ALBANY — The latest snapshot of the city’s battle against blight shows that more than half of the 1,750 vacant buildings listed since 2006 are no longer abandoned — because they’ve been razed or are occupied — but the new report cautions that as many as a third of the 809 remaining derelict buildings may have to be demolished.
Of that 809, however, only 164 — or 20 percent — are registered with the city as required by law, the report says.
Wednesday’s vacant buildings census — the first since Jeffery Jamison was named head of the newly re-branded Division of Buildings and Regulatory Compliance last year — reflects, on paper at least, a nearly 100-building increase from the 707 reported in 2011.
Jamison said that increase doesn’t tell the whole story. He said this year’s report is a more comprehensive accounting of the city’s vacancy problem because eight new building inspectors were hired this year and because the city’s list was reconciled with lists maintained by neighborhood groups, which have led the charge for a crackdown in years past.
“It’s realistic and it’s positive,” Jamison said of the trend. “But I didn’t want to sugarcoat it at all. I just wanted to report the facts and make sure we got it right.”
From rotting South End row houses far from the public eye to the crumbling hulks of what was once Wellington Row in the State Street shadow of the Capitol, Albany — like many older cities — is grappling with how to manage its aging buildings.
The report comes as some county lawmakers and neighborhood activists are pushing for legislation that would allow Albany County to create what’s known as a land bank, essentially a local development corporation with the sole mission of acquiring distressed and tax-delinquent properties and steering them at low cost to responsible buyers who will rehabilitate them.
Boosters say the land bank is a way to break the cycle of tax foreclosure and speculation that ensnares many properties until they decay to the point that there is little choice but to raze them.
Mayor Jerry Jennings’ administration has yet to publicly embrace that plan, citing questions about how it would be financed and whether it might duplicate other efforts already combating blight. City Development Commissioner Michael Yevoli said he will meet with proponents this week.
The exact number of vacant buildings has been subject to debate, with Jennings’ critics accusing his administration of undercounting.
In 2009 during the mayor’s last re-election bid, the city said the number had dropped from 950 to 691. A joint 2001 survey by the University at Albany and Historic Albany Foundation put the number at around 840. But Jamison said he did not hold back.
“I wanted to find every single one,” he said. “If the number ended up being 1,000, I didn’t care.”
Part of the haziness may lie in the city’s definition of a vacant building, which is one that is unoccupied and cannot be secured through normal means, such as locking its doors. So not every building that is unoccupied is classified as vacant.
Jamison’s 180-page report, which is mostly a list of properties, paints a positive picture for the most part of the city’s efforts to fight blight. The report says Albany has a lower per-capita vacant building rate (0.008), than Buffalo (0.063), Camden, N.J., (0.051), and Syracuse and Rochester (0.012). The division has filed 550 cases against landlords in Vacant Building Court this year, the report said.
Of the approximately 950 properties no longer considered vacant, nearly 600 have been reoccupied while roughly another 250 have been torn down, the report said.
Those demolitions, however, have often been controversial — as will likely be the report’s suggestion that one third of the city’s existing vacant buildings may need to come down. The biggest problem, the city says, is simple economics: Many of the buildings are “upside down” — they would cost more to fix or demolish than their owners could hope to recoup through rent, prompting them to simply walk away.
But Historic Albany has repeatedly accused the city of being too hasty to demolish some buildings and relying on faulty economic analyses to justify doing so.
On Wednesday, the group’s executive director, Susan Holland, questioned some of the assertions in the report, including that the economic downturn and resulting foreclosures have fueled the city’s vacant building problem.
“Albany hasn’t really had a significant foreclosure problem. There isn’t anything to substantiate what they’re saying. The third that they’re talking about to tear down — what is their criteria? Who is doing the work and what is their criteria?” Holland asked, acknowledging that some buildings do pose a threat to safety and do need to be demolished.
But, she added, “Their upside-down theory — it’s their theory. It’s not proven.”
jcarleo-evangelist@timesunion.com • 518-454-5445 • @JCEvangelist_TU