JACKSON, MI -- Years of demolishing significant numbers of blighted property in the city of Jackson may be coming to an end, as the city is now looking to sell land or structures it owns more often than taking a wrecking ball to them.
The city spent years using funding from the federal “Help for Hardest Hit” program to demolish hundreds of blighted properties throughout the city. New City Manager Jonathan Greene and rising demolition costs have contributed to the new approach in selling these properties, City Spokesman Aaron Dimick said.
“We believed at the time that was what was needed to stabilize our neighborhoods and to reduce blight, because we had hundreds of properties that were essentially abandoned and turned over to the city through tax foreclosure,” Dimick said. “We have gotten to this point where we have hundreds of city-owned properties that we’ve acquired over the past decade, and it’s really time to do something with those properties.”
City-owned property sales are conducted through the city manager’s office with final approval by the Jackson City Council. Multiple properties have been approved for sale at meetings so far this year. The city currently has four houses on the open market, with several pending sales.
Vacant lots owned by the city can be identified through the county parcel viewer website.
Most of the approximately 600 city-owned properties on the market are side lots, though some are available as developable land. City residents can buy them for as low as $300, not including any back taxes. Side lots, most often used to expand a home’s footprint, are only available to buyers with adjacent properties.
The intent of this new approach is to reduce the property under the city’s control and the costs associated with them, like mowing and maintenance, Assistant City Manager Shane LaPorte said.
“This is a way that we can decrease the amount of mowing we have to do and decrease that maintenance cost by side lot selling these properties,” LaPorte said. “We’re really only taking care of these admin costs, we’re not making some profit out of it. That’s not that’s not the intent at all -- the intent is to keep it very affordable and just to really get rid this property off our books.”
For some existing homes, the city has taken on some rehabilitation work like electrical system updates or paving a driveway. Some properties may require purchase agreements saying it’s the buyer’s responsibility to bring things up to code.
The city did do more renovations on one home on Elmwood Avenue that has a sale pending at $129,900, as an experiment, LaPorte said. He said it was successful because the home will sell, but this won’t be a common approach for most city-owned houses.
“I think the intent moving forward is to get out there and make some improvements that still offer affordability for purchase and it’s one less structure the city has to maintain or demo if there’s cause for it,” LaPorte said.
Money made from the sales is put into the city’s general fund, but it’s revolving, LaPorte said, as one house’s sale could fund renovations needed at another.
“The idea with that is you take a home that’s in a deteriorating condition in a relatively stable neighborhood and then by stabilizing that property, you lift up the other properties around it and you reduce blight having a cascading effect with the other properties,” Dimick said.
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