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Boardman Township Land Bank soon will begin to sell properties
BOARDMAN
The township soon will be ready to put up for sale properties in its land bank for the first time.
The township land bank was the centerpiece of the zoning department’s annual open house Tuesday. Zoning Inspector Sarah Gartland described the land bank as a crucial piece of a multipronged approach to deal with blight and maintain property values in neighborhoods impacted by the housing-market crisis.
“The Boardman Township Land Bank was started in 2012 to put back to productive use abandoned, neglected, tax-foreclosed properties,” Gartland said. “We started working on it in 2013, and now at the end of 2015 we have 14 properties. We’re getting our process ironed out, and we’re ready to start turning them over.”
“This is something that a lot of communities are doing,” she said. “It’s what to do when properties are not finding buyers, or being neglected entirely. ... It’s a way to get them back into some kind of taxable use.”
The properties currently owned by the land bank are at a site on Lemans Drive, 30 Ewing Road, 4060 Sylvia Lane, 4055 Tippecanoe Road, 5022 Southern Blvd., 31 Shields Road, 563 Garden Wood Drive, 5026 Southern Blvd., 75 Arlene Ave., 74 Charles Ave., 127 Afton Ave., 120 Shadyside Drive, 77 Prestwick Drive and 78 Homestead Drive.
The properties that soon will be available for purchase are the ones the township first acquired in 2013. The zoning department actively works to acquire other properties and demolish structures; Gartland said she expects to demolish about six properties each year for the next few years. Next year, the land bank will add about 10 properties to its roster.
In most cases, Gartland said, the goal is to return green spaces to neighborhoods and put the properties into the hands of residents who will take care of them.
“Most of our properties will be side yards or green spaces for neighbors, because most of them are in areas with real small lots, and most people could use a little more green space,” she said. “Some of our properties could be used for redevelopment, maybe a new house. We have maybe one or two, here or there, that could go for commercial development or a small apartment if it’s in a neighborhood like that.”
The township land bank owns two properties on Southern Boulevard, she said, that could be used for a new apartment building since that neighborhood is comprised primarily of multi-unit dwellings.
In neighborhoods that primarily are made up of single-family homes, however, the zoning department has been working to ensure that they stay that way. Gartland and her team are in the process of changing neighborhoods that are zoned Residential R-2 (which allows for multi-unit dwellings), to Residential R-1 (which is for single-family dwellings). The focus is on neighborhoods that already are mostly made up of single-family units.
“This goes hand-in-hand with our rezoning project,” Gartland said of the land bank. “These vacant properties were all in R-2 districts, so someone could have bought one of those and put a six-plex in them. Now they’re single-family. We’re working on our neighborhoods as quickly as we can so we can be sure that anything that comes into our land bank, and all these neighborhoods, are preserved as single-family.”
The zoning department expects to put properties up for sale early next year. The first step will be to send letters to the owners of properties that abut the land bank’s properties to find out if those people want to buy the land for side-yard use. The zoning office also is setting up a website, which will list appraised values for the properties.
Signs also will be going up at the properties, informing people about the chance to purchase the land. Individuals who are interested in purchasing a property, or putting it to some other use, can reach the zoning office at 330-726-4181 for more information.