only job: Building inspections, code enforcement, project management,” she said.
How it works
Last year, Prairie Hills worked with a consultant on a feasibility study to see if a land bank would be beneficial to west central Illinois.
The study found a land bank could help address problem properties in the region, especially if different municipalities were able to coordinate efforts.
Now, municipalities in Fulton, Hancock, Knox, McDonough, and Warren counties have been invited to join the Prairie Hills Land Bank. That includes city and county governments.
The fee to join is population-based – $3 per capita – and helps pay for overhead costs and staffing. Municipalities can then put blighted properties in the land bank.
Livingston calls the land bank a “repair station,” where the properties sit temporarily while the land bank staff gets to work.
Once the property is in the land bank, the first step is for Prairie Hills to have it assessed.
“Is it something we can repair? Is it too far gone? Do we need to demo the space,” Livingston said.
If demolition is necessary, then the land bank would prep the space.
“Or get a contractor to come in and fix it and then sell it back out. We don't want to hold onto things for a long time,” Livingston said. “The idea is redevelopment and sale. Then some of the proceeds from those sales can be used to fix other places in the community. So it kind of feeds into itself.”
On a larger scale
In addition to having dedicated staff working to address problem properties, Livingston said there are other benefits to joining the land bank.
For instance, the Illinois Housing Development Authority tends to favor land banks when awarding grant money.
“They have technical advisors that are paid through their office just to work with land banks. So we have an environmental attorney and a regional planner, the software support. All these opportunities are more open to us because we want this to work as a land bank,” Livingston said.
Some communities in west central Illinois are in dire need of multi-family housing.
Others may have abandoned properties that pose health and safety risks.
And others need newer and more ample housing stock to satisfy job market demands.
“It’s harder to bring in upper-level management for a hospital if those people don’t have homes they want to live in,” she said.
Livingston said land banks can do a number of other things, too, such as helping someone who inherited a home get it up to code. Or developing grant programs for home repair and incentives for first-time homebuyers.
Plus, the pooling of resources across municipalities can make deals with developers more attractive by addressing the issues on a larger scale – and going beyond individual city or county limits.
“So if you approach a developer and you want to infill five lots, particularly if those neighborhoods are not shiny, they may not want to be there. They’re more likely to tell you no,” Livingston said.
But she said if a land bank approaches a developer and says they have 25 lots – five in this community, five in this one and that one, five to the south, and five in more “shiny” areas, it might be a different story.
The same goes for getting contractors to do work here.
Intergovernmental agreements
Livingston said the Prairie Hills Land Bank Authority should be official by July.
Earlier this year, Livingston started meeting with interested municipalities and sharing copies of intergovernmental agreements that would need to be approved.
“The wheels have been moving pretty steadily,” she said.
In April, the city of Carthage became the first to approve a resolution joining the Prairie Hills Land Bank. The Macomb and Monmouth city councils have discussed it, too.
"A city council has to say yes, we want to participate. They have to pass that resolution. That does not give me just the green light to go muck about in that community doing whatever I want. Their representative still has to say, yeah, we want you to work on this lot, or we want you to work on this building, or we'd like this kind of house. So there's still a lot of control at the city level,” Livingston said.
Livingston said the land bank will be a “rolling train.” Some cities will sign on right away for a three-year contract.
“At the end of three years, if they decide they're not seeing enough results and they would like to exit the land bank, they can. If they want to renew for a year at a time after that, they can do that too. I asked for three years so that we have enough time to get some of those initial projects off the ground, completed and sold,” she said.
Others can join at any time.
Livingston said every municipality that joins will get a seat on the land bank authority’s board, and there will also be an advisory board consisting of economic development professionals and other leaders across the region.
Tri States Public Radio produced this story. TSPR relies on financial support from readers and listeners in order to provide coverage of the issues that matter to west central Illinois, southeast Iowa, and northeast Missouri. As someone who values the content created by TSPR's news department please consider making a financial contribution.
