One of the most important parts of building affordable housing is acquiring land for free or a reasonable price. It’s one of the biggest challenges for organizations looking to build housing for people who can’t afford market-rate homes.
The Spokane Regional Land Bank, led by Ami Manning, has acquired a few lots to sell to companies and non-profits that build affordable housing. We brought her in to talk about how they work.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Ami Manning: First of all, I need to say, lots of folks can land bank, but land banks are a specific structure that is kind of a quasi-governmental structure that allows land to be held, tax-free usually, for the purpose of community good. So rather than having land or properties go to the highest bidder, it goes to the highest good.
In our case, we really focus on affordable housing. So the land that comes into the Spokane Land Bank is for affordable housing development. Across the country, there are more than 200 land banks and they have been put into effect to focus on vacant, abandoned, and dilapidated properties. In Washington state, we are adding underutilized. We really feel like there's land that government folks are holding and for-profit folks are holding, speculatively, that could go into the land bank to help us address the crisis.
DN: So where does the land bank get money to buy land?
AM: That's a great question. We had three properties, and we just sold one. We're very new, like two years old, so just a toddler in the scheme of things. And so right now, we've been using grants and the sale of our properties to be able to, like, purchase land, but we haven't yet.
The idea that we've taken to Olympia and that others are supportive of is that we have a state or city or county-backed land acquisition fund that would help us pull in land that maybe nonprofits aren't ready to—they don't have that capacity to pull it in. So we would pull it in, hold it for a time, and then get it into affordable housing. So the idea would be we would have that low-interest, state-backed fund that would be able to do that, and that would be part of the land acquisition, and it would seed itself because it would be a revolving loan fund or grants. It would be something that would help.
DN: So does the land bank just hold the land? Does it improve the land in any way? For example, if you bought land and there's some remediation that needed to be done?
AM: Yeah. Part of what we're doing in Spokane is we are the first nonprofit to receive a EPA brownfield grant, assessment grant. And so we got that by focusing on three under-invested, formerly red-lined neighborhoods, West Central, East Central, and Hillyard. We are working with the EPA to identify land that could be developed into affordable housing that might be a brownfield. And so we work with Department of Ecology and other folks when we find a brownfield to figure out what that remediation is and help get the funding so that it can get. So, yes, the answer is yes.
I just want to make sure that folks know that that is part of how we're funding the work right now is through that grant and trying to identify. Phase one environmental assessments and phase two environmental assessments cost money for affordable housing developers. And every little bit, it's such a thin margin for folks to get that housing out there that the more we can take off by holding land and keeping the cost down by performing those assessments means that more housing gets built.
So, we will and land banks across the country do improve land. They parcel it out. They work on brownfields.
They do some creative ways to pull property that has been sitting and causing challenges to neighborhoods into development or into, like, an asset. Not just affordable housing across the nation, but, like, day cares and art consortiums and community centers.
DN: You mentioned about 200 land banks across the nation. Are land banks very established in Washington?
AM: No. So, we are the only little rogue land bank in Washington. There are a couple of folks that are kind of coming alongside us or even ahead of us.
The Pierce County Community Development Corporation is doing a lot of amazing things and they do have that land acquisition fund and are pulling parcels in and have been doing this development hand-in-hand with a similar group that works in Tacoma.
But we are the only officially unofficial land bank in Washington State. We don't actually have the legislation to be able to scale the work that we're doing right now. So, right now, we're figuring out how to do it at a small scale in our community through that Brownfield grant, through donated properties for mission-aligned folks and through working with a group that is doing church land bank development called Liminal Lands.
So, if there's a company, an individual that says, 'I've got a parcel of land, I don't know what to do with it...'
DN: Can they just sell it to you? Can they give it to you? How does the process work?
AM: They can give me a call and we have a kind of an assessment tool that we would go through to make sure that the land that we're bringing in would be developable. We've had a couple of kind of swampy areas that would not be something that we could develop.
But the land that is currently in the land bank was donated, just a pure donation, and some of it was sold at a reduced cost. The property that we closed on in East Central was a nonprofit called Spear Community Program, and it was closing. They had been in business for like 50 years, and things had changed. And their partnership, their ministries, just were not, they didn't have the same volunteer group and supporters. So, they had decided to close and, in that closing, they really wanted the property to kind of keep a mission going and be part of the neighborhood in a meaningful way. That's when they contacted the land bank to get that property. So we did purchase that and half of the purchase price went to support mission community outreach of the price.
And then the other went to the land bank, and then we sold it to Take Up the Cause, which is a small developer in Spokane that is working on Black homeownership in Spokane. So, those are the things that we like to see, a lot of different community members coming together to improve the neighborhood.
DN: You went to Olympia last week. You testified before a House committee. Tell me what you were asking for.
AM: We were really just presenting about land banks and co-ownership models. And really, I think they were taking the time to look at some different things that are bubbling up, different ways to think about housing, all the way from what we're doing to co-ownership in taking on trailer parks to have a co-ownership model in those. And then from AARP to be doing kind of a service model where folks are, AARP and another, I don't remember the last one, but just a lot of different models that we can do. So, what I presented on was really what land banks can do and what we would need to do as we really start to make some inroads in this affordable housing crisis.
We were asking to hold the land tax exempt [from property taxes] while it's in the land bank, to be able to clear titles. It's really unsexy work, what land banks do.
So, these things are very kind of wonky, but they will help keep the land at a low price for affordable housing developers. So, clearing titles, tax, holding the land tax free, being able to take in and sell affordable housing developments that are larger.
One of the things that we're asking is that the state really allow for housing authorities, nonprofits, or public development agencies to be able to apply to be land banks and that we would have one per county. This would be a really coordinated effort. Because while everybody can land bank and this doesn't take away from that, Habitat for Humanity can land bank, Catholic Charities can land bank, Community Frameworks, all of these folks that are already doing good work can continue to hold their properties for development. But what this allows us to do is for our local community to have a plan and a pipeline for development and to take those things and hold them so that, you know, there are times where we see properties that we could get in the land bank, but nobody can move on them fast enough. And so, they end up being kind of flipped in a sort of, what is the saying, lipstick on a pig. They kind of paint the outside and then get it out and jack up the prices in the neighborhood. So, those properties we could potentially get into the land bank.
I think the last piece of it is for transfers of tax-delinquent property. We are asking for this, and this is sort of a long shot, but the first right of refusal on tax-delinquent properties that the county brings in. Washington doesn't have a lot of those.
We have a really long foreclosure process. It's usually around three years. They're usually pretty challenged properties. And so, being able to potentially pull those in to the land bank for development, too.
Underinvestment in affordable housing has been happening since the late 1970s and the '80s. So this is not an overnight fix, and land banks certainly are not that, but it's a tool. It's a tool that our community can use that can resist speculation.
I live in West Central. The house next to me was vacant for almost 40 years and the person who owned it was in the neighborhood, but they didn't want to sell it until they could get a certain amount. It wasn't tax-delinquent, but it had a lot of other issues, things like that.
I think the land bank can be an option for folks in that to help us move forward. A lot of folks, a lot of smaller developers, have a hard time doing affordable housing development, have a hard time finding land that they can sort of cut their teeth on in affordable housing development. I think the land bank, the way that we're visioning it, could help in that a lot.
