Congratulations to the Neighborhood Vacancy Initiative at Legal Services of Eastern Missouri, recipient of our 2021 Award for Collaboration and Coalition Building!
The Award for Collaboration and Coalition Building recognizes a person, organization, institution, or initiative that:
Demonstrates incredible commitment to working through partnerships, even when it’s more challenging than “going it alone.”
Forges new connections that bridge gaps between people, organizations, and places that don’t normally interact with each other in the St. Louis region.
Shows up for others and participates directly in their work; does not only ask or expect that partners and collaborators come to them.
Approaches difficulty and conflict with understanding, compassion, and an open mind.
Humans of St. Louis storyteller Lindy Drew met with Peter Hoffman, Managing Attorney for the Neighborhood Vacancy Initiative, to learn more about him and his team’s work. Here’s some of what Peter had to say.
Peter Hoffman, Managing Attorney for the Neighborhood Vacancy Initiative at Legal Services of Eastern Missouri (Humans of St. Louis / Lindy Drew)
When I went to law school, I knew I wanted to do public interest work but I didn’t know what it meant. Anytime you’re in school, it’s an opportunity to try new things. Well, my first year I had an internship with a public defender in Kansas City where I got to work on pretty heavy stuff like murder trials. One of the defendants we represented was a young man about my age. I’d visit the client for hours on end, I got to know them, and we had a lot in common. There I was in school, being able to move up the ladder or whatever, but he grew up in a very different neighborhood than I did and didn’t have access to all the opportunities I had. I got emotionally invested trying to defend that client and do right by them.
It wasn’t an ideal outcome. He’s probably still in prison and here I am now getting to do work that I love. I wonder how much of that is because of where we each grew up, how our environments shaped us, and what we had access to or didn’t. And as soon as that case was closed, the very next client who came in was also someone not that different in age and who grew up in a neighborhood without much access to opportunities. As important as that internship was, I wondered if there was a way to use my legal education or a career in public interest to help work with communities to create more opportunity.
My second year of law school, I interned with Legal Aid of Western Missouri’s Economic Development Unit in Kansas City. Eventually, I told them, “I’m not going away. I love the work so much. You’re gonna have to pay me.” Things worked out when somebody left the team, a spot opened up, and I applied. I was fortunate to find that program in Kansas City because they used Missouri law. They represented neighborhoods in court and used legal tools to reclaim vacant properties. And I remember one of the first weeks of my internship reading over some laws and thinking, “This all applies to St. Louis too. At some point, I’m gonna get back there and work with neighborhoods to help get vacant houses fixed up.” I took that legal support for neighborhoods model that we had done to create opportunities for neighborhoods through legal assistance and returned to St. Louis eight years later to do the same work here.
Our team represents community groups, so our clients are usually neighborhood associations or community development corporations. We provide a variety of services, but a big focus is on representing them in court to use state laws that allow neighborhoods to acquire vacant and abandoned property. A lot of the litigation we do on behalf of neighborhood associations is aimed at absentee landowners or property owners. They may only exist on paper, so it’s hard for the City to hold those owners accountable in court. And when there’s an LLC or large entity, or the owner is dead, municipal code enforcement has its limitations. That’s when we identify properties that fit certain criteria, file a lawsuit in court, get legal access to the houses, clear off some of the liens, and find somebody in the neighborhood who wants to rehab or buy the homes.
We started the Neighborhood Vacancy Initiative in 2018 with support from the City through the St. Louis Development Corporation and The Bar Association of Metropolitan St. Louis. As you can imagine, some of the cases and work are very labor-intensive. We can’t do it all ourselves. So there’s me, Latasha, and Rachel as the three attorneys; Melissa and Brittany as the paralegals; and we have a ton of pro-bono volunteers. We’ve partnered large law firms with neighborhood associations so they can bring more cases and handle more matters. And with all the expertise big firms have with sometimes hundreds of lawyers, they help serve residents of low- and middle-income neighborhoods here. So we do corporate governance work, problem property litigation, and real estate related services for residents, including free beneficiary deeds for homeowners.
One of the big reasons for vacancies is property abandonment. People will die without any estate plan, there’s not a lawyer in the community, or they don’t have the resources to make a will or draft and record a beneficiary deed or have a plan for their assets when they go. As a result, the default rule in Missouri is that when you die, if you don’t say what you want to happen, the title is split among all your heirs. So if any of those heirs want to get a bank loan, sell the place, or start fixing it up themselves, then they’ve got to go to a lawyer, they’ve got to go through probate, and it can take years and cost thousands of dollars. A lot of times if this occurs in a neighborhood where the property values aren’t so high or a house needs work, it’s not even worth it and the place is just abandoned. It’s so heartbreaking. But one little piece of paper can prevent all of that from being lost.
I remember having a client tell me her parents had to drive two states away to find a bank to make a loan for their family to buy a house. In the ’50s and ’60s and still today, there are so many barriers to homeownership. Somebody not having a simple transfer-on-death deed can lead a family to lose their home as an asset. We’ll take referrals from the neighborhood groups who send us families. Maybe a family is living in Mom’s house, Mom died, they’re paying the taxes and taking care of it, but they’re not in the title. So we help fix some issues. We also do regular clinics to make sure people have access to estate planning documents. We can only do so much ourselves, and that’s why we bring in other resources as we do with pro-bono partnerships so we’re able to do more.
In the last three years, we’ve opened about 300 cases, done about 50 estate planning or title consolidation cases per year, and we do about 50 problem property cases per year where we affirmatively file lawsuits with respect to vacant and abandoned properties. There are over 20,000 vacant properties in the City of St. Louis, and maybe the City owns about half. The other half is owned by people who have long been dead or LLCs in which who knows where the owners are. We have to look at each property and untangle it like a knot or a big ball of yarn.
Each property is different and each item behind why the property is vacant or abandoned needs to be sorted out before that property can be put back into productive use. So we work with neighborhoods to identify their priorities and what they want us to work on. They point and say, “It’s this one next to the school. It’s this one next to the bus stop. It’s this one on this block where we want to put a park or community garden.” In each neighborhood, we figure out what their priorities are and start untangling that knot.
During the day, we wear our lawyer hats and untie these knots, property by property. Then we all also give a lot of our time to the St. Louis Vacancy Collaborative, working with City departments and other non-profit service providers to come up with big-picture solutions. And for us, that’s another way to get that same goal. Yes, we can solve problems in the immediate sense, but is that going to fix systemic things long-term? We need to focus on other types of advocacy, collaborations, and policy.
Doing the work you do with housing and real estate and being from St. Louis, what are you thinking about as you’re seeing all the vacant houses when you drive through the City?
I’m always working. My partner’s probably used to it now because it’s been almost 12 years doing this work, but I’ll always be looking for addresses. I have an app on my phone. I know how to look up who the owner is. I get the parcel number. And then when I get home, I go into the City's land title system. So it’s just constant. There are 10,000 problems to solve all over. When I drive around, it’s like, “I wonder how that property got to be that way? What is the story behind that one?” They’re often terribly tragic: someone died, there was a fire, somebody was evicted. But in order to take that property and turn it into something positive, you have to understand how it got there in the first place to fix the problems associated with the title and then try to push the place back out to somebody who can do something with it. We’ve got a lot of stories like this because we do like 50 of these cases a year. There’s this physical blight that you see, but then there’s this hidden legal blight. That’s where our team really gets into it. Like, “What are all of the other issues that aren’t visible but just as much of a barrier to solving a problem as fixing up the roof or windows or whatever it is?”
People from Saint Louis University School of Law, St. Louis Association of Community Organizations, and Community Builders Network did a forum on vacant properties in 2016. They asked me to come to St. Louis to talk about what we were doing about them in Kansas City. That’s when I met some of my future friends, colleagues, and collaborators. And one of them was Tonnie Glispie-Smith, who won a CBN award in 2020 and is really involved in the West End Neighborhood Association. She’d call me when I still lived in Kansas City and ask, “What do you think about this property? How about this other one?” So it made it easy to know that there would be neighborhoods that could benefit from this type of assistance.
One of the first cases she ever asked me about was a duplex in the West End. It had long been vacant more than 10 or 15 years and they had tried everything to get that house fixed up. They tried calling the Citizens’ Service Bureau, calling the police, talking to the alderperson. They just couldn’t make anything happen. They found buyers who wanted to purchase that property and fix it up. And it was just a terrible situation — a violent situation happened inside the place while vacant, it was really overgrown, people found guns and drugs inside and out. It was a nightmare for those who lived around there.
Well, we started looking at it and untangling the knot. We found there were actually two parcels of land — one from the family the owner inherited and the other he purchased from the LRA long ago. And even when the neighborhood would send interested buyers, he had a title issue because when he took the title to that property, there was a mistake in the legal description. So Tonnie told me, “If I have this property owner call you, can you help him? He wants to sell it. He just can’t. He’s stuck with it.”
We went through 20 or 30 years of records to figure out what the issue was and it turned out the title problem was preventing the property from being sold. The guy was a senior and a veteran and just couldn’t afford an attorney. It would have cost a good chunk of change he didn’t have. So we worked with the owner to fix it and he was able to sell the house. He wasn’t being prosecuted in housing court anymore. He wasn’t spending tons of money having to secure the property. He sold it and got some money out of it. And now the house is fully renovated or pretty close. So that was an early win for us.
Ya know, sometimes we’re the stick and we’ll file a case against an absentee property owner. But that was a case where we got to be the carrot. We were the good guy and we got to help that owner fix the title issue to sell it.
How do you see the trickle-down effect of that story impact the community and the street?
Disinvestment is contagious. Vacancy is contagious. When one house becomes or is vacant, it takes a negative toll emotionally on the people living nearby. Like, “Why should I keep putting money into my house? I’m never gonna get it out because my property value’s always gonna be hurt by that vacant property across the street. Why should I even care?” But the opposite is also true. So when somebody sees a house being renovated, it’s like, “Yeah! Things are moving in the right direction.” It makes people feel more comfortable and want to invest in their own community. It inspires hope. This property’s not just stuck in this terrible purgatory anymore. There’s going to be a new homeowner soon and new kids on the street and more money for the school district and eyes on the street if someone needs help or something. More people help to build community because they can now call that neighborhood or house or block ‘home.’
Who owns these abandoned properties you and your team file lawsuits against to force them to sell or repair their home and why might they not want to sell it?
Sometimes the owner is just stuck and sometimes the owner just doesn’t want to do anything. Occasionally, we’ll encounter an owner who says, “No, this house of mine is not a problem,” when all the other facts say that it is: there have been all kinds of break-ins, the property’s caught on fire, it’s collapsing. And an owner will say, “I don’t care. I don’t want to fix anything up. I’m not gonna sell it. I’m not gonna demolish it. I’m not gonna donate it. You just have to take me to court.” And we will do that over and over and over again. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
There are few reasons why people don’t budge. They might have an emotional connection to a property. They might not want to let it go because maybe it was Grandma’s house. So when the neighborhood is negotiating with an owner, or we’re doing it as their attorney, it’s like, “If that house means so much to you, wouldn’t it mean more to have a new family be able to live in it and enjoy it? Because if you don’t do anything, it’s gonna fall over or the City’s going to demolish it. What does that do for that memory you’re holding onto?”
Then there are owners who have a higher opinion of the property’s value than what they think it is. Maybe they overpaid and they’re embarrassed and don’t want to realize they made a bad investment. It’s the sunk-cost fallacy. So they hold on to it thinking something’s eventually going to happen and the house is going to be worth something. But that’s just not the case most of the time. If that house collapses in on itself and it’s demolished, it’s not going to be worth anything. Maybe the lot will be worth something, but not much and probably not in the foreseeable future. So sometimes it’s the economics of people not wanting to give up thinking they can still make money off of it.
I had a case where this guy’s dad’s house was going to collapse. So the neighborhood association found someone to buy it, like, “We think it’s a fair price. You can negotiate.” And the owner said, “It’s not for sale.” He agreed that the price was fair. And if it was any other house, he would have sold it. But he really wanted to make sure his dad’s legacy and place in the neighborhood and community were valued. Well, the neighborhood had an orchard. And they said, “If you can figure out a price for that house so somebody can buy it and fix it up, we can put a bench in our orchard and dedicate it to your dad so his memory always has a place to live on in the neighborhood. And you’ll have a place where you can go to visit that isn’t the abandoned house anymore.” So there are ways to get creative without money or being cutthroat. But every property has a different story behind it and we have to figure out why it is the way it is.
How do you and your team celebrate a win?
Our work is different than a lot of legal aid work. Legal aid is providing assistance to people often at the lowest point in their lives. So we have 80 to 100 attorneys who do things like provide orders of protection for victims of domestic violence, represent tenants in eviction cases, help people get badly needed public benefits. We’re fortunate in that our cases are a bit more optimistic and definitely more visual because we deal with real estate and property. We’ve been working with a photographer who’s helping us document all of our cases and all the befores, afters, and durings. What have we done in our first three or four years? Hopefully, instead of just 300 cases in a report, we’ll have a visual marker to celebrate the milestones. These are real stories and transformations that we should have in print somewhere to show that these tools work. And that’ll be a great way to look back on everything we’ve done, take stock, and be proud. This isn’t overnight work. This takes years and years. Some of the properties we’ve worked with in year one are just coming back on the market.
Were you surprised to get the award this year for collaboration and coalition building?
I didn’t go to my law school graduation. All that award stuff has never really been for me. But this is different because it’s a Community Builders Network award. It’s from our friends, collaborators, people we work with all the time, and it just means a lot. Community development work is really hard. And people know that. We certainly don’t do this work for the money. It is a labor of love for everybody involved and we’re passionate about it. One thing that needs to be celebrated is how hard the work is but how people continue to do it despite the challenges and uncertainty.
- Peter Hoffman, Managing Attorney for the Neighborhood Vacancy Initiative at Legal Services of Eastern Missouri
We hope you can join us to celebrate community builders like the Neighborhood Vacancy Initiative team at our Community Development Family Reunion event on September 23!
Photostory by Humans of St. Louis and Lindy Drew. Photostory narratives represent the opinions of the speaker(s) featured only and do not necessarily represent the views of the Community Builders Network of Metro St. Louis.
