Which buildings could meet the RESIDE Act's vacant-and-abandoned test

What the law requires

The RESIDE Act authorizes HUD grants to convert a “vacant and abandoned building” into attainable housing. The definition has two parts. The building must have been built for use as a warehouse, factory, mall, strip mall, hotel, or another industrial or commercial use, which covers office buildings. And it must meet one of two conditions. Either a code enforcement inspection found it unsafe, at least 90 days have passed since the owner was notified of the deficiencies, and the owner took no corrective action. Or it is subject to court-ordered receivership or nuisance abatement related to abandonment, or otherwise meets the state’s legal definition of abandoned property.

An office building with a high vacancy rate, or even no tenants at all, meets neither condition on that fact alone. The first condition turns on an unsafe finding the owner has not fixed, the second on a court or state-law finding of abandonment.

How many screened buildings could meet the test

Each city's unsafe-building cases are matched to the screened footprints they fall in, or within 15 feet of.

How this is checked

Philadelphia’s Department of Licenses and Inspections publishes its open unsafe and imminently dangerous structure cases with the violation date. Boston’s Inspectional Services publishes building violations, filtered here to the state building code’s unsafe-structure sections (780 CMR 116 and 121); that dataset gives only the date of a case’s latest status, so the 90-day count runs from that date and can only understate a case’s age. San Francisco’s Department of Building Inspection publishes its notices of violation as free text, filtered here to items citing an unsafe or dangerous building; items about vacancy alone are left out, because vacancy is not a finding that a building is unsafe. Denver and San Jose do not publish code enforcement cases as open data.

A building is listed as a possible match when it has a case that is still open and dated at least 90 days before the check date. That is not proof the first prong is met. The law counts 90 days from when the owner was notified and requires that no corrective action was taken. A case’s violation or status date is not its notice date, and an open case does not show whether anything was fixed. Both are in the city’s file, which a city applying for a grant would check.

Questions

Sources

1. U.S. Government Publishing Office, “Public Law 119-101, Section 210”
2. Philadelphia, “Philadelphia Department of Licenses and Inspections, unsafe and imminently dangerous structures”
3. Boston, “City of Boston Inspectional Services, Building and Property Violations (unsafe-structure codes, 780 CMR 116 and 121)”
4. San Francisco, “San Francisco Department of Building Inspection, Notices of Violation citing an unsafe or vacant building”

More on the law: The ROAD to Housing Act explained · Environmental review changes · CDBG and HOME changes · Opportunity Zones · The Innovation Fund · Innovation Fund reforms, city by city · The Build Now Act · Manufactured housing and the chassis rule · Chassis-free manufactured homes by state · Manufactured home zoning by city · RESIDE Act funding status · How RESIDE grants should be sized · The ban on large investors buying homes