Mott Foundation grant helps launch national land use organization

Helping communities "unlock" the value of abandoned and underused properties, and transform blighted neighborhoods into vibrant and sustainable assets will be the focus of a new national organization being launched in January with the help of a $500,000 grant from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. The organization, with offices in Flint and Washington, D.C., will provide federal, state and local officials and nonprofits with ideas, research, technical assistance, training and policy guidance on land use issues. That work will include tracking the costs, impacts and prevalance of vacant properties across the country; sharing strategies for stabilizing at-risk neighborhoods; and helping to develop policies that support a national response to the chronic property abandonmet facing many cities. The organization, which will be formally named by January 1, will also be supported by the Ford Foundation and other sources. It will be led by Daniel Kildee, who for nearly a decade has piloted successful land use reforms in Mott's home community of Genesee County, Michigan. The launch comes as cities across the country struggle to cope with vast inventories of vacant and abandoned land, a problem that has worsened in recent years due to the nation's foreclosure economic crises. "Properties left to ruin can have disastrous effects on neighborhoods and communities," notes Kildee. "Our work will be to help people craft and implement land use strategies that meet their unique situations and needs and that return those properties to productive use." Such have been the goals of the Mott-funded Genesee County Land Bank, which Kildee helped launch in 2002. Land banks are public authorities created to obtain, hold, manage and redevelop tax-foreclosed properties. And the Genesee County program has become a widely respected model, having taken ownership of nearly 7,000 vacant and abandoned lots. Of those, it has sold 1,774 properties to new owners and cleared an additional 1,022 lots for resale or redevelopment. Taking such impacts to a national scale is at the heart of Mott's support for the new organization. "The Genesee County Land Bank and Dan Kildee have become widely recognized for their expertise in repurposing vacant and underused properties," said Mott President William S. White. "This new organization has the potential to become the country's leading resource for helping policymakers, nonprofits and others build strong local, state and national policies and practices around land re-use." The foundation's grantmaking on issues of land use and reform has totaled $11.4 million since 1993, incuding support in the late 1990s for state policy initiatives that paved the way for the creation of land banks in Michigan. Mott, established in 1926 in Flint by an automotive pioneer, is a private philanthropy committed to supporting projects that promote a just, equitable and sustainable society. It supports nonprofit programs throughout the U.S. and, on a limited geographic basis, internationally. Grantmaking is focused in four programs: Civil Society, Environment, Flint Area and Pathways Out of Poverty. Besides Flint, offices are located in metropolitan Detroit, Johannesburg (South Africa) and London. The Foundation, with year-end assets of approximately $1.96 billion made 558 grants totaling $110.4 million in 2008. For more information, visit Mott.org. Published: Wed, Dec 16, 2009

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