From 1971 to 2008, only five states passed legislation enabling land banks; but in the last six years, another eight have done so. As vacancies and blight have plagued parts of the United States still recovering from recession and the mortgage foreclosure crisis, so too has land banking grown. There are now some 120 land banks and land-banking programs, with West Virginia joining the list in 2014.
“Many communities—large and small, urban and rural, from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt—are facing a scale of vacancy and abandonment never seen before,” according to a new Center for Community Progress (CPC) report, Take It to the Bank: How Land Banks Are Strengthening America’s Neighborhoods. (PDF Free to Download; $10 hard copy)