The Acquisitions, Dispositions and Development team at the Cuyahoga Land Bank had a busy summer battling neighborhood blight, reaching 98 homes demolished throughout the county in August.
“We are making real progress toward recovery from the foreclosure crisis,” says Cheryl Stephens, Director of Acquisitions, Dispositions and Development for the Cuyahoga Land Bank. “Still, we are acquiring more than 100 properties into our inventory each month, and nearly two-thirds of those properties are beyond repair or rehabilitation.”
“The Cuyahoga Land Bank does extensive inspections of each property brought into its inventory and we push for rehabilitation and renovation whenever possible,” says Stephens. “The unfortunate truth is that so many of these homes have been neglected for so long that demolition is the only option.”
Stephens points to responsible project management and reliable contractors as the reasons they were able to accomplish so much in August and says she hopes to continue that momentum going forward. “When the Cuyahoga Land Bank was founded in 2009, it was estimated that more than 30,000 residential and commercial properties were in need of demolition,” to keep surrounding home values from declining and the neighborhoods themselves from appearing rundown. “We have strategically removed more than 4,600 of those properties (15%), a statistically significant number in the overall work to correct the blight problem in Cuyahoga County,” she says.
To find out more about how the Cuyahoga Land Bank makes decisions on whether to renovate or demolish a vacant or abandoned property, read our recent blog post “To Demo or Not to Demo” HERE.