End the vacancy crisis
In some of Albany’s poorer neighborhoods, vacant buildings remain a defining characteristic. And few problems are as pressing and damaging, given how vacant buildings breed crime and pessimism, discourage investment, and threaten health and safety.
But let’s acknowledge the progress Albany has made.
Until 2017, city officials didn’t even know how many vacant buildings they were dealing with. But that year, Albany initiated a count of the structures, which provided eye-popping evidence of a problem that should be considered a crisis. The city found 1,044 vacant buildings, most of them formerly residential.
By and large, this was not a problem of the city’s own making. Indeed, the prevalence of vacant buildings in neighborhoods such as West Hill, Arbor Hill and the South End results from a confluence of factors that includes the racist, classist redlining of Black and poor sections of the city, continuing concentrations of poverty, and property values that remain too low to encourage investment. tuletters@timesunion.com
The result is a vicious cycle from which it is nearly impossible to escape. Vacant buildings are a result of low property values, but they are also a cause of low property values. Ask yourself: Would you be inclined to buy a home on a block riddled with vacant properties? Would you be willing to invest in one of those properties, knowing that others nearby might never be rehabbed?
Still, as the Times Union’s Emilie Munson recently reported, the city has been attempting to address the issue by shifting more resources toward code enforcement and by attempting to hold absentee landlords accountable. As a result, the number of vacant buildings in the city dropped by about seven percent over the past six years, to 974.
That is progress, albeit painfully slow. One hurdle is that the city doesn’t even have addresses for the owners of most vacant buildings, making it essentially impossible to hit those owners with citations for code violations and other problems. And while the city has hired two attorneys to work on code enforcement and housing issues, those cases take months to work their way through backlogged courts.
It is time to really tackle the problem with the urgency demanded of a crisis. For one, the city of Albany should shift even more resources toward code enforcement and tracking down absentee landlords. It must expand on the work it is doing to speed the pace of its success.
But Albany and other upstate cities cannot tackle this problem on their own. They need more money from the state to rehabilitate vacant buildings, and laws that make it easier to track down absentee landlords, hold them accountable and, when all else fails, take possession of problem buildings headed for demolition by neglect.
Happily, this agenda dovetails with Gov. Kathy Hochul’s desire to increase New York’s housing supply by 800,000 units over the next decade. Why build new when so many existing homes are waiting for a new life? Why not embrace efforts that could add to the housing supply while also invigorating neighborhoods across New York that need a helping hand?
No neighborhood can thrive when it is pockmarked by vacancy. No city can succeed when neighborhoods are left behind. And New York state can’t flourish when so many of its cities are facing a damaging problem that they can’t solve on their own.