Battling blight

When Rosalind Bond finishes her work day and goes home, she is unable to enjoy the outdoors in her neighborhood on Springfield’s east side.

The two-story house next door to her neatly kept ranch-style home in the 1400 block of East Jackson Street has been abandoned for more than five years and, to put it mildly, in disrepair.

The roof and siding are decaying. Weeds, trees and other foliage on the vacant property have grown so high that most of the front of the house is obscured. Holes in the structure, as well as a back door that remains cracked open, have welcomed stray cats, raccoons, opossums, at least one groundhog, and possibly some human visitors from time to time.

After living in her home for 26 years, Bond, 74, innovation coordinator for the nonprofit Springfield Project, said she is scared to go outside for fear of having to deal with critters scampering in and out next door. She even avoids her backyard because the foliage on the neighboring building darkens her own backyard during the day.

She also doesn’t want any interactions with people who use the alley to regularly dump bags of household garbage in the vacant house’s backyard.

“When I go in the house, I stay in the house,” Bond said. “I’ve lived with this long enough. This is just ridiculous.”

After years of administrative and court proceedings initiated by the city, the decrepit building is on the city’s demolition list and could be torn down this fall. But the situation is emblematic of problems that Bond and other residents of the city’s older neighborhoods have faced for years.

Deteriorating properties, abandoned homes and fly dumping in residential neighborhoods are long-standing issues in Springfield and have been the focus of a “working group” from the City Council consisting of three of the council’s elected ward representatives.

The group, which was formed last year and met numerous times this year, discussed all of those issues and more. Little has emerged thus far when it comes to potential ordinances or firm policy recommendations, though the alderpersons say several initiatives are in the works.

“I want to make sure we have the best information before we start asking for changes,” Ward 8 Ald. Erin Conley, a member of the working group, told Illinois Times.

“This is taking longer than I would have hoped for,” she said. But getting council members and the public engaged in an issue ahead of time is “how you get a reasonable ordinance passed,” she said, “and that’s how you get something that can actively improve the quality of life.”

Landlord registration and rental inspections

Two of the major solutions pushed for years by the Springfield Independent Coalition for Our Neighborhoods (ICON) were a comprehensive landlord registration and inspection program for rental properties and reforms to the city’s garbage collection system so all residents are billed for garbage service through their City Water, Light and Power bills instead of by individual waste haulers.

The lack of movement in the direction of these options in the city under former mayor Jim Langfelder and now current Mayor Misty Buscher, who took office in May 2023, is disappointing, according to the leader of ICON, a nonprofit that advocates for all neighborhoods and especially older sections of Springfield.

“If we are serious about the quality of life in Springfield and making sure that every neighborhood in the city is safe, clean and livable, then it needs to be a top priority of the mayor and City Council, involving systemic changes and process improvements and funding commitments,” said ICON President Mark Mahoney.

Mahoney, who served as director of the Springfield Department of Public Works under former mayors J. Michael Houston and Jim Langfelder, said ICON is frustrated that more progress hasn’t been made on landlord registration and a “comprehensive, user-friendly system” for garbage collection.

“Most of these initiatives are not new, and the mayor and council should be well-prepared and ready to move forward,” Mahoney said. “At some point, studies, working groups, etc., need to translate into real action. A year is time enough for that to have happened if it was a true priority.”

Buscher said her administration is making progress to improve the city’s housing stock and in June launched an online “cited properties dashboard” that a news release said is “designed to provide transparency and facilitate a better understanding of property violations in Springfield.”

Buscher said in the release: “We believe this tool will empower our community by providing them with valuable information about property conditions in their neighborhoods. Our goal is to create a collaborative effort in maintaining and improving our city’s housing standards.”

Mahoney said the database is “great, but it doesn’t get to the root of the problems.”

Buscher, whose husband is part-owner of The Real Estate Group, one of the largest real estate agencies in Springfield, isn’t a fan of a proposed landlord registration program and said registration won’t necessarily lead to action by landlords to improve and maintain their properties.

Mahoney believes it’s unlikely there will be enough votes among the 10 alderpersons to enact major changes without Buscher’s leadership, since most supported her candidacy when she denied Langfelder’s bid for a third four-year term.

“The mayor has a pretty good lock on many of them,” he said. “We have a small-town mentality as a community, but we are a city.”

Many Illinois communities comparable in size to Springfield, including Bloomington, Peoria and Joliet, have systems in which landlords are required to register with the city, Mahoney said.

Registration promotes ease of communication when there are code violations or other problems, and he said registration is paired with regular inspections to spot problems early, when they are less expensive to fix.

The director of a landlord registration program in Bloomington, who later operated Joliet’s program, spoke to ICON and Springfield Public Works Director Dave Fuchs about those communities’ programs in the spring.

Fuchs said no one on the City Council is satisfied with the way the housing code is enforced in Springfield, and everyone wants to make the process more rigorous.

If Springfield adopted a program similar to Bloomington or Joliet, Springfield would have to spend more or reallocate from other areas of city spending to expand inspections, he said. The current code enforcement system is driven by complaints.

Conley said a good compromise might be for the council to require that all rental properties register with the city the contact information of a person with the power to make improvements. But she hasn’t ruled out broader action.

“The next step is to really bring a broader discussion to the (council) and drill down to what areas we want to address next,” she said. “Let’s look at things that work in other communities.”

Conley said she would like Public Works officials to outline for the council the challenges with expanding rental property inspections. Conley, who works a full-time job with the state, said she hasn’t had a chance to talk with Public Works about making such a presentation.

Ward 2 Ald. Shawn Gregory, a member of the working group whose ward covers much of the east side and part of downtown, isn’t currently in favor of requiring all landlords to register but said he is willing to listen to any proposal.

“Anything that will push us forward, I’m open to it,” he said.

When the cited properties database launched, almost half of the complaints lodged by the city were against properties in Ward 2, which has many of the city’s lowest-income neighborhoods. Gregory said the database helps him make the case about “how drastic our needs are.

“There’s a sense in our community of, ‘We’re tired of looking at this. We want these things fixed,'” Gregory said.

In the coming months, he said he plans to introduce an ordinance that would create a program to financially assist responsible developers who would purchase some of the properties that the city has acquired on the east side to build or rehabilitate homes.

And Gregory said he plans to introduce an ordinance in coming weeks that would create a “reparations commission” made up of Black leaders and other Black residents.

Gregory, who is Black, said the commission would be similar to a panel operating at the state level and in Evanston and would recommend budget priorities for the council to assist residents of mostly Black neighborhoods whose families have been economically disadvantaged by the legacy of slavery in the United States.

“It should be a repair of everything that has been done,” he said. “The key is investments in people.”

Reparations could take the form of cash payments to residents and economic incentives, he said.

“This is something I think we’re missing in this city – a group to really look at the Black struggle and how we get it better in Springfield,” Gregory said. “We have a lot of groups doing fantastic work and concentrating on some fantastic projects. And I just think it’s time for us to give priority to a much-needed problem that’s been studied and that we’ve talked about. I’m just to the point where I’m tired of talking, and I want to see some action done and some concrete things.”

Garbage collection

Mahoney said the city would experience less fly dumping, such as what Gregory has seen in his ward, if everyone contracted with a waste hauler for garbage collection, as is currently required in city ordinance.

ICON believes the easiest way to enforce this requirement would be to put the fees residents and landlords pay for garbage collection on their regular CWLP bills.

Many Illinois cities, including Rockford, Bloomington, Normal and Peoria, either pick up garbage as part of city services or contract with a single waste hauler and collect fees for the service through water bills, general revenues or property taxes.

Lake Area Disposal Service Inc., a locally owned company and one of two companies picking up residential garbage in Springfield, has resisted proposals to allow the city to collect garbage hauling fees on behalf of Lake Area and the other hauler, publicly traded Republic Services.

A sales manager for Lake Area has said such a collection method would make it easier for the city to contract with one hauler, a situation that Lake Area fears could put the 92-year-old company out of business.

Mahoney said the city also should consider requiring any waste haulers to pick up large items to make the process more user-friendly rather than contracting with a nonprofit, Habitat for Humanity, for large-item pickup.

Conley said she is waiting for responses from CWLP officials and Greg Moredock, the city’s chief legal counsel, for information on the challenges of enacting major changes in garbage collection.

“I want the easiest solution to be the solution,” she said. “I want to know what will work. … We’ve had a lot going on in the city. … We’re dealing with a city that was chronically understaffed for a long time.”

Gregory said he would like to see Public Works add a second crew to collect garbage that is dumped in yards, along roads and in ditches. That option was discussed by the council but didn’t make it into the current fiscal year budget.

Ward 5 Ald. Lakeisha Purchase, who serves on the working group with Conley and Gregory, said discussion in the group resulted in a proposal to create a form that would be filled out by tenants and landlords, then given to city officials so the city knows who is responsible for paying for garbage pickup and it’s easier to identify violators.

The group will continue to meet, Purchase said.

On the issue of garbage collection, Buscher said she is open to reforms but, as she said for an Illinois Times story in April, she has been too busy with other issues – such as hiring more people for understaffed agencies – to turn her attention to garbage just yet.

“I’ve been mayor 15 months now, and I can’t fix every problem in a broad-brush stroke overnight,” she said. “Issues are prioritized, and we’re doing the big, heavy lifts first.”

Blighted properties

When Gregory looked at the dilapidated building next to his constituent’s home on East Jackson Street, he said, “One house like this hurts the whole dang block.”

Legal hurdles to tear down such structures can take several years, Moredock said. That’s because he said city ordinances and state law require legal notice to lien holders and the property owner, and sometimes heirs in the case of a death.

There are also legally mandated waiting periods for responses and appeals before the city can demolish private property, he said.

The process can take even longer if the property owner continues to pay for utilities long after a property is vacant, Moredock said.

The City Council has taken steps in recent years to reduce administrative delays under the city’s control and has appropriated more money for demolitions, he said. City officials would prefer to create incentives for rehabbing properties rather than creating more vacant lots, but some properties are beyond repair, he said.

The city in 2023 handled 725 cases in its administrative court dealing with housing-code violations. The city completed 44 potential demolition cases. And among those 44 cases, 10 houses were demolished by the city, 19 were demolished by property owners and the remaining 15 were repaired by their owners, Moredock said.

That same year, there were 127 pending demolition cases. Of those, 78 were awaiting demolition, and the remainder were awaiting further legal action, Moredock said.

The city is about to request bids for the demolition of 35 houses, Public Works Director Fuchs said.

“The amount spent and the number of houses demoed really depends, but I can say the average is about $500,000 per year and about 35 houses, but this varies year by year and depends on the grants available,” Fuchs said.

The houses being demolished for the rail relocation project “are entirely separate from this,” he said.

“The basic problem is we’ve got a lot of dilapidated properties in the city of Springfield, and we’re working our way down the list,” Fuchs said.

Fuchs said the five zone managers who were hired this year by the Buscher administration, with each manager assigned to two wards, have assisted residents concerned about dilapidated properties, fly dumping and other neighborhood issues.

“They are available to listen to citizens’ complaints,” he said. “They are able to explain the various processes involved in all of these complaints, and that seems to help.”

By the time a property gets on the city’s demolition list and the city seeks demolition contractors, Moredock said, “The neighbors have been annoyed with this property for years.”

That’s the case for the East Jackson house as well as for a dilapidated home mostly surrounded by overgrown trees and foliage in the 4000 block of Marie Drive in the Irisdale Subdivision on the city’s northeast side.

Neighbors refer to the home, which has been vacant for more than a decade, as the “haunted house.”

Victoria Edmison, 61, a retired city worker who lives next door and was one of Irisdale’s original homeowners 30 years ago, said she tries to avoid looking at the abandoned property, which she referred to as “an uncontrollable mess.”

She said she is confident the decaying, one-story building has reduced the value of the home she shares with her husband, Michael.

The city has arranged for grass on the property to be cut, but the foliage remains.

Edmison said she was glad to learn from Illinois Times that the house likely will be torn down by the end of the year.

“It’s just been hard to be happy here,” she said.Ward 3 Ald. Roy Williams Jr., in whose ward the Marie Drive property sits, said he’s frustrated that it takes so long to tear down these types of properties.

“It shouldn’t take 10 years,” he said. “It’s a flaw in our system.”

Dean Olsen is a senior staff writer at Illinois Times. He can be reached at 217-679-7810, dolsen@illinoistimes.com or x.com/DeanOlsenIT.

This article appears in Battling blight.