Captain Plan→it

There are currently 6,117 vacant and abandoned properties in Columbus, or 1.8% of the total 337,719 housing units in the city. Pfeiffer hopes to display that the problems on Myrtle Avenue are a result of multiple factors including national bank mortgage bundling practices, out-of-state real estate speculation and neglect, poor lending practices and bad business decisions.

“Our objective is to abate nuisances, preferably by using private resources,” explained Pfeiffer.  “However, in many instances the property owners have walked away from their responsibilities and left their remaining neighbors and government to clean up the mess.”

(via ColumbusUnderground)

The Video is here.

The video is traditionally made (aka rather dry, not all flashy and cool like most planning videos these days), but if you are interested in housing, code enforcement, nuisance properties, etc, you may want to check it out anyway. It is interesting to see all the steps the city must take to try to fix blighted neighborhoods. FF to 57 seconds.

There are a lot of financial/legal shenanigans behind this issue, and it’s extremely frustrating that there aren’t any effective laws to prevent this yet.