New Haven is contemplating a “giveaway” of troublesome vacant lots that it can’t sell cheap.
The board of the Livable City Initiative (LCI), City Hall’s neighborhood anti-blight agency, approved the sale of two Dewitt Street “sliver lots” to Habitat for Humanity on Monday night.
That leaves only 600 more to dispense with.
It hasn’t been easy.
Frank D’Amore (pictured at top of story), LCI deputy director, defines a “sliver lot” as properties in the city’s possession — acquired mainly through tax foreclosure — that are too small to build on or are otherwise unsuitable for development.
Sliver lots are a financial liability since they require city maintenance and don’t produce tax revenue. If abandoned, they also drag down neighborhoods.
After a decade of dramatically reducing the number of abandoned properties, partly by selling sliver lots to adjoining homeowners, LCI is now groping with a growing inventory thanks in part to the recession and foreclosure crisis.
LCI is constantly trying to sell the sliver lots to adjacent property owners as it did in the 1990s. But D’Amore said lately it has been increasingly difficult to find buyers, even with prices as low as 25 cents per square foot.
What to do? That’s the question coming before a Jan. 21 meeting of LCI’s Property Acquisition and Dispensation Committee (PAD). The public’s invited. (It takes place on City Hall’s fifth floor at 4 p.m.) Among possible solutions: lowering prices, or eliminating them altogether.
“There’s been talk of a sliver lot giveaway,” said LCI staffer Evan Trachten (at right in photo).
Between 60 and 70 sliver lots are sold every year, when the economy is good, Trachten said. But in the current economy, people can’t come up with even $200 to $500 to buy an 800 or 2,000 square foot lot.
“People can’t buy them,” Trachten said. “To me it’s shocking… even investors.”
“We’re trying to create as many incentives as we can,” D’Amore said. He explained that the city offered a phased-in property tax program over several years to buyers of sliver lots. But LCI still can’t get rid of them.
D’Amore said that LCI has been “mulling things over” trying to come up with a solution to this problem.
“There are many ideas on the table,” Trachten said, from lowering the prices, to creating a sliding scale, to simply giving the properties away to adjacent property owners, many of whom have been using them for years, without paying taxes on them.
“If we can come up with a plan that gives them away, it could be very beneficial to the city,” Trachten said.
If they are not being used, what about a "sponsor a lot" program?
You get a lot for free: in exchange you have to keep it green & beautiful if you aren't able to build anything on it. (i.e. an extension of your adjacent property)