The three-day Reclaiming Vacant Properties Conference will gather foreclosure, land bank and urban reinvestment experts from around the nation in Cleveland this week. They'll see firsthand the devastation wrought during the foreclosure crisis which accelerated not block but neighborhood scale abandonment in Cleveland during The Oughts. They'll discuss which tools, like Cuyahoga County's land bank, judge Raymond Pianka putting subprime lenders on trial in his housing court and the nationally recognized ReImagine initiative to repurpose vacant land are making small headway in the face of continued economic recession and continued abandonment of the urban core.

“Cleveland has proven to be an innovative center for solutions to urban blight,” says Dan Kildee, president of the Center for Community Progress, the Washington and Flint-based group hosting the conference. Kildee was a creator of the country's first county land bank in Genesee County, Michigan which served as a model for Cuyahoga County's land bank.

“In 1992, Cuyahoga County was the first county in the country to examine the uses for brownfield land. The city has had a lot of success in combating the economic downturn. There is still work to do, but Cleveland can serve as an inspiration to the whole country.”

Author Alex Kotlowitz will revisit Cleveland and its Slavic Village neighborhood, the site of his article in The New York Times a year ago—a hard-hitting investigation of the foreclosure crisis—as keynote speaker this Thursday. One the lighter side, hundreds of attendees will visit urban gardens and farms, like the former Stanard school which was deconstructed and converted into an urban farm on E. 55th Street in 2009. They will visit pilot projects for green infrastructure that the city started this summer using $500,000 in Neighborhood Stabilization Program funds. They will tour the Detroit-Shoreway/W. 65th Street Arts District as an example of urban infill redevelopment driven by arts and culture. And they will ride the hybrid bus-rapid transit HealthLine and hear how a complete infrastructure project like the Euclid Corridor is bringing the city's grand avenue back from the brink.

But mostly the conference is a chance to gather lessons from best practices around the country. Los Angeles and Baltimore will explain experiments with court appointed receivers or conservators to manage the rehabilitation and revitalization of substandard and vacant properties. A group from Memphis will "share the story of how the private sector and community development corporations are working together to engage government and the courts in addressing vacant properties, blight, and
neighborhood deterioration." 

Hot topics in alternative land uses—green water infrastructure and urban agriculture—will be addressed in many cross-cutting sessions, They include:

• Innovative ways to turn blighted properties around, including landbanking and brownfield grants;
• “Ask the Doctor,” a session which studies the anatomy of foreclosure, including what neighbors can do to combat vacant properties;
• A detailed look at the role skewed property-tax assessments are playing following the subprime mortgage debacle;

For a full list of topics and descriptions, click here.