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The 3M Building in Weinland Park burned down last summer after being abandoned and vacant for years.
Mayor Michael B. Coleman kicked off a new initiative today to combat vacant housing in Columbus. The city has identified 900 of the 6,200 vacant homes in Columbus as dangerous and uninhabitable, and be razing the buildings over the next four years.
“Despite the efforts we have made in the past, the scourge of vacant and abandoned housing continues to rein blight upon our neighborhoods,” Coleman said at today’s announcement event. “We did not create this problem, but together, we will address it.”
Coleman was joined today by City Attorney Richard C. Pfeiffer, Jr., Councilmember Zach M. Klein and other neighborhood leaders.
Previous efforts to combat vacant housing, such as the Home Again program, have addressed issues with 2,000 vacant properties, either renovating or demolishing them. The new initiative kicked off today will create a “Vacant and Abandoned Property unit” (VAP) that consistes of representatives from the City Attorney’s Office, Code Enforcement and Building and Zoning Services. The collaborative effort is being created to focus on the enforcement and management of all 6,200 vacant and abandoned homes in the City of Columbus. The group will be publicly publishing the name of negligent property owners who fail to tak action on these problematic houses.
“Our office has been aggressive in addressing the challenge of vacant and abandoned properties, from taking legal action against irresponsible landlords to proposing legislative remedies to helping raise public awareness of neighborhood blight,” said City Attorney Pfeiffer. “So we applaud Mayor Coleman for his efforts and look forward to working with him on this new initiative.”
The City of Columbus will invest $11.5 million from the Capital Improvements Fund over the next four years to fund demolition efforts. The city will also create programs that offer assistance to neighborhood development organizations interested in restoring homes or building on vacant lots.
“Work to clean blighted properties requires an increased amount of cooperation between the City and community,” said Councilmember Klein, chair of the Development Committee. “The VAP will help focus City resources where they are needed most to make changes that will happen over time, not overnight.”
Has a list of homes slated to be demolished been released somewhere yet? It may be too early in the process, but I’m curious. Would love to know if the condemned one on my block is on the hit list…
I haven’t seen one, but will ask around today.
I’ll respectfully point out that although a Weinland Park building illustrates this story, in Weinland Park the civic association’s strong preference is to rehab rather than demolish. We’re a smaller neighborhood than most, and we have more institutional support than many, but it’s still true for all neighborhoods that, as Robert Dickerscheid (South Side resident) said in yesterday’s Dispatch article, “Any time you tear down anything, you are losing a little history, a lot of memories.” I’m sorry every time I see a house torn down that sheltered families for 50 or 75 years before it was destroyed by just 10 or 15 years of neglect.
Of course. The photo of the now-demolished 3M building was used as an illustration as it was one in our archive of an abandoned building and we didn’t have time to send out a photographer to get new photos for this story. It was sad that this building burned down as the plans for reuse could have been pretty amazing.
Most of the boarded up houses in WP are not abandoned, but are stuck in the foreclosure process. Unforunately this allows them to further degrade and become the target of arson which has plagued the community.