‘Zombie’ homes give Chicago operators an opportunity
By Dan Weissman
In early July, Chicago police officers arrested four men for taking over 14 vacant foreclosed homes — living in some and renting out the rest — mostly in prosperous neighborhoods. Seven years after the housing market crashed, there are still enough vacant homes to provide opportunities for this kind of creativity.Eight of the houses were in Beverly Hills and Morgan Park— South Side Chicago neighborhoods that look like suburbs, complete with big brick houses, winding streets and a vigilant neighborhood group, the Beverly Area Planning Association.
One of the homes sits a block and a half from the group’s office, on a street the association’s executive director, Margot Holland, describes as “beautiful,” lined with trees and spacious houses.
The taken-over house fits right in. The white-brick split-level is obviously well cared for, with tidy landscaping and a sign in front indicating that a security system is in place. “Yeah, it definitely doesn’t look suspicious,” Holland says.
So, how does a tidy home on a beautiful block end up ripe for the picking?
For help in understanding the context and in sorting through the public records, I turned to Rob Rose, director of the Cook County Land Bank Authority. Created in 2013 to help clear a backlog of vacant foreclosed properties, the land bank focuses on a collection of 23,000 tax-delinquent parcels.
Asked how long it might take him to dispose of all 23,000, Rose has a ready answer: “The rest of my life.”
His answer is based on a simple calculation. Rose thinks that clearing 500 properties a year — by finding new buyers or recommending targeted demolition — would be a pretty good pace for his small office. At age 44, that would keep him in the job until he’s 90.
However, as a public records search on the taken-over homes shows, there are far more than 23,000 vacant properties.
None of the eight properties in Beverly and Morgan Park are on Rose’s lists, because the property taxes are still being paid, presumably by the lender, as a hedge against forfeiting the parcel in a tax auction.
“This is the most difficult type of property to get to, because there’s no immediate red flags,” Rose says.
For the split-level, records show foreclosure started three years ago, but the lender hasn’t taken title. That’s about average in Illinois, which has more protections for homeowners than many states.
According to Daren Blomquist, vice president of the real-estate analytics company RealtyTrac, that delay means a foreclosed home in Illinois is more likely to be abandoned. “The longer it’s in that process, the better the chance that the homeowner is just leaving the property.”
Nationally, RealtyTrac counts about 127 thousand of these “zombie properties” stuck in foreclosure indefinitely. “When you consider that at any given time, there’s probably a couple million homes for sale, this isn’t an overwhelming number of properties,” Blomquist says. “Compared to overall inventory nationally, it really is a drop in the bucket. I think this really is a neighborhood issue.”
But even in a nice neighborhood, a few zombies here and there can provide an opening for creative operators.
Cook County wants to buy all the homes in Riverside Lawn, turn it into forest preserve
By Joe Sinopoli
RIVERSIDE – Whatever Cook County decides to do to bring about flood relief to Riverside Lawn, officials say no one will be forced to sell their property. According to county officials, claiming eminent domain is not an option.
Officials from the county and the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago (MWRD) met Riverside Lawn residents July 30 in a public meeting to discuss how to bring relief to the flood-beleaguered residents in the unincorporated subdivision on the south bank of the Des Plaines River.
Riverside Lawn lies huddled in a forested area between Lyons and Riverside on the banks of the Des Plaines River, which borders the area on three sides.
At the center to the discussion at the meeting July 30 was the county’s offer to purchase Riverside Lawn land parcels. The county said the homes would be razed and the land turned over to the Cook County Forest Preserve District to remain permanently green and undeveloped.
There are approximately 71 parcels with 30 homes in the area, county officials said.
Each property would be assessed at the pre-2013 flooding date by county assessors. Residents could independently get their property assessed, as well, and present their appraisal to the county for consideration.
In the event a property owner and the county come to an impasse, an arbitrator would be called in, officials said of the process.
Robert Rose, executive director of the Cook County Land Bank Authority, said a “critical mass”of willing property sellers is essential, and the parcels would need to be contiguous with each other before the county would entertain purchasing them.
Simply put, the county would not make an offer to a hodgepodge of individual parcels within the flood plain of the subdivision.
“If you decide as a community ‘No,’ it’s over in the truest sense of the word,” Rose told homeowners at the meeting.
However, Jane Hornstein, deputy director for Community Development for Cook County, said the county would probably go ahead and purchase any property from a willing seller.
“The idea is to clear out as much people as we can,” Hornstein said. “We don’t want to leave just one person there. There’s no way we can force somebody to sell. But for practicality purposes, we would like to get everyone out of there. The objective is health and safety.”
Richard Fisher, senior civil engineer for Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, said the area was previously evaluated for the possibility of building a protective levy, but property issues created a roadblock to the plan.
Cook County’s Land Bank is betting on Austin
By Michael Romain
When, earlier this month, the Cook County Land Bank Authority identified 13 Chicago neighborhoods and 13 surrounding suburbs in which to aggressively purchase vacant single-family and multifamily properties — Austin was on the list.
The selected areas all have a concentrated supply of what the Woodstock Institute — a Chicago-based research and financial 
advocacy organization — calls “zombie properties.” Those are properties in which a foreclosure case “has been filed but not resolved for more than three years.”
“Because neither the borrower nor the servicer has clear control of the property, neither has a strong incentive to assume responsibility for the property,” the report notes. “Zombie properties, therefore, are likely to be poorly maintained or blighted, which threatens the stability of surrounding communities.”
In its 2014 report, the Woodstock Institute reported nearly 6,000 zombie properties in Chicago. Most of those homes, the report notes, are “disproportionately concentrated in lower-income communities” and “are more likely to occur in racially homogenous communities.” More than 250 of those properties, or about 12 out of every 1,000 mortgageable properties, were in Austin.
The land bank will work to revitalize those “zombie properties” and prevent other vacant properties from deteriorating into zombies by purchasing the properties, establishing site control and holding them for potential developers.
“What we do is come in … and write off those back taxes and work with
[municipalities] around those code violations, so when we convey the property to a developer, at a minimum, what he knows is [he’s] got a tax-free, lien-free property that has been secured, cleaned out and maintained,” said Rob Rose, the land bank’s new executive director, during a recent informational meeting on the bank in suburban Maywood. Rose has also presented in Austin before the West Side NAACP.
“What the developer has to worry about now is just the cost of bringing [the property] back on line,” he said. “He doesn’t have those other unknowns that he’d have if he was just trying to do it by himself.”
Rose has noted that the 13 neighborhoods that the land bank has chosen to target not only have a concentrated supply of distressed properties, but also the potential to attract a sufficient supply of interested developers and end-users. The neighborhoods that were excluded, such as Englewood, North and South Lawndale and West Ridge, wouldn’t receive special attention because “there is too much to overcome,” Rose told the Tribune this month.
Rose is cautious and perhaps necessarily so (the land bank is only funded to the tune of $4.8 million); but his community-wide approach is nonetheless much more ambitious and less discriminating than that of his predecessor, Brian White.
Whereas White’s decision to buy and hold hinged on the future marketability of individual properties, Rose is betting on whole communities. It’s a process that requires a much broader array of stakeholder conversations — not just those among business, real estate and government professionals.
In Austin, the land bank is in talks with the West Side NAACP to craft a community benefits agreement. The agreement, “at its core,” establishes the aims and goals the community envisions for the development process, Rose said.
“It can be very specific, in terms of the number of jobs and businesses or it can be more general. I prefer to have it more general in scope, only because these opportunities are very dynamic and its very hard to nail down hard set numbers on this. But the spirit of it is what you want to agree to. We want to have community participation and make sure that the needs of local businesses are addressed in that benefit agreement,” he said.
The difficulty in this approach, Rose noted, is how precisely that community-wide consensus comes about. And a lot will be riding on the outcome. Rose said that what the land bank is trying to do in Austin “is going to serve as a model of how we’re going to engage other communities in the county.”
“I want to see how well the NAACP can pull together other members of the Austin community,” he said. “I want to make sure that we don’t have one group speaking on behalf of Austin and Austin is like, ‘That’s not what we’re saying.’ That tends to be how we get things wrong.”
Deborah Williams, a longtime NAACP member and the organization’s former third-vice president, said the group is currently working on forging a coalition of 17 different agencies that will have a stake in the agreement.
“We want to be at the forefront of any investors coming into our area,” she said. “We want to make sure the homeowners and people living in this community have [priority] on land and foreclosed properties, so we can keep our people living in our community.”
[municipalities] around those code violations, so when we convey the property to a developer, at a minimum, what he knows is [he’s] got a tax-free, lien-free property that has been secured, cleaned out and maintained,” said Rob Rose, the land bank’s new executive director, during a recent informational meeting on the bank in suburban Maywood. Rose has also presented in Austin before the West Side NAACP.
“What the developer has to worry about now is just the cost of bringing [the property] back on line,” he said. “He doesn’t have those other unknowns that he’d have if he was just trying to do it by himself.”
Rose has noted that the 13 neighborhoods that the land bank has chosen to target not only have a concentrated supply of distressed properties, but also the potential to attract a sufficient supply of interested developers and end-users. The neighborhoods that were excluded, such as Englewood, North and South Lawndale and West Ridge, wouldn’t receive special attention because “there is too much to overcome,” Rose told the Tribune this month.
Rose is cautious and perhaps necessarily so (the land bank is only funded to the tune of $4.8 million); but his community-wide approach is nonetheless much more ambitious and less discriminating than that of his predecessor, Brian White.
Whereas White’s decision to buy and hold hinged on the future marketability of individual properties, Rose is betting on whole communities. It’s a process that requires a much broader array of stakeholder conversations — not just those among business, real estate and government professionals.
In Austin, the land bank is in talks with the West Side NAACP to craft a community benefits agreement. The agreement, “at its core,” establishes the aims and goals the community envisions for the development process, Rose said.
“It can be very specific, in terms of the number of jobs and businesses or it can be more general. I prefer to have it more general in scope, only because these opportunities are very dynamic and its very hard to nail down hard set numbers on this. But the spirit of it is what you want to agree to. We want to have community participation and make sure that the needs of local businesses are addressed in that benefit agreement,” he said.
The difficulty in this approach, Rose noted, is how precisely that community-wide consensus comes about. And a lot will be riding on the outcome. Rose said that what the land bank is trying to do in Austin “is going to serve as a model of how we’re going to engage other communities in the county.”
“I want to see how well the NAACP can pull together other members of the Austin community,” he said. “I want to make sure that we don’t have one group speaking on behalf of Austin and Austin is like, ‘That’s not what we’re saying.’ That tends to be how we get things wrong.”
Deborah Williams, a longtime NAACP member and the organization’s former third-vice president, said the group is currently working on forging a coalition of 17 different agencies that will have a stake in the agreement.
“We want to be at the forefront of any investors coming into our area,” she said. “We want to make sure the homeowners and people living in this community have [priority] on land and foreclosed properties, so we can keep our people living in our community.”
Land Bank will take ‘calculated risk’ in 26 Areas
By Mary Ellen Podmolik
Humboldt Park is in. So are East Garfield Park and Woodlawn in Chicago and suburbs like Maywood, Matteson and South Holland.
The Cook County Land Bank Authority has identified 13 city neighborhoods and 13 west and south suburbs where it will aggressively buy vacant, abandoned single-family homes and small multifamily buildings and hold them, waiting for a buyer.
But other Chicago neighborhoods hard hit by the nation’s housing crisis are out. North and South Lawndale, Englewood and West Ridge are not going to get focused attention and investment from the land bank because there is “too much to overcome,” said Rob Rose, the land bank’s new executive director.
“We have to take calculated risks,” Rose said during a meeting of the land bank authority’s board Thursday. “We’re going to do it in places where there is market demand. Weaker areas need more than the land bank can provide right now.”
In some communities, the organization may partner with a local organizations but it will not go after properties on its own. It will not focus its budget on buying properties that already are part of the South Suburban Land and Development Authority. Also left off the list are communities that are recovering on their own and don’t need the land bank’s assistance.
Working with researchers, the land bank looked for areas where it believes people want to live and are willing to invest their savings as homeowners. Among the factors it looked for were shrinking residential vacancy rates, rising purchase prices and mortgage activity and community involvement.
Within the city, the communities the land bank has tagged as transitional, meaning there is potential for improvement, are all on the West, Southwest or South sides. They are Auburn Gresham, Austin, Chatham, Chicago Lawn, East Garfield Park, Gage Park, Grand Boulevard, Greater Grand Crossing, Humboldt Park, South Shore, Washington Heights, Washington Park and Woodlawn. Of the estimated 33,000 vacant abandoned lots and homes in the city, 41 percent are in those 13 neighborhoods.
Seven of those communities already are part of the city’s Micro Market Recovery Program, an initiative designed to rehab vacant residential buildings and attract residents.
Suburban communities identified are Bellwood, Burbank, Chicago Ridge, County Club Hills, Forest Park, Matteson, Maywood, Melrose Park, Olympia Fields, Posen, Riverdale, South Holland and Stone Park. Those suburbs have 30 percent of the estimated 27,600 vacant, abandoned lots and properties in suburban Cook County.
Separately, the land bank, which has funding of $4.8 million, also is moving forward with two other initiatives. With funding from the Illinois Housing Development Authority, it has worked with community groups to identify abandoned properties that will be razed in Woodlawn, Englewood, Chicago Heights and Riverdale.
It also has bought 25 tax-delinquent properties through the county’s scavenger sale as a test case of its initiative to acquire parcels that it thinks would be attractive to developers if it were not for delinquent property taxes.
Fannie, Freddie to discount blighted homes in Chicago, Cook County
By Mary Ellen Podmolik