Resources

A community movement is growing on Kalamazoo's east side, and it's taking the shape of fruits, vegetables and trees. Who's making the effort possible? The Kalamazoo County Land Bank, which approached Eastside residents after seeing the success of their community garden next door to two vacant lots in the land bank’s portfolio, and asked them to expand those efforts. In the works – not just a bigger community garden but a greenhouse for year-round gardening and hands-on classes.

The American Assembly’s new book, America’s Legacy Cities: New Directions for the Industrial Heartland, is now available for direct download. Written by some of the nation’s leading urbanists, the book serves as an important new resource in the effort to retool, reimagine and rebuild America’s ‘legacy’ cities. We’ve made the full text available on our website in chapter by chapter links below.

A new report by the Preservation Green Lab – part of the National Trust for Historic Preservation – provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of the potential environmental benefit of building reuse. This groundbreaking study, The Greenest Building: Quantifying the Environmental Value of Building Reuse, concludes that, when comparing buildings of equivalent size and function, building reuse almost always offers environmental savings over demolition and new construction.

A compelling and data-rich new January 4 Federal Reserve white paper – "The U.S. Housing Market: Current Conditions and Policy Considerations" – looks at key problems faced by the housing market and offers a framework for thinking about issues and tradeoffs for policymakers to consider. Among Fed Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's key recommendations: the role of land banks in dealing with low value assets, and the suggestion of increased federal funding for technical assistance for the creation and operation of land banks (see page 14-15 of the report).

New Orleans' 2011 report on blight eradication efforts – aimed at cutting blighted properties by 10,000 by 2014 – shows the City has more than doubled revenues from fines, moved over 1,000 properties to code lien foreclosure, and doubled demolitions to more than 2,800. The Center for Community Progress is working with the City and its allies to develop a strategic plan for vacant property land management and land-banking.