Lots sold by city still vacant, New York Acorn report says

Real Estate Weekly, March 5, 2003 by Steve Viuker

Hundreds of vacant lots that the city has sold at auction since 1996 remain empty trash-strewn lots that blight neighborhoods in desperate need of more housing, according to a report by New York Acorn.

The housing group found that in 10 neighborhoods with a great deal of vacant land, 66% of the vacant lots that the city has sold at public auction since 1996 remain vacant. The report also called for a moratorium on future city land auctions.

Councilman James Sanders Jr., the chairman of the Council's Economic Development Committee, said that he supported the group's call to end the auctions. "This highest-bidder system has led to speculation and to people who are flipping land and just sitting on this land as we have a homeless problem that seems to skyrocket," he said.

The neighborhoods that the report studied because of their large number of vacant lots were Mott Haven, Hunts Point, Morrisania and Highbridge in the Bronx, Far Rockaway in Queens and Bedford-Stuyvesant, Bushwick, Crown Heights, Brownsville and East New York in Brooklyn.

City sales of vacant lots accelerated in the 1990's in an effort to get more land on the tax rolls and have declined in recent years, the report found. In 1999, the peak year, the city took in $100 million by selling vacant lots. Last year, the amount was just $4.9 million.

The Bloomberg administration, which outlined a plan in December to build thousands of new housing units for the city, is convening a task force to look at the sale of city-owned land but has no plans to stop the auctions.