Spike in vacant buildings is costing St. Paul time, money

Squatters, stolen pipes and broken windows have taken up a lot of police officer Dean Koehnen's time in the past year.

That's because more than 1,000 buildings -- most of them residential -- landed on St. Paul's list of vacant properties between Jan. 1 and Dec. 1. Add that to the 550 that were on the list at the start of 2007, and St. Paul has a costly and visible problem.

More than 2.5 percent of the city's 56,000 residential buildings -- single-family, duplex and multi-unit -- are unoccupied. The concentration of empty buildings in certain neighborhoods and an ever-increasing total -- about 100 more buildings each month -- have city officials and housing advocates trying to figure how to fight blight, crime and declining home values.

"It's definitely a hot topic in the last year," said Koehnen, who is on loan to help the city's code-enforcement department.

"There are absolutely more calls [to vacant buildings], and it is taking more of our resources to look at them," said officer Mark Wiegel, who spends about half his time on housing-related cases.

The city has had an average of 450 vacant buildings per year.

"Is this a problem?" said Nancy Homans, policy director for Mayor Chris Coleman. "Yes."

"We've never seen this kind of spike in this short of a period and in this volume," said the city's Steve Magner.

His department monitors vacant buildings once they're reported and makes sure they're in compliance with the city's nuisance code. The majority of the city's vacant houses have significant safety concerns and need to be secured, sometimes by being boarded up. A record $100,000 has gone to boarding up houses, a cost the city tries to recoup from the buildings' owners.

Magner's department has taken on additional workers and put lots of overtime into the issue. The budget for monitoring vacant buildings has jumped from $338,000 in 2005 to $607,000 for 2008.

The reasons the buildings are vacant run the gamut -- divorce, foreclosure, a soft housing market -- officials said. But the majority are the result of foreclosures, Magner said.

A remarkable fact is that very few, if any, of the buildings are in tax forfeiture, according to Ramsey County records. That means property taxes are being paid.

View from the street

What does it mean to a neighborhood with more and more dark buildings on the block?

The effect on residents is significant, said Dawn Garland, housing director of the East Side Neighborhood Development Co. They're worried about housing values and people breaking into vacant homes and stealing copper, causing explosions or starting fires, she said. Some people have even told her they've thought about not paying their own mortgages.

"It really messes with people's sense of hope," she said. "It's just sad."

Said Wiegel, of the police: "When you've got three or four houses in a block boarded up or with a placard in the window, it attracts more of a criminal element."

Charley Swanson, who lives on Cook Avenue a few blocks off Payne Avenue, said he's not that concerned about the vacant building outside his front window or the other one a few houses down.

"It's more of an indication of the housing market than the livability of the neighborhood," he said.

Coleman has said his goal is to make St. Paul the most livable city in the United States. A growing list of vacant buildings doesn't help reach that goal, but he said the Invest St. Paul program, which targets the four hardest-hit neighborhoods, is one way to help.

But the city, Homans said, isn't equipped to solve the problem by itself. "It's an issue we're taking extremely seriously, but we don't want to cause panic that we're on the verge of clearing blocks and blocks of land," she said.

The federal and state governments, as well as financial institutions, need to help, she said.

"The sad part is a lot of people will have a lot of pain between then and now," he said.