Emily Badger: "How cities are starting to turn back decades of creeping urban blight"

Emily Badger has a blog called Wonkblog. It's a blog that's part of The Washington Post. This post here at Wonkblog is a must read if revitalization (or "gentrification" if you're opposed to community revitalization) of cities is an interest of yours:

A VACANT LOT is a contagious place. [emphasis added] Signs of its disorder — graffiti, car parts, trash ditched in the overgrown weeds — have a way of spreading. This is how it happens: First, the one lot drags down neighboring property values, discouraging people who live there from investing in their own homes, deterring banks that could lend them money, and unnerving buyers who might move in. Then the behavior that blight provokes multiplies, too: People who see litter, for instance, are more likely to litter themselves. Finally, blighted lots become good places to stash weapons and sell drugs, and the crime that follows depresses the block even more until what’s the point of picking up the trash when you can just move out, too?
     And so these places multiply — “there’s one, and then there’s another, and then there are two more, and then there’s another," says Glenda D. Price, the president of the Detroit Public Schools Foundation and a co-chair of the city’s blight removal task force. "It just seems to creep.”

Many of the vacant lots around the City of Lake Worth have new homes constructed by the CRA and there also many homes by Habitat for Humanity. It's those new homes that will help revitalize many parts of our most neglected neighborhoods.

If you're addicted to the daily news cycle of shootings, traffic snarls, and general dissatisfaction that the media is convinced increases viewership then it's easy to miss the big picture, especially in our City, Lake Worth. However things are turning around here, too fast for some and too slow for others. Today we find out the population of Lake Worth is one of the fastest growing in Palm Beach County, crime is down county-wide, and infrastructure work is moving forward in some of our most neglected neighborhoods. A new townhome community is being constructed downtown, our City leaders are getting positive feedback from the county and state legislators, we may be getting new street lights throughout the City, new water pipes are being talked about, and there's talk of slowing down traffic in our main arterial roads, and on and on it goes.

We're not talking any more about when dilapidated structures will be demolished; now the conversation is, "which one is next".