And, like his predecessors — Mayor Tom Murphy had a program in the 1990s called Project Picket Fence that largely failed — Mr. Ravenstahl has a program to encourage residents to maintain vacant lots.
SHAKER HEIGHTS, Ohio — In a sign of the spreading economic fallout of mortgage foreclosures, several suburbs of Cleveland, one of the nation's hardest-hit cities, are spending millions of dollars to maintain vacant houses as they try to contain blight and real-estate panic.
Investors, however, say they have done a service to neighborhoods plagued by foreclosures, by helping to nudge home values upward and renovating and maintaining formerly vacant homes.
The Port Authority said the Terminal 6 site must be cleared to make room for "improvements that will better serve travelers and help reduce delays," meaning additional boarding gates and aircraft parking spots for JetBlue's Terminal 5. Ron Marsico, a spokesman for the authority, said that maintaining a vacant Terminal 6 was costing the authority $600,000 a year.
Banks argue that they shouldn't be responsible for maintaining the vacant property during that time, and now a federal housing agency is suing Chicago for forcing them to do so.
Pressured by local groups, many of them affiliated with the Home Defenders League and Occupy Our Homes networks, a number of cities, including Seattle, Oakland and Los Angeles, adopted "responsible banking" laws meant to hold banks accountable to meet community needs and laws to force banks to pay for the cost of maintaining foreclosed vacant properties that blight neighborhoods.
In many cases, local and municipal governments have to take responsibility for maintaining or bulldozing vacant properties -- an expensive pastime that's costing cities millions at a time when budgets are already stretched to the breaking point.
Differences in the way banks maintain and market vacant foreclosed homes in mostly white neighborhoods and communities where black and Latino families live, may be deepening the nation's housing crisis, damaging the property tax bases on which most communities depend and leaving many black and Latino homeowners stranded in increasingly blighted neighborhoods, according to the investigation.
Our results, supporting the greening hypothesis, indicated that residential parcels proximal to produce gardens were better maintained than parcels near undeveloped vacant lots.
The Police Department also maintained 10 to 12 positions vacant to help balance the budget.
There, changes involve renovations to older, existing buildings as well as the construction of sleek new mid-rise gray-brick apartment blocks that fill in stretches of long-vacant land where poorly maintained council towers were demolished in the early 2000s.
