News

By Mary L. Datcher, Chicago Defender | February 1, 2018  (Click here for the original article)

In 2010, Cook County Commissioner Bridget Gainer noticed something out of the ordinary—calls were coming in more frequently about constituents challenged with losing their homes. Aware of the housing market collapse and predator loan practices by banks, long-time home owners were seeking assistance from their public officials.

“People were calling me, they’re getting letters from the bank. People were worried if they had to move out that day—a lot of uncertainty. To be honest, the banks didn’t really know what to do. Half way through the foreclosure process, they realized they didn’t want all of these houses back, so what are we doing there? But, the compound had already started putting people out of their homes,” she remembers.

Growing up on the South Side in the Beverly community, Gainer began her career as a community organizer before entering into government. In order to equip people with resources to hopefully save their homes, she did a legal aid clinic in order for homeowners to know their rights. Working with Alderman Pat Dowell, a vacant lot ordinance was passed which forced banks who issued the mortgage to upkeep and secure the vacant property once the person walked away.

“In Cook County for the decades we used to have a minimum of 15,000 foreclosures per year. In 2009 to 2011, there was 45,000-55,000 during that time with the same number of judges… so if you had a foreclosure on a house, you used to be able to circulate it through the system and someone could buy it. Now it took at least 150 days to get a house out of foreclosure. So, it created this man-made barrier for regular people to buy houses, rehab and resale,” she explains.  “We all know when a house sits vacant for a year, it gets stripped or it falls apart because it’s sitting in the winter.” 

One day, both Gainer and Ald. Harris drove throughout the Chatham community looking at the houses. “She was taking me to all these homes that had become vacant. I literally remembered where we were. If there are vacant houses sitting in Chatham, then we are doomed. This is a solid neighborhood,” she thought.

Trying to find some kind of solution to a growing problem, she read about a land bank program in Flint, Mich. She recalls the neighborhoods were desirable and attractive where houses were being purchased through the land bank, so she reached out to the person who created the program. Taking money out of her county budget, Gainer hired him as a consultant to work on a similar program for Cook County.

Launching the Cook County Land Bank Authority (CCLBA) in 2013, it was two years in the works to identify vacant residential and commercial properties along with vacant lots that have carried back taxes and liens for years. The CCLBA acquires the properties, having the ability to wipe out taxes in order to sell them at below-market rates to qualified community-based developers who in turn rehab the homes and sometimes move-in.

Under the Homebuyer Direct Program roll-out in August 2017, properties in communities that have seen a considerable drop in residency such as Englewood, Auburn Gresham, East Chicago, Chicago Heights and other parts of Cook County offer consumers an opportunity to purchase and rehab these homes. Gainer says it’s simple.

“There’s a lot of people who can redevelop a house especially a single-family home. It’s not that complicated. There’s a lot fewer of those people that can go to court and hire a lawyer and put out money for all of that time before they can make any of that back. While all the talk from city hall or from the county building, ‘we want everyone to develop’. It was impossible for the average person.”

Rob Rose, CCLAB Executive Director, says it’s a program that provides an opportunity for home buyers to become developers.  “Our job is to be able to facilitate. Our job isn’t to go into any one neighborhood to tell them what to do. Nor is our job to hand out checks. What we do is remove the legal barriers but more importantly, we give access. If you think about programs like this in the past, it always boils down to if we’re going to do RFQ (Request for Quotation) or qualify the smaller group to take advantage of these programs,” he says.  “Black people for the most part were left out or that one Black person will get all of the business on the South Side and so you inadvertently pick your winners and losers.”

The CCLAB works independently from the Cook County Board earning revenue from the property sales and reinvesting into the budget to provide an infrastructure to provide additional resources for first-time home buyers and developers. In 2017, the program has generated nearly $18 million in earned program income, 20 percent over in 2016. Since the program began, 400 homes have been purchased and rehabbed.

Gainer says, “These neighborhoods are their own little ecosystems, let one of them fall and it weakens the whole infrastructure. For me was it was recognizing from the beginning, there’s a ton of people. There’s a ton of people who want to live those communities. We have just gotten in their way and we have to get rid of the nonsense.”

Going against the naysayers, Rose is proud of the accomplishments of the CCLBA as they enter into 2018 with a goal to acquire 600 properties.

“As the Land Bank was getting started, we were told these neighborhoods weren’t ready for redevelopment. Don’t be shocked or surprised if you have to rent out or maybe the Land Bank can rent them? It was this common theme of ‘sure the house can be rehabbed but who will actually buy them? Who wants to live there?’ What we’ve seen is that there are plenty of people who want to live there,” he said. “They are looking for quality rehabs, they’re looking for the barriers to be removed. If you can wipe away the back taxes, the code violations and address them in the rehab; the old mortgages and liens. You take all of that away and say, ‘here’s a house, can you make this work?’ It will open up all types of possibilities.”

By Sam Cholke, Curbed Chicago | January 31, 2018 (Click here for the original article)

The Cook County Land Bank Authority is racing into large-scale mixed-use developments, and as its first project will take on a crumbling bank that’s loomed vacant over the Cottage Grove Green Line stop in Woodlawn for 20 years.

The Washington Park National Bank, 6300 S. Cottage Grove Avenue, is the Land Bank’s chance to prove it can take on substantial developments, and Executive Director Rob Rose’s wants to go into the first project at a sprint.

At a Tuesday night meeting to discuss options for the four-story building with Woodlawn residents, the Dallas-transplant billed himself as a man of action. Rose said he wants to get ideas from residents over the winter so he can start soliciting proposals from developers by April and break ground in the summer.

“By this time next year, if we’re not complete, we want to be darn near complete,” Rose said.

By comparison, it took the city 12 years to find a developer for the nearby Strand Hotel, 6315 S. Cottage Grove Avenue, after snatching the five-story building up at a tax sale in 2002.

The Land Bank has moved surprisingly nimbly at times since forming in 2013, but the pace Rose wants to hit is aggressive for any large government-owned property, especially one that has been so badly scarred by Woodlawn’s turbulent real estate market over the last 94 years.

The limestone cladding designed by architect Albert Schwartz has fallen away in sections, burnt out shop signs cling to the walls and a maturing tree is clearly visible growing out of the roof.

Inside, the scene is much worse.

Rose said a skylight that once illuminated the main lobby of the bank has collapsed, leaving the interior open during the winter. He said engineers are still trying to figure out why the basement keeps filling with water, which then freezes when temps drop.

But the Land Bank wouldn’t have been able to acquire the bank if it hadn’t been neglected.

Though once the home of The Woodlawn Organization, the powerful community group founded by Saul Alinsky, the group’s long-time leader, Rev. Leon Finney Jr., has allowed the building to languish. In December, the Land Bank was able to take control of the building because it had racked up $3.7 million in unpaid taxes over the last 20 years.

“We are going to save this building,” Rose told neighbors, minimizing demolition as an option.

But he admitted the engineering studies aren’t finished, and though initial results show the steel structure of the building is stable, there are outstanding questions about water damage in the basement.

Rose said he won’t have any financial resources to offer a developer that wants to take on the project, but he can smooth the runway for takeoff by clearing away years of liens on the title and connect developers with state and city tax credits like the Woodlawn TIF District.

Right now, the Land Bank is trying to figure out exactly what kind of developer they should be looking for.

In a quick poll of the audience Tuesday night, more than half of people wanted the 35,000-square-foot bank to become some mix of entertainment, office and business incubator space. There are two more meetings on Feb. 6 and Feb. 20 to nail down a more specific vision.

But Rose said he wants whatever developer that takes on the bank to be focused on the needs of Woodlawn now and isn’t interested in developers that want to try to surf on a wave of property speculation brought on by excitement around the Obama Presidential Center in nearby Jackson Park.

By Craig Dellimore, CBS Chicago | November 20th, 2017 (Click here for the original article)

CHICAGO (CBS) — The Cook County Land Bank Authority celebrated Monday the 200th home that’s been rehabilitated under the innovative program.

Cook County Commissioner Bridget Gainer helped create the Land Bank after the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. WBBM’s Political Editor Craig Dellimore reports.

She said most people did not have the expertise or ability to buy the homes vacated during the debacle.

“We built this thing called a land bank. We went into communities where homes were sitting vacant, we bought them up, cleared the titles…and then put them out on a really simple website where people could buy,” Gainer said.

And it is still going.

“So instead of having to go to court for nine months or a year, someone could just go on our website, they pick the house that they want and within 30-60 days they close on it,” Gainer said.

People get affordable homes, she said, and neighborhoods no longer have those abandoned homes as a blight on their communities.

The program began with money Attorney General Lisa Madigan obtained from lawsuits against the big mortgage servicing banks. But now, the program is self-sufficient and providing affordable homes.

By Dennis Rodkin, Crain’s Business Chicago | November 20th, 2017  (Click here for the original article)

A stylishly rehabbed Chicago Lawn bungalow is the 200th formerly derelict home revitalized through the Cook County Land Bank, officials are announcing today, as the agency hits the benchmark a few months ahead of schedule.

“When we started, that goal of 200 homes seemed like a hairy, scary goal because nothing like this had been done in Chicago before,” said Rob Rose, executive director of the land bank, launched by the Cook County Board in 2013 to speed up the process of turning around the county’s huge inventory of foreclosed homes.

Shortly after Rose came on in February 2015, the land bank announced the 200-homes goal, to be completed by February 2018.

“We fulfilled a commitment, and that’s important when you’re using (public) funds,” said Bridget Gainer, the Cook County Commissioner who chairs the land bank. “But more important is that 80 percent of these homes are returned to homeownership, and 65 percent of our developers are black and Latino, from the communities, so the money is recirculating in the neighborhoods we’re working in.”

The land bank’s initial funding was $20 million passed along by Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan from the state’s $1 billion share of a $25 billion national settlement with the five largest bank mortgage servicers. Gainer said the land bank became financially self-sufficient early in 2017, operating off its own revenue. The land bank will generate about $12 million in revenue this year and plow most of that into the next round of purchases of derelict properties, she said.

“We took no tax money in 2017,” Gainer said.

Work on the Chicago Lawn bungalow, at 6638 Artesian Ave., is about three weeks from completion, according to Bridgette Washington, whose firm Washington Realty & Investment is doing the project, her first-ever rehab job.

The house has all-new kitchen and bath fixtures, its formerly low-ceilinged attic bedrooms and the staircase up to them have been rebuilt at the full height required by building codes, and some main-floor walls have been removed to open up the floor plan to a more modern layout, Washington said.

The bungalow had been foreclosed in 2013 and deeded over to the land bank in 2014, according to the Cook County Recorder of Deeds. With partner Ricky Albritton, Washington bought the property from the land bank for $16,000. She plans to list it at $225,000 when the work is finished next month.

The land bank “made everything easy and convenient from the time I said I wanted to do this,” Washington said. Key to making it work, Gainer said, is that once the land bank acquires a foreclosure, it uses the county’s authority to wipe out any clouds on the title. That process “would take a developer nine months to a year and run up the attorneys’ fees,” Gainer said, while “we can make it happen fast.”

The land bank also helps small-operator developers like Washington line up financing, contractors and other resources. “We’re building a community of developers,” Rose said.

By Corilyn Shropshire, Chicago Tribune | September 29th, 2017

A vacant brick bungalow on South Luella Avenue in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood requires some work — in fact, quite a bit of work.

The orange kitchen, despite having a coveted island, needs updated appliances, new cabinetry and flooring. The toilet in the main floor bathroom is broken and the peach carpet smells of cats.

But for a prospective homebuyer looking for a house with good bones, the home has potential.

It’s just one of the 30 to 40 homes the Cook County Land Bank Authority is putting up for sale as part of a new program designed to promote homeownership by selling vacant, dilapidated, tax-delinquent homes directly to homeowners.

Until August, the land bank sold the properties it acquired only to developers that would rehab them and sell them at market rates.

But several of the land bank’s properties were more in need of cosmetic changes than complete rehabs. Rehabbers weren’t as interested in less-blighted properties because the projects would not produce the desired returns.

Enter the land bank’s new program designed to attract prospective owner-occupants with fixer-upper dreams.

“Most of the properties (offered to homebuyers) need cosmetic work, not a full gutting,” said Rob Rose, the land bank’s executive director. “These houses are great for a homeowner to come in, make that investment and build equity … because we’re selling to you below market.”

The homes range from $50,000 to $170,000. The South Luella Avenue bungalow is listed for $103,000. Six of the homes have sold since late September.

“What we love is getting the folks in the community to be the homeowners in those neighborhoods,” said Courtney Jones, president of the Dearborn Realtist Board, a trade association for black real estate professionals that supports the initiative to bring people back in to the neighborhood. “That allows the equity to stay with these people of color who’ve grown up in those areas.”

The land bank aims to make a long-term impact on neighborhoods hit hard by the housing crisis by filling abandoned homes with homeowners, not just renters, said Cook County Commissioner Bridget Gainer, D-Chicago, chairwoman of the land bank.

The initiative is also meant to boost homeownership among African-Americans, who are lagging behind whites in owning homes.

Only 38.9 percent of African-Americans owned home in the Chicago area in 2015, compared with 74 percent of whites, according to a report from Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. Before the housing crash, almost half of African-Americans in the Chicago area owned homes.

Most of the homes in the land bank’s program are in Avalon Park, Roseland and South Shore. Some suburban properties are also available.

The land bank brought in corporate lenders offering purchase rehabilitation loans and is building a list of contractors to share with homebuyers.

“The main problem with these (vacant) buildings was man-made,” Gainer said. “Either it’s stuck in court, or the buyer couldn’t get credit. The houses are still desirable, people wanted to live there … so there needed to be a solution to unstick it.”

Since its founding in 2013, the land bank has identified 13 city neighborhoods and 13 west and south suburbs where it sees potential, and has been acquiring vacant homes to sell. The Chicago neighborhoods are Auburn Gresham, Austin, Chatham, Chicago Lawn, East Garfield Park, Gage Park, Grand Boulevard, Great Grand Crossing, Humboldt Park, South Shore, Washington Heights, Washington Park and Woodlawn. It is working to expand to more neighborhoods.

As of the end of August, the land bank had acquired 538 properties. Of those, 346 homes have been sold to developers and 167 have been rehabbed.

By Rooted In Chicago, Chicago Now | August 13th, 2017

Ever notice a nice-looking house or building which has been vacant for years and no one seems to know why?  You might assume that even though the outside of the structure is attractive, surely the inside must be a wreck (busted pipes, moldy walls, nests of raccoons and possums swapping stories about the good old days, etc).  Surprisingly, this is often not the case.  If structure has been winterized and properly sealed up to keep out the elements, it can sometimes sit vacant for years while experiencing only an insignificant amount of interior damage.

Did you know that sometimes the only thing that keeps a nice structure out of circulation is PAPERWORK?  We’re talking back taxes, liens, and encumbrances which scare away homebuyers and even the most stout-hearted of investors.  This is where agencies like the Cook County Land Bank Authority (CCLBA) step in and work their Hogwarts magic.  They have the power to waive all the taxes, water bills, receivership liens, etc. and give the property a tabula rasa to make it more desirable to buyers.  And THAT is why they have earned the right to put the word “authority” in their name.  CCLBA is a boss. Boom!

“Land banks, as defined by the Center for Community Progress, are governmental entities or special-purpose nonprofit corporations that acquire problem properties, eliminate liabilities, then transfer the properties to new owners. The goal is to return the properties to productive use—and to the tax rolls—in accordance with community goals. Land banks often have special powers, including the ability to obtain property at low or no cost through the tax foreclosure process and to hold land tax-free, according to the center’s 2014 report Take It to the Bank.”

– An article posted on the CCLBA website titled “Land Banks Helping Rebuild From Legacy of Foreclosure”

But if you are like me you always want to know “What is the catch? Why would our cash-strapped local government give up on trying to collect legitimate taxes owed a property?”  Here’s the dirty little secret: the government (local, state, federal) will bend over backwards to help renters transition to buyers because it generates more taxes.  But if the only catch to having the opportunity to live in a place I can call my own is to pay taxes, then WHATEVER!  That’s an easy decision.  I’ll take it!  The decision makers have resolved that they’ll never collect those back taxes anyway so why not cut their loses and offer a chance to a new owner?  Check out this Next City article,”Chicago’s Land Bank Will Use Big Data to Target Vacant Homes.“

I have known about this program for a while, but what I learned more about on the Auburn Gresham trolley tour was how excellent this program really is.  CCLB has launched a new Homebuyer Direct Program.  The website says “the focus of this program lies in reaching out to prospective homeowners who may be interested in directly purchasing, rehabbing and ultimately living in the home of their dreams!…

[T]he CCLBA is looking to offer properties throughout Cook County to prospective owner-occupants at below-market prices.  This could be a perfect opportunity for you to engage in the purchase/rehab, finish it to your taste, and build in some equity!”

I’ll share more with you about the CCLBA on Wednesday. Whether you’re a homebuyer or investor, you don’t want to miss these important details about how this great program can benefit your life.