Whaling City offers cheap vacant lots to abutters

Blair Bailey, New Bedford’s tax title attorney, can’t say exactly how many vacant lots there are in the city, only that the number hasn’t dropped significantly since the height of the foreclosure crisis.
“There are at least a few hundred and it hasn’t improved that much because there is a bit of a lag between the time they fall behind and foreclose,” Bailey said. “It is getting a little better now, but as far as the properties go, we had banks walking away from foreclosed properties and they never used to do that.”
Overgrown, debris-strewn and often a magnet for criminals, abandoned properties have been a problem in many southern New England cities even before the recession. Potential safety hazards that generate no tax revenue and reduce the property values of homes around them, vacant lots can drag whole blocks and neighborhoods down with them.
Like it has before, New Bedford is looking to homeowners who live next to vacant lots to help rescue them. In the “Side Yard” program launched last month, New Bedford is offering abutters rock-bottom prices – between $999 and $250 – to buy the vacant lots next to their homes.
In addition to the cheap sale price, New Bedford will provide the buyers financial and technical help to combine the vacant lots with their existing property.
“Every city has some kind of program for dealing with vacant lots, but I don’t know of any that has prices this low,” Bailey said.
The program is called “Side Yard” because the city hopes homeowners who acquire the vacant lots will turn them into private green spaces next door. The lots can also be used as private parking for cars serving the adjacent building.
What new owners can’t do with the vacant lots is build anything on them. All deeds for the new lots will come with development restrictions.
Although some areas of Massachusetts have seen property values soar along with housing demand, that’s not yet the case in urban neighborhoods of the state’s secondary cities.
In New Bedford, like Fall River and much of Rhode Island, the market for older multifamily properties – the city’s classic triple-deckers – remains very soft.
As a result, New Bedford, unlike super-expensive Boston, is looking to reduce density and increase lot size in many neighborhoods by cleaning up and merging abandoned properties with occupied ones. “Some of these lots are very small, most less than 5,000 square feet and some are multifamily with no green space, parking or backyard,” Bailey said.
While new owners can put in a driveway and park cars on lots acquired from the city, zoning does not allow them to pave an entire lot or use it as a commercial surface lot.
The median sale price of New Bedford single-family houses in April was $184,500. Even after rising 19 percent from last April, those prices trail well behind the $313,000 statewide median, according to figures from the Warren Group.
As their vacancy attests, developers have shown little interest in building on these small lots and the city believes their best use is as a value-adding accessory to adjacent houses.
While an unbuildable side yard won’t produce the same tax revenue for the city as a property with an inhabited building, it will generate more than an abandoned lot.
Under the Side Yard program, the city will refund up to $500 of the cost of surveying and filing the new combined deed, which can easily run more than $1,000.
Bailey said the city will also work to make sure the taxes on the expanded property reflect the fact that it cannot be built upon.
Right now the city owns about 30 vacant lots that it has repossessed for unpaid taxes, but Bailey said there are 1,200 total properties subject to tax liens, some of which are also empty lots.
Since the Side Yard program started, Bailey said the city has gotten calls about several lots that are still in private hands. As the city moves through the list of properties with back taxes, those with potential buyers will rise to the top of the list.
Linda Hopps, president of Caldwell Banker Hopps Realty Group and president of the Greater New Bedford Association of Realtors, thinks the Side Yard program will have a positive impact on neighborhoods and home values in the city.
“I own a lot of rental properties in New Bedford and when people don’t keep them up it brings everything down. I think this could make some properties more attractive,” Hopps said. •

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