City: Click here to buy abandoned houses
New Web site aims to remove blight by revitalizing properties

From Indianapolis Star, July 9, 2008

Qiana Taylor is thinking about moving. Her Near-Westside home, where she has lived for three years, is across Lynn Street from a couple of vacant houses where the paint is peeling, the weeds have long overtaken the lawn and the lots are littered with trash.

Indianapolis officials are hoping to help people like Taylor feel better about their surroundings by launching an online list of abandoned homes where buyers can quickly and easily identify available properties. Previously, anyone interested in buying such a home would have to call or e-mail the city.


Using the new Web site, indylandbank.com, interested parties can search through available properties and, for $200, submit an application to purchase the homes and their lots.

Going one step further, the city is offering special deals to police officers in hopes of making neighborhoods safer. Officers can pay no more than $2,500 to acquire an abandoned property as long as they agree to live in the house for three years.

Many of the homes on the Web site are priced even lower, some for less than $1,000. The highest-priced property: $9,350. Many are on the Eastside or Westside.

The creation of the Web site, managed by the city's Land Bank, represents the latest move in the Ballard administration's bid to rid Indianapolis of the thousands of abandoned homes that dot the city and draw crime to neighborhoods.

The Department of Metropolitan Development's Indy Land Bank, established two years ago, acquires abandoned, tax-delinquent and other problem properties within Marion County and makes them available to nonprofit and for-profit developers.

Abandoned property purchased through a Marion County tax sale is typically sold "as is," often leaving the buyer to pay off tax and other liens. But a home purchased from the Indy Land Bank comes with a clean ownership title, free of such liens.

Fueled by job losses, bankruptcies and foreclosures, the abandoned-housing problem in Indianapolis is believed to be growing.

The most recent survey of vacant Indianapolis houses, by Ball State University students in 2003, showed the city had 7,913 vacant homes. Fifty-eight percent of them were in Center Township, just outside Downtown.

Sherron Franklin, the city's new abandoned homes director, said the administration thinks the Web site will help, to a point.

"This is just one tool," she said. "It takes more than one tool to build a house."

Along those lines, the city recently established police patrols that are targeting the problem in 12 areas of the city. Officers are giving priority to properties where they suspect criminal activity has occurred, where there's been a fire and where a neighbor has complained.

Also, Indianapolis could soon assume ownership of hundreds of abandoned houses after Mayor Greg Ballard asked county officials to turn over homes that aren't sold in an October tax sale.

Franklin has been traveling to different cities to see how they've dealt with the problem.

She returned from a trip to St. Louis at the end of June and plans to head to Louisville, Ky., at the end of July and to Buffalo, N.Y., in September.

Franklin said Indianapolis might replicate the establishment of problem-properties units -- groups of people with names such as "Blight Busters" or the "Dirty Dozen" -- that monitor abandoned properties and aid in the prosecution of delinquent property owners.

Indianapolis is following the lead of other cities in setting up its Web-based approach to marketing available properties.

Wayne County, home to Detroit, has one of the biggest online land banks. Wayne County has at least 50,000 abandoned homes.

Indy Land Bank manager Duane Ingram has high hopes for the Web site.

"It makes it more visible because without the Web site, no one may have known about the program," Ingram said.

Photos are shown with most of the properties, along with addresses and average value, as estimated by two independent appraisers working under contract with the city. A link is also available with properties to Indy Site Finder, which provides demographic information on the area.

Most purchases will be processed within six weeks, Ingram said.

He said the city hopes some of the homes will be bought by nonprofits that work to make more affordable housing available. Those groups could fetch homes for the same price -- $2,500 -- at which police officers could purchase them.

Other homes might be acquired by for-profit developers who rehabilitate and sell them.

Also, residents who own property that abuts Land Bank homes can snap up those homes for as little as $500 if no other bids are submitted. Most of the properties sold by the Land Bank have gone to abutting landowners.

Taylor, 31, isn't sure the effort will change her mind about eventually leaving.

"When I first moved here, I wasn't sure about the neighborhood," said Taylor, who has an 8-year-old son.

Crime and troubled schools concern her most. "It's not the kind of neighborhood I would want to raise a kid in," she said.

But a couple of nice new neighbors might change her mind.