New Bedford follows Pittsburgh’s lead, turns to residents to beautify vacant lots

New Zedford mayor Jon Mitchell this week announced a “Side Yard Program,” encouraging homeowners to put city-owned vacant lots to good use — an initiative that has proven successful in cities such as Pittsburgh. The New Bedford program will allow residents to buy vacant lots that abut their properties at discounted costs.

“We’ve developed a pathway for the transformation of blighted empty lots into gardens, side yards, off-street parking as well as a range of other productive reuses. This program offers a great bargain to eligible landowners as the cost to purchase a vacant city-owned lot ranges from $999.00 to just $250.00,” Mitchell said in the city’s press release.

The revitalization strategy has been implemented in several major American cities, including Baltimore and Pittsburgh, where residents can purchase abutting vacant lots for $250. Pittsburgh’s Northside neighborhood has been the site of extensive vacant lot renewal (though not primarily through “side yard” acquisition), and the local news site KeystoneEdge recently reported on the effort:

Lisa Freeman, a graduate of ReClaim Northside last year, sat in to mentor the group this year. Her vacant-lot garden project shares the neighborhood with drug dealers, she said. As she dragged a garbage can full of mulch by them one day, she called to them: “Which one of y’all are going to help me?” She actually got some takers. Then she pulled a second can by. “Whose turn is next?” she said.

“All it took was acknowledging them and not making them feel that they’re a drug dealer; no one is supposed to talk to them, everyone is supposed to be afraid of them. It got to the point where, when they knew us, it was [with] the utmost respect. They still sell drugs, but not there.” Now, effectively, she said, “we have a drug prevention activity through that garden. They engage with us. They’re one of your stakeholders as well.”

A 2011 report by the Pittsburgh city controller called the program “an effective tool in returning small, wooded and/or steeply graded tax-delinquent parcels to private ownership.” It noted that the city had so far sold 715 of the approximately 1,200 lots it had deemed eligible for the Side Yard Program in 1994.

However, the Side Yard Program is not a substitute for other clean-up efforts, including public-private partnerships. In its 2012 annual report, the Clean Pittsburgh Commission credited the city’s Redd-Up Zone program, which provides materials and coordination for volunteer clean-up efforts, for keeping vacant-lot blight under control.

– Robert David Sullivan

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