The structures city officials will recommend for demolition with newly available federal money might include some that otherwise would not come down.
The nearly $19.9 million, for which local government will compete with a dozen Indiana counties with similar populations, is expected to be available next year. Like the demolitions the city pays for every year out of its annual allotment of riverboat money, the federal money is intended to tear down badly blighted homes.
But there is a key difference.
Whereas the city’s only concern when it demolishes a property is destroying a health or safety hazard, the feds want more. The city’s bid for federal demolition funds must come with specific proposed end uses for targeted properties and designated program partners. The partners are likely nonprofits and community development corporations that are willing to own the properties and carry out the plans.
The city must acquire clear title to the properties and transfer those to program partners.
Ben Miller, director of the Evansville-Vanderburgh County Building Commission, said program partners likely would want to demolish blighted houses in neighborhoods they have already invested in, perhaps by acquiring land or rehabilitating structures. New houses could be constructed where the blighted buildings stood. A program partner might also want to tear down badly blighted houses in neighborhoods near structures they believe they can rehab.
“We’d be looking at it through a different lens. We’d be looking at it to try to stabilize an area and make a big impact,” Miller said.
“Who’s going to take this on? It’s not going to be the city to keep (a property) forever, so who out there, what community development corporation, what community partner, wants to take that property on and have a plan for what they’re going to do with it? They would own it.”
Mayor Lloyd Winnecke has identified Memorial Community Development Corp., Community One and Habitat for Humanity of Evansville as potential program partners in pursuit of the federal funds, which will be administered by the Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority pending U.S. Treasury Department approval.
After a Dec. 18 public forum about the newly available money, Winnecke envisioned saying to the city’s community partners: “’OK, if we acquire this parcel at, say, 123 White Street, what can you do with it? Are you interested in that?’ That’s where the collaborative effort will have to take place.”
Regular demolitions
The $19.9 million for which local government will compete -- the Building Commission and the city Department of Metropolitan Development are heading up the local bid -- is part of $75 million the state is making available for demolition through the Treasury Department’s “Hardest Hit Markets” program. That money, in turn, is part of $221.7 million awarded to the state, primarily for homeowner mortgage payment assistance.
Michigan and Ohio have made similar provisions for federally funded demolitions.
Housing and Community Development Authority officials have said that they want to use the $75 million to demolish between 3,000 and 5,000 of the state’s worst blighted and abandoned structures.
Evansville-Vanderburgh will compete for the money with Laporte, Vigo, Tippecanoe, Hendricks, Johnson, Madison, Monroe, Porter, Elkhart, Clark and Delaware counties.
The city tore down 155 houses this year, paying for the demolitions out of its roughly $12 million annual allotment of riverboat money. Property owners were billed for the demolitions, but in most cases they did not reimburse. The demolition costs often amount to more than what a house was worth.
In 2012, the city tore down an almost identical number of structures -- 157.
In almost all cases, the city does not own the structure that is targeted for demolition.
In 2014, the city has $500,000 in riverboat money budgeted for such demolitions.
At any given time, Miller said, the city has about 40 structures in the pipeline for demolition, having persuaded an administrative judge to grant raze orders but not yet having bid out the work to contractors.
A similar number of structures is typically on the Building Commission’s radar screen, with code enforcement officers waiting to go to hearings to seek raze orders.
‘Worst of the worst’
When making decisions about how to distribute the newly available federal demolition money, the Housing and Community Development Authority will use a scoring matrix weighting such factors as proximity to schools and brownfields sites, public safety calls, the presence of lead contamination and whether a structure is vacant.
“You get a lot of points for police and fire runs, for example,” Miller said. “The scoring matrix is designed to find the worst of the worst properties, but properties that also can be redeveloped into something more productive.”
The Building Commission is working with the city’s water and sewer utility to identify properties that haven’t received bills for long periods and with other agencies to pinpoint environmentally distressed properties and others that may score highly with the state.
“We’re just trying to put a lot of different information that the scoring matrix is talking about, all together on one, kind of a map,” Miller said.
The city is just beginning to organize itself for an application it expects to receive in the spring. The Department of Metropolitan Development will head up the search for program partners.
“We’d be ready by the spring,” Miller said. “It’s a lot of work but also a high priority because of the amount of money that may be available.
“It’s not every day the state tells you they have $19 million for demolition.”