Despite the data that indicate a booming economy, vacant properties are prevalent in communities across the country. As stewards of our environment, what can architects do to address the issue of blight and create thriving and more sustainable communities for the future?
While good buildings require architects to do more than simply meet code, strengthening communities through design is more complicated: Architects must deploy their skills thoughtfully with community groups and allied professionals to transcend code and zoning regulations—and it certainly helps when they act as good citizens as well.
Vacant land is easy to spot, but a vacant building may not be as immediately evident. What constitutes “blight” is subject to jurisdictional definition. In Chicago, one operative definition of blight is excessively broad: any area that meets five of 13 factors is considered blighted under the Tax Increment Allocation Redevelopment Act. These factors include obvious signs like dilapidation, obsolescence, or deterioration, to more subjective criteria, such as deleterious land use of layout and lack of community planning. Amazingly, Chicago’s Loop and other highly valued portions of the city’s economically flourishing North Side are considered blighted under this definition.
A recent report by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy looks at “The Empty House Next Door” in the United States, exploring the impact of vacant properties on communities. In Gary, Ind., more than 40 percent of the city’s 25,000 plots of land are vacant, according to the city's 2015 Gary Parcel survey. In Detroit, more than 120,000 lots are vacant. And the vacancy rates in rural areas and small towns are nearly double that found in metropolitan areas, indicating that the problem is not solely a problem of density. But cities built on another century’s industrial economy, like Gary and Detroit, were the hardest hit during the Great Recession—and have been the most resistant to recovery in the ensuing years.
“Although vacant properties are a problem, they are first and foremost a symptom of other problems—concentrated poverty, economic decline, and market failure,” according to the Lincoln Institute’s report. Existing laws governing tax and mortgage delinquency often delay the redevelopment of vacant properties, which the study also touches upon: Municipalities should “remove legal impediments in state law to effective strategies for vacant property reuse.”
Providing new ways for properties to find responsible stewards is one first step—and it’s at this juncture where architects can step in. A way to game the system is to start small, as demonstrated by Civic Projects’ Frame | Work initiative on Chicago’s South Side. The project, a collaboration with the Greater Englewood Community Development Corp., began in 2016 to activate an underutilized plaza through the design of what Civic Projects founder Monica Chadha, AIA, dubs “internet tables,” which provide community-enhancing places for web access (through boosted Wi-Fi installed on an adjacent building) during events held at the plaza, which currently include a farmers market. “The use of [this plaza] will be an expansion of the activation of a currently vacant commercial building,” Chadha explains. “It will be a hybrid between temporary pop-up retail and a longer-term activation by emerging entrepreneurs.”
Frame | Work has been testing solutions at the grassroots level, working directly with stakeholders to assess what’s possible. “Maybe we need an event permit, but not a building permit,” Chadha explains. “We’re showing the viability of use of space. The conversation is different when the community has seen what can be done.”
Building on the notion that an event permit can be as transformative as a building permit, Chadha suggests that the solution to blight “doesn’t have to be architecture.” After all, she notes, how long will a design solution continue to work in place? How will a short-term activation lead to a long-term or even permanent activation of the site? And “how do design professionals stay committed to this work long term?” she asks. Her practice, for one, looks to establish a three- to five-year client–designer engagement at a minimum.
In response to shortfalls in city funding, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has closed more than four dozen public schools during his seven-year tenure, leaving many underserved neighborhoods with vacancies in place of once vibrant community anchors. One repositioning that’s underway is the former Anthony Overton Elementary School in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago’s South Side. A classic midcentury modern design by Perkins+Will, the 60,000-square-foot structure was scooped up in 2015 by a community development organization in the hopes of revitalizing the building and, subsequently, the area.
Paola Aguirre, a partner in Chicago-based Borderless Studio, has been working with the community to envision its next life through the studio-led Creative Grounds initiative. After growing up in Mexico, Aguirre attended Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and worked at the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill before starting her own practice. She advocates a more entrepreneurial approach from all stakeholders when approaching any project. “Creativity is essential,” Aguirre says. “[It’s] not only about financial capital, but a mindset to leverage social and cultural capital. … As architects, we are trained to focus only on the outcome. It's hard to fight that mindset.” Tentative solutions now in place include temporary design installations, such as a human-scale map on the old schoolyard pavement, projections on the building, and an open classroom.
As chief design officer for Chicago-based Skender, a traditional general contractor that is recasting itself as a product company, Tim Swanson, Assoc. AIA, is tasked with imagining buildings as a designed object. Moreover, he seeks to produce them as whole products using prefabrication, which can reduce costs and result in residences that aren’t just affordable, but good.
Swanson notes that architects too often see themselves as “saviors,” adding that “while there is value to design’s role, it must come at the hands and voices of those who call these communities home.” He points to community toolkits like the Tactical Urbanists Guide, developed by the Street Plans Collaborative, as a positive development, but notes that holistic solutions are required: Design, policy, investment, and construction need to be intertwined to ensure solutions aren’t superficial or piecemeal.
Swanson’s recent decision to move from office director and national city design practice leader for CannonDesign’s Chicago office to Skender reflects his belief in the shift to this paradigm—leveraging scale, technology, and production to provide better quality and design for the masses. “We are exploring new building technologies and typologies that allow for deployable infill housing at multiple scales,” Swanson explains. “Creating a high-performance home chassis that can be configurable, permit-able, and quickly manufactured allows us to work directly with the families that will call these buildings home to define and design them in a fraction of the time of traditional construction.”
Cities are facing a crisis of vacant properties, Swanson notes, in an echo of the findings of the Lincoln Institute study. “The complexity of codes and regulations in most metropolitan areas reinforce wealth separation,” he says. “The capital and effort to remedy a vacant site is excessive.”
And Swanson knows this firsthand. He sited his own house—a project still in process—on a lot in Chicago’s West Side that had been vacant for decades. The building permit application took 262 days for city approval, suggesting a lack of organization to support some project types, namely single-family residences on infill lots. Meanwhile, a 30-story building that started the permit process on the same day as Swanson’s single-family residence topped out on the day he received his permit. “Infill should be the easiest thing to do,” he says. “I’m not arguing for less regulation, but we’ve lost sensibility.”
Making sense of these obstructions—and negotiating solutions—is an opportunity for architects. “Vacant properties are a symptom of concentrated poverty, economic decline, and market failure,” concludes the Lincoln Institute’s “The Empty House Next Door” report. Architects are uniquely positioned to facilitate and develop methods and solutions to mitigate these conditions and rebuild thriving communities.
