Abandoned Land: Not-So-Casual Vacancies in the Urban Enviroment

BY RAJA KRISHNA

When I hear the words “vacant lot,” my thoughts immediately jump to one of my favorite Hey Arnold! episodes, which features America’s most famous football-head and his group of friends as they explore their neighborhood in search of a place to play sports. The gang comes across a vacant lot covered in trash and decides to claim it as its own. After they painstakingly clear the garbage from their newfound swath of urban land, they find their field overtaken by grownups. The adults struggle to come up with ways to utilize the field, much to the frustration of Arnold and his friends. Eventually, the kids decide to dump trash back onto the field in order to teach the adults a lesson and return the field to its pre-discovery condition. After observing how much effort the children put into cleaning and maintaining the vacant lot, the whole neighborhood comes together to transform it from a dump into a baseball field.

In real life, Arnold and his friends would have needed a permit from the city in order to lay claim to their vacant lot, but the sentiment of environmental stewardship and unused abandoned land that the episode emotes remains important. While “The Vacant Lot” makes for a memorable episode of Hey Arnold!, it also calls attention to a hidden—and increasingly costly—problem in American cities: the vacant lot.

Hiding in Plain Sight

Of all the forgotten aspects of modern urban decay, the vacant lot remains one of the most ignored by the average citizen. When we drive through impoverished neighborhoods, we desire to see those areas improve into prosperous and functional communities. When we pass crumbling buildings or see vines climbing up former department stores, we lament the lost economic and business potential that those edifices represent. Perhaps this is because the sight of a dilapidated office space or tenement building—human–constructed edifices with direct human impact—evokes in us a sense of loss, a sense that perhaps if we had tried a bit harder as a society, we wouldn’t have such a human problem to look at.

In contrast, when we pass vacant lots, the most we can muster is a comment on their disarray or the length of their grass. It is not immediately obvious to an onlooker, but vacant lots present our cities with serious environmental and economic challenges. They are blight on the city, a symbol of the shifting urban landscape, and a drain on city coffers. The people living around these lots not only suffer decreased property value, but also decreased quality of life.

Many vacant properties and buildings are privately owned, but cities take control of the ones that aren’t. Most cities maintain “land banks” for their vacant lots, allocating millions of dollars each year to vacant lot upkeep. Take Cleveland for example, a city with approximately 20,000 vacant lots peppering its landscape. The New York Times reported in 2011 that Cleveland spends approximately $3.3 million each year just to mow the grass in its vacant lots. Not only is Cleveland spending taxpayer money on vacant lot upkeep, but it is also losing out on the potential to earn money from its vacant lots. After all, empty land means empty tax rolls. It should go unsaid that such a large sum of money could be better spent on improving Cleveland’s school system (or even on hiring better basketball players), if only the city could find a way to make viable use of its vacant lots.

It might be helpful to think of a vacant lot as a sort of urban stem cell. Just as a stem cell is an undifferentiated building block of life that has yet to specialize into performing a specific function in our bodies, vacant lots are undifferentiated plots of land which could be used in any number of different ways. Through land banks, cities keep official records of all vacant lots in the area and grant permits to third parties who would like to either purchase a lot or use them for a specific purpose. Thus, not every vacant lot in a city has to be used in the same way. Many cities have converted their vacant lots into gardens or community centers. Others have assembled task forces of environmental scientists to study the effects of vacant lots on the urban watershed (vacant lots can serve as water collection areas during rainstorms and filter and purify the city’s polluted runoff). But the innovation does not just have to come from the city government. The beauty of land banks is that they are conducive to city engagement with third party groups. In many cases, vacant lots are the perfect locations to open up a new small business or a community center.

On a larger scale, cleaning up a vacant lot could have a city-wide impact. For example, a New York City group called Picture the Homeless found that vacant land and buildings could make a serious dent on New York’s homeless problem. In 2010, 5.8% of New York City was made up of abandoned land. Picture the Homeless found that these buildings and lots could house over 119,000 homeless individuals. This is just one of the countless proposals for urban improvement from across the country.

It is easy to see why cities like Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis have every incentive to reinvigorate their vacant lots. Not only would their cities look better, but they would function better as well.

Spotlight on St. Louis

One of the nation’s largest vacant lot problems exists right here in St. Louis. The city that most of us will call home for at least 4 years has over 10,000 vacant lots and serious financial woes. Not surprisingly, the vacancies are concentrated in the northern half of the city. Of course, this demonstrates the well-documented socio-economic disparities within the city of St. Louis, but it also presents a remarkable opportunity for development. Paul McKee, a wealthy St. Louis land developer, recently purchased over 2,000 lots in North St. Louis, and plans to spend $8.1 billion to develop the land. He calls the project the NorthSide plan. According to St. Louis Today, the project would “put 10,000 new homes and millions of square feet of office space across two square miles north of downtown,” which could potentially reinvigorate our once-great Midwestern city.

But Mr. McKee is not the only one brainstorming ways to make use of our vacant lots—Washington University students are too. This year’s Olin Sustainability Case Competition—which challenges students to propose ideas for sustainable development—focuses on the issue of vacant lots in St. Louis. I sat down with Michael Offerman, a fifth-year senior and architecture student, to discuss the competition and the steps Washington University students can take to improve our city. Offerman, one of the authors of this year’s case, expects that many student proposals will incorporate tax incentives, a solution that has enjoyed widespread success in the St. Louis area. In fact, Tax Incentive Financing (TIF) development was one of the driving forces behind the recent Washington Avenue redevelopment. There is reason to believe that TIF-based development could work for vacant lots as well.

But, says Offerman, vacant lots present an interesting environmental dilemma for St. Louis. Our city has one of the oldest—and therefore most outdated—sewage systems in the country. Because of the way it was structured, water from St. Louis’s two watersheds occasionally seeps into the sewage pipes, causing them to overflow and deposit human feces into the Mississippi. One of the reasons this problem is not worse is that our vacant lots serve as a semi-natural buffer, absorbing and collecting water that could otherwise add extra stress to our waste management infrastructure. This fact puts St. Louis’s Land Reutilization Authority, whose job it is to get as much land back on the tax rolls as possible, at odds with the Metropolitan Sewage Department.

Perhaps issues of reconciling St. Louis’s aging infrastructure with its need for redevelopment are too complicated for the confines of this particular article, but there are steps that Washington University students can take right now to help their city. When I asked Offerman to name the single most important thing students could do help St. Louis make a comeback, he replied, “Stay in St. Louis after you graduate. Smart people come to St. Louis to get an education, but if the city can’t hold on to that population, then there’s no one to attract businesses here.” It’s a great way for students to give back to the city to which we all owe our education.

An American Problem

Allow me to wax poetic for a bit and observe that the vacant lot is a truly American problem. After all, what is a vacant lot but a swath of abandoned urban land that is brimming with unrealized potential? Where one person sees a wasteland, another may see a business opportunity, a space for community engagement, a new home for the homeless, or even an ecosystem. In the face of urban decay and the collapse of outdated urban environments, our vacant lots challenge us to combine our entrepreneurial spirit, our creativity, and our work ethic in order to rethink the way we approach the urban environment. For all the innovation America has done for the world, perhaps it’s time to take a leaf from Hey Arnold!’s book and do some innovation in our cities here at home as well.