Rick Swartz Comments on City Land Bank

No one likes to advocate for the creation of a new, quasi-governmental agency merely for the sake of expanding the role of government in our economy, or in our personal lives. Goodness knows how most community organizations struggle these days with the sometimes arbitrary, sometimes capricious actions of all of the public agencies and city departments that we've come to know and love. But the system by which the City attempts to take vacant, tax-delinquent properties and make them available for new development is pretty much a hit-or-miss proposition.Neighborhood organizations that are better organized, better staffed, and better funded tend to be able to make the existing system work, warts and all. It can take years, and it can mean huge carrying costs for properties while you put the big plan in place for them.The proposition of a land bank is about:1) leveling the playing field for all neighborhoods,2) opening up a process that seems opaque to many outsiders, and3) helping to attract private investment.And in the end, that private investment always wants to know: do you really have site control, or are you only kidding me?Is a land bank the proverbial silver bullet? Hardly, but I can tell you from first-hand experience that as your community starts to attract the interest of outside investors and developers, you're going to want to know that folks are not just going to pop up at a Treasurer's Sale, bid out a property, and then put your neighborhood organization over the barrel, because that parcel happens to sit in the middle of a site in which you've spent the better part of three or more years in assembling.We all know that, for many private investors, the bottom line usually outweighs the good that is going to come to the community from their actions. That's the nature of capitalism, and we at the BGC are OK with it. We think a land bank will help to better fuse the investor's bottom line to the community good that comes from recycling non-tax-producing properties in creative, exciting ways. If it helps to create some economic or social equity in your community in the end, that's OK, too. We're not going to attach too many wagons to one team of horses. Richard SwartzExecutive DirectorBloomfield-Garfield Corporation