Congratulations to the Land Bank Coalition, a St. Louis County’s partnership to restore productive use to problem properties led by MO State Representative Kevin Windham and Legal Services of Eastern MO’s Rachel Waterman and Peter Hoffman, recipient of our 2023 Collaboration & Coalition Building Award!
The Collaboration & Coalition Building Award recognizes an 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 Kevin, Rachel and Peter to learn more about their work with the Land Bank Coalition. Here’s some of what they had to say.
What is land banking and how did you all come to work together?
Kevin: It’s important for a neighborhood to have vibrant homes, but it’s also important to have young folks walking to school and walking past homes that aren’t vacant and dilapidated and that have neighbors in them. That’s been known for a little while. This hasn’t happened overnight. And there’s been groups of neighbors and even outside speculators who have tried to come in to revitalize these communities. But at some point, it becomes a bigger problem and you see the system needs to be overhauled. A lot of these problems won’t be curtailed unless the government intervenes.
Rachel: A land bank is a governmental entity that serves as a holder of last resort, typically for properties that went up for a tax foreclosure auction, received no bids, and then needed somewhere to live. And that’s what Kevin asked us to look at in St. Louis County. The County has a different way of dealing with tax-delinquent properties — an administrative system, in lawyer speak. And the effect is that a lot of properties accumulate tax debt indefinitely without a good way to clear the title so they can be brought back to market or redeveloped. So properties get caught in a vicious cycle under the systems used in the County and throughout most of Missouri. Other states and cities use land banks to solve this problem, and those problem properties that don’t sell at auctions end up in a land bank where tax debt is cleared. So it’s kind of where they go to be repurposed.
Peter: When white flight happened, the core of the City hollowed out. And it’s only been in the last couple of decades, with continued sprawl out west and aging populations and aging housing stock, that there’s been a need for the County to come up with some system to help recycle vacant and abandoned properties. Most of our program’s work has been in St. Louis City, so this has been our first foray into working with stakeholders in the County. For us, it was an exciting opportunity to do something that fits within the work we were already doing but can also have an impact across the region and the State. So, at the request of Representative Windham, we worked together with the community to brainstorm ideas, look at best practices across the country, and try to draft legislation to reflect that.
What’s been illuminating to you with the work you’re seeing happen?
Rachel: My favorite thing about the St. Louis County Land Bank Coalition meetings is the community education component we provided — making abstract legal issues concrete for people who experience the impact of those systems every single day. As legal aid lawyers, we think a lot about foreclosure and due process and notice all of these legal and constitutional things that are part of these systems, the outcome of which is lots of vacant and abandoned properties in the City and the County. And we’ve worked hard to make those concepts accessible to the coalition which is advocating for the legislation, as opposed to something that just the lawyers understand. The thing I’m most proud of is that everyone who joins our calls can now have a conversation about these legal concepts, why they matter, and why they might produce that vacant house next door.
Kevin: To bring that to fruition a bit, we came up with an awesome video that’s been one of the highlights of my time with the group especially because I got to listen to Ruth Ezell bring to light the work of the coalition. Having somebody I personally admire do the voiceover for that video was pretty cool. In five minutes, this animation helps people understand what was once a 100-page bill and is now under a 50-page bill. It’s hard enough to explain the concept in just a few minutes, but through this project, it’s explained in such a succinct way. Visually, it also allows people to see a house go from vacant and abandoned to what the judicial process looks like and then how the property becomes someone’s new home again. If you think of vacant homes in the region, what if they went through land banking instead of sitting dormant?
📷 | Pictured above are Kevin in front of his grandmother’s house, with his grandmother, and of the two abandoned homes that were in front of her house. Photos courtesy of Kevin Windham.
Kevin: My grandmother moved into her house here in Hillsdale in 1969 and it was the apple of her eye. Across the street, there were two dilapidated homes and, before she passed, that’s the last thing she’d see on her street when she’d walk outside. That is not a success story, but it’s something we as a group don’t want to happen. It’s bigger than policy. It’s something many people have to see in their neighborhoods every day. This neighborhood’s pretty tight-knit. There are a lot of neighbors here from when I was growing up. I have a picture of the homes when they were here and one of them had a tree growing through the middle of it, which shows how long they had been sitting there. Over a decade. Eventually, the homes were removed and nothing’s been built there since. That’s another step in how we think about land banking — the community input to say what they want in a space beyond empty lots. I don’t think it’s uncommon from a lot of other neighborhoods on the North Side. There’s still a ton of pride here. Even though some properties in the neighborhood are going downhill, you’ll see homes right next to them that have brand-new siding or that are undergoing renovations.
Rachel in front of the land where the two vacant buildings used to be in front of Kevin’s grandmother’s house.
Rachel: The reason this work is important to me is that housing policy and community development is where we still see so much racism in society today. Where Kevin’s grandmother’s house is located was about a mile from where I grew up. Same school district; right down the road. My parents still live in their house in a thriving, healthy neighborhood, which is pretty mixed demographically. Yet, Kevin’s grandma’s neighborhood, which is almost entirely Black, saw so much disinvestment and decline. All of these neighborhoods were a beacon of the American Dream after World War II, where families could buy their first house, like small single-family starter homes. And it tells a story about America with how our families’ neighborhoods were treated differently based on who moved into them.
Kevin: We didn't know each other growing up. And when we started on this project together, I had been elected about a year before ever having known Rachel lived in the Normandy area. It really hit me that we grew up that close to each other. It’s something I even thought about on the campaign trail. The Delmar Divide in our neighborhoods is kind of like Lucas and Hunt Road. Pasadena Hills is one of the most affluent Black neighborhoods in the County, and it’s still an unreachable dream for some folks who live on the other side of where they’re living on Lucas and Hunt. Reflecting on that and the Community Builders Network award we got, I started thinking of how a house is more than just a house when it comes to community and how I learned about what a home means. The women in my family taught me the value of a house when building a family and climbing up in socio-economic status. Then a bit deeper, my dad is in the housing industry. And a lot of men in my life taught me the value of building a home when building wealth. I’m just grateful to them and Legal Services of Eastern Missouri for helping me bring that back to my community with this new land banking policy.
Why did it take all of you coming together to make the St. Louis County Land Bank Coalition happen at this time?
Peter: Everybody knew there was a problem. We had municipal leaders contact our office like, “We understand your team works on vacant property issues.” I had one mayor unfurl a map on his desk of all the vacant properties and ask, “What do we do about these?” Well, every house is going to have a different story for why it was abandoned. Part of this is knowing that story and having a tool to fix each scenario to get that property back to productive use. You need tools to solve each problem property. A case-by-case intervention was not going to get the community the outcome it deserves.
Rachel: People have been talking about land banking in the County for a long time. One of the first questions folks would ask is, “Why hasn’t this happened yet?” This has happened thanks to Representative Windham and his leadership. Until now there hasn’t been anyone to bring a broad coalition together to try and make changes at the state level.
Peter: It’s really his leadership and the whole coalition that will ensure that this is a success. If the legislation is passed, it’s just the first step because then there’s all this implementation that needs to happen. And it’s important that it’s not just technical experts that understand this, but community leaders, people who live across the street from these houses, interest groups, rehabbers, and small developers. All of them need to know about this land banking tool and how it works so they’re involved in shaping it. Lawyers have blind spots, too. Sometimes we’re just looking at the four corners of a document and don’t understand the unintended consequences of a certain line. So Representative Windham bringing everybody together to respond to the drafts created a more informed and thoughtful end result.
Kevin: Yeah, the timing wasn’t right. But then people came together. We all had common interests in land banking and trying to revitalize neighborhoods via housing. Virtual meetings during the pandemic turned out well for us with attendance and getting a wide range of folks to join. And they stayed on the call for two years to get to the point of making the legislation. We got grants from the Center for Community Progress for technical assistance, and we received grants to make the land banking video. We even took part in a national conference and now people who attended that join our calls every two weeks.
Peter: If the coalition is successful, maybe this could mean that Missouri can be a model for something positive. Maybe other cities, states, and regions can learn from this coalition approach to vacant properties.
- State Representative Kevin Windham, Missouri House of Representatives, and Peter Hoffman and Rachel Waterman, Neighborhood Advocacy Attorneys for Legal Services of Eastern Missouri
