Data-Driven Systems: Model Practices & Policies for Strategic Code Enforcement

This brief examines the latest strategies, tools, and techniques for using real property data to help communities facilitate neighborhood revitalization through a strategic, data-driven approach to code enforcement policies, programs, and tactics

The People\u27s Court

The Cleveland Housing Court adjudicates only one house and one owner at a time, while the investors and speculators in blighted properties operate in secret at high volume from a distance. However, the court\u27s focus on housing code compliance and its (when needed) willingness to hand down strong measures is powerful. Even now, the City of Cleveland is implementing new strategic code compliance measures in partnership with neighborhood-based community development corporations, to the point where there is less profit in owning worthless houses in Cleveland, and the court is redirecting the disposal of low-value foreclosed houses to local land banks and experimenting with other lawful ways to dispose of wasted loan collateral

Data-Driven Systems: Model Practices & Policies for Strategic Code Enforcement

This brief examines the latest strategies, tools, and techniques for using real property data to help communities facilitate neighborhood revitalization through a strategic, data-driven approach to code enforcement policies, programs, and tactics

Abating Neighborhood Blight with Collaborative Policy Networks—Where Have we Been? Where are we Going?

Blight is a term with multiple meanings and a complex legal and policy history in the United States. Currently, blight and its community costs are frequently associated with vacant and often foreclosed homes, defective and abandoned buildings, litter, vacant lots, and graffiti. As a legal and policy term, blight has roots in the common law definitions of public nuisance. Researchers and scholars in other disciplines have cited blighted neighborhoods as both a cause and symptom of larger socioeconomic problems such as poverty, crime, poor public health, educational deficits, and other personal or systemic distress. This Article traces the seeds of a blight policy movement through the experiences of two of its pioneering members: Clinical Professor Emeritus Kermit Lind and Senior Researcher Joe Schilling. Lind and Schilling will offer insights on the movement’s legal and policy foundations while reflecting on the challenges that lie ahead for lawyers and policymakers. Part I defines the legal and policy parameters of neighborhood blight by examining its origins and linkages with public nuisance principles and eminent domain as well as blight’s social and cultural dimensions. Part II outlines the characteristics, members, and elements of a vacant property policy movement from 1990 to 2015. Lind and Schilling describe their collaborations in Cleveland and other cities in helping local practitioners and leaders revise and reform their vacant property policies with a special focus on local government code enforcement programs. They outline a new model— strategic code enforcement—that communities will need to adopt and deploy in light of dramatic shifts in real estate markets, the globalization and securitization of the mortgage industry, and dwindling public resources. They offer critical legal and policy lessons from the second wave of vacant properties and neighborhood decline caused by the Mortgage Foreclosure Crisis and Great Recession that still reverberates throughout communities today. Part III concludes with further reflections about the vacant property policy movement and how its local and national networks can help communities build greater legal and policy capacity as well as facilitate the sharing and development of innovative strategies through collaborative working groups and coordinating councils. Using recent developments in Memphis with the introduction of the nation’s first Neighborhood Blight Elimination Charter, Lind and Schilling stress the pivotal roles that community development intermediaries, law schools, and nonprofit lawyers must play in developing and sustaining these local problem-solving networks

Maintaining Residential Integration: Municipal Practices and Law

This Article focuses on the policies and programs that can be established to sustain racial diversity in housing. It reviews the circumstances that give rise to such policies and programs, describes the legal framework within which they must be fit, and examines some of them in light of the needs and interests of policy makers in communities that are open to minority groups. Since effective housing integration policies and programs can vary significantly from one place to another, each municipality must consider its options in view of its circumstances and the changing conditions in its housing market. In response to the question of whether fair housing laws and the Constitution permit the use of race-conscious policies and programs to maintain integrated housing patterns, the answer may very likely be one every law student learns in the first term-it all depends

Can Public Nuisance Law Protect Your Neighborhood from Big Banks?

This article considers how the law of public nuisance might be applied to protect neighborhoods from the destructive forces of the mortgage crisis. For more than thirty years I have been a close observer and a participant in community development at the neighborhood level in Cleveland, Ohio. I now supervise a law school clinical practice that provides legal counsel to an array of nonprofit community development corporations that, for more than thirty-five years, have been renewing housing and neighborhood sustainability in a city going through major social and economic change

Maintaining Residential Integration: Municipal Practices and Law

This Article focuses on the policies and programs that can be established to sustain racial diversity in housing. It reviews the circumstances that give rise to such policies and programs, describes the legal framework within which they must be fit, and examines some of them in light of the needs and interests of policy makers in communities that are open to minority groups. Since effective housing integration policies and programs can vary significantly from one place to another, each municipality must consider its options in view of its circumstances and the changing conditions in its housing market. In response to the question of whether fair housing laws and the Constitution permit the use of race-conscious policies and programs to maintain integrated housing patterns, the answer may very likely be one every law student learns in the first term-it all depends

Perspectives on Abandoned Houses in a Time of Dystopia

This article describes various perspectives on abandoned houses in urban neighborhoods and the reactions from those perspectives. It notes how conflicting reactions perpetuate the crisis of blight for individual residents and their communities. It argues that real solutions for management of abandonment must be based in local communities and tailored to local conditions. Priority must be placed on consistent maintenance in compliance with local housing and neighborhood health, safety and environmental codes. Housing preservation, rehabilitation, reutilization programs will not succeed without improved and sustained maintenance. Localities will need to take the lead in remodeling residential maintenance using new strategies, methods and technologies. Role models for that work are emerging

Responding to the Mortgage Crisis: Three Cleveland Examples

Just as SVD [Slavic Village Development] fought back against predatory lending, mortgage fraud, and speculator flipping, the City of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County also sought to prevent these practices and stem the rising tide of foreclosures. This included legislation, litigation, and homeowner counseling. This article will focus on three examples of the response to the mortgage crisis in Cleveland: the Cleveland Housing Court, the Cuyahoga County Land Reutilization Corporation (land bank), and community development corporations (CDCs) and local intermediaries (namely, the Cleveland Housing Network (CHN) and Neighborhood Progress, Inc. (NPI)). Each of these entities has developed initiatives aimed at the crisis, often in an innovative fashion. While many other cities have similar organizations, these Cleveland examples have been cited as models which provide lessons to other cities facing similar problems