This literature review will benefit policymakers, particularly in understanding how different communities are addressing rising rates of vacancy and how property abandonment has become a common characteristic of contemporary blight. The research also provides new and beneficial knowledge for local communities by making the changing patterns of neighborhoods more transparent. Further, for underrepresented and disadvantaged groups and their advocates struggling with blighted neighborhoods, this research will underscore many of the factors affecting their condition.
With a better understanding of blight, Keep America Beautiful, working in conjunction with its State Leaders Council and Econsult Solutions, now is developing new tools and resources to better measure the many impacts of blight. The groups are working on a community blight calculator, which will take into consideration what has been learned and what will be most beneficial to communities seeking to measure the scale and scope of blight in their effort to remediate the problem.
Blight is a complex legal and policy concept with a long history. This pioneering synthesis of the literature will help local officials and community-based organizations, such as Keep America Beautiful and its affiliates, fashion more holistic strategies to address the community impacts of blighted properties and facilitate neighborhood revitalization.
Report co-author Lee Huang of Econsult Solutions asserts: “What we found in our work is that ‘blight’ looks like and means different things in different settings. Our review of the existing literature really underscores this point, and has yielded a very rich look at how various communities define and deal with blight.”
What Is Blight?
Historic and contemporary meanings of blight have shifted over time and from place to place. Blight’s history started with early 20th century housing reformers who described increasing concentrations of substandard living conditions and derelict properties as akin to the spread of plant blight. Blight really means the physical changes of properties that cause harmful impacts on the life cycle of neighborhoods and its residents.
By studying previous research reports about blight, the authors of “Charting the Multiple Meanings of Blight: A National Literature Review on Addressing the Community Impacts of Blighted Properties” found:
- Blight is a complex and dynamic phenomenon with different meanings and actions shaped by a variety of actors and institutions.
- Blighted properties also shift with the times and place. While most of the articles and reports focused on urban blight, deteriorating properties are now a challenge for suburban and rural areas thanks in part to increasing concentrations of foreclosed homes and the spatial diffusion of poverty.
- Blight is a symptom of larger social forces, such as poverty, and includes a wide variety of actions/remedies primarily led by local governments and community-based groups.
- Blight’s legal and policy roots derive from the longstanding principles of public nuisances.
- Blight also became a legal justification for the use of eminent domain that destroyed many inner-city African-American communities throughout the country.
While early legal scholarship focused on traditional blighting conditions, such as litter, visual blight from signs and eminent-domain processes, current case studies and analysis focus on how to abate and reclaim vacant properties.
PHOTOS: Keep Cincinnati Beautiful