Reprinted from www.kcur.org

It was a tearful, dramatic day five years ago, when the school board of Kansas City Public Schools decided to close 21 buildings in order to adjust to a shrinking student population. That was in addition to nine previously closed schools, leaving the district with 30 surplus buildings.

Kansas City is not the only district doing this around the country … Detroit, Philadelphia and Chicago all closed large numbers of school buildings in recent years. But in the wake of the school closures, Kansas City developed what was considered a pioneering program, asking communities to be part of the process of determining what would happen to the empty buildings.

Read the full article at http://kcur.org/post/shuttered-schools-still-part-kansas-citys-landscape

Reprinted from www.southlandcommercial.com

One of the most important things to have, when representing a buyer in the purchase of real estate, is a commercial property inspection. This should be done by a qualified property inspector. Having this type of inspection ensures that the buyer has “looked under the hood” and knows exactly what they are getting. What can appear to be a good purchase can sometimes quickly turn into a money pit with multiple unseen issues that the buyer would be inheriting.

A list of the items to be checked during a commercial property inspection:

• Structural Issues
• Mold (WDO Inspection)
• HVAC
• Roof
• Environmental Contamination
• Plumbing
• Electrical
• Hazardous Materials (lead paint, asbestos)
• Proper Insulation
• Fire/Life Safety Issues
• ADA compliance issues
• Foundation issues

Read the full article at southlandcommercial.com

Reprinted from www.timesunion.com

Guilderland

The town cracked down on vacant properties Tuesday night by unanimously adopting an ordinance that requires owners of vacant structures to register them, keep them neat and put up a $5,000 bond that the town can tap into if the property needs to be cleaned up.

“These properties don’t generally become public health issues, but they become unsightly and rundown,” said Town Supervisor Ken Runion.

To read the entire article, click here

Reprinted from Detroit Free Press

Detroit’s fight to reduce blight has begun to focus more on vacant, dilapidated business properties marring the city’s landscape, with city lawyers quietly taking dozens of property owners to court in recent months to get them to either fix up or demolish their buildings.

A team of six lawyers in Detroit’s Law Department has brought more than 50 lawsuits in Wayne County Circuit Court against commercial property owners in the last nine months, many targeting blighted buildings that help tarnish neighborhoods.

Targeted so far have been the owners of properties ranging from a large, dilapidated apartment complex on the city’s west side, to a downtown high-rise and even a two-family duplex near Indian Village, one of the Detroit’s more stable neighborhoods.

To read the entire article, click here

Reprinted from www.citylab.com

In case you haven’t heard, suburban malls are on the way out (sorry Paul Blart). Some have become abandoned wastelands popular for ruin porn. Others have been torn down and turned into industrial sites.

According to Ellen Dunham-Jones, an architect and professor at Georgia Tech, there are about 1,200 enclosed malls in the United States, and about one-third of them are dead or dying. That’s because developers rapidly overbuilt malls in the 20th century, she said: The U.S. has twice as much square footage in shopping centers per capita than the rest of the world, and six times as much as countries in Europe.

“The malls died for a reason,” she told me. “We were way over retailed.”

To read the entire article click here