Registry touted in blight fight
Schenectady hopes revised vacant building listings will help it deal with issues
Albany uses a white “X” on a red background to mark unsafe structures.
Recent legislation proposed in the city of Schenectady would have required property owners to “conspicuously ” post signage on blighted and abandoned structures containing their names, addresses and telephone numbers.
Yet the proposal was scrapped by the City Council as a component of recently adopted legislation reforming the city ’s vacant building registry.
“It’s almost like a poster board saying a house is open to be squatted in or vandalized,” said city Councilwoman Marion Porterfield. “It was just like more of an advertisement as opposed to getting in touch with people.”
City-owned buildings would have been exempt, including a nearly uninterrupted block of city-owned houses on Summit Avenue in Hamilton Hill.
Of the city ’s 673 vacant buildings, 285 are city-owned.
The city has maintained a vacant building registry for the past decade. But officials acknowledge the existing
system is riddled with loopholes and is difficult to enforce and monitor, especially when it comes to LLC- and bank-owned properties.
“Our internal tracking is not necessarily at the level it should have been,” said Mayor Gary Mccarthy. “It helps us better identify what the problem is.”
Legislation adopted by the City Council last month clarifies who has to register by defining “vacant” more clearly. It also better identifies owners and exemptions, giving owners less wiggle room in the court system.
“Our legal office has a greater capacity to enforce things once cited and brought to court,” said Avi Epstein, the city ’s neighborhood stabilization coordinator. “With the way it was worded before, there was so much room for interpretation.”
A large emphasis, Epstein said, is to focus on the areas with the greatest concentration of vacant buildings and look for solutions, which may range from demolishing city-owned property, citing private owners and lien holders and leveraging federal funding to bridge funding gaps for rehab projects.
The updated registry will also better track complaints and allow the city ’s code enforcement bureau to more quickly contact building owners
and dispatch code officers to problem sites, including those owned by the city itself, which has been frequently criticized for poor upkeep of its own properties.
“That info is now being collected in the system and it’s been taken care of in an orderly fashion,” Epstein said.
And in a city that touts its initiative to promote first-time homeownership by flipping cityowned property, narrowing the gap between foreclosure and sale is key to keeping the homes in good shape.
The city sold 71 properties in 2020 and demolished 34, down slightly from 76 the previous year.
“It’s just going to help to continue to revitalize the neighborhoods and continue our laser focus
with getting a hold on these problem properties,” said city Councilwoman Karen ZalewskiWildzunas.
Neighborhood associations who have long griped over eyesores welcomed any tools that would better track oversight and complaints.
Tom Carey, president of Schenectady United Neighborhoods, pointed at several deteriorating homes in the city ’s Upper Union Street neighborhood.
“They tend to hang around for years and years,” Carey said.
Despite reporting to the city, it can be difficult to track their status, he said.
Neighborhood leaders aim to focus on a different house each month.
“We’re hopeful the
changes will make it very useful because vacant properties are a problem in the city and one vacant building can disrupt the whole block,” Carey said.
Mccarthy said the reforms tie into the city ’s broader initiative to integrate technology into government operations.
Eventually, the registry will be made available to the public as part of a broader data set with an array of applications for residents, from tracking code violations on neighboring properties to checking to see if dog licenses are up-to-date.
“Hopefully this will allow a level of scrutiny and embarrassment for people who are not doing what they should be doing and hopefully hold them into account,” McCarthy said.