The City of Freeport received a grant provided by the Land Bank Capacity Program (LBCP) of the Illinois Housing Development Authority (IHDA), created to help empower local and regional revitalization efforts by increasing planning and land bank capacity statewide outside of the Chicago Metropolitan Area. Teska conducted a feasibility analysis using multiple datasets to identify and prioritize properties for acquisition by a land bank, including tax sale history, condemnation properties, demolished properties, planned demolitions, census tract vacancy rates, and by location in the floodway or floodplain.
Residents and businesses north of the Pecatonica River in the City of Freeport are primarily located within the floodway and experience extreme flooding events (four since 2010). These floods are detrimental to public health and safety and have become more frequent, leading the City to prepare a Pre-Disaster Mitigation (PDM) Grant application in 2019 in an effort to secure funds to help residents relocate and return the area to green space. Secondarily, properties throughout Freeport have experienced a combination of multiple tax sales, condemnation and/or demolition and many are clustered in Freeport’s older neighborhoods. At the time of analysis, the Stephenson County Trustee owned 93 properties as a result of unredeemed tax sales and held the lien to 343 properties. The analysis finds that the creation of a land bank in Freeport, possibly as an extension of the Northern Illinois Land Bank, could help address the need to help residents relocate out of the floodway, reduce the number of properties owned and managed by the County Trustee, and improve the use and value of properties in historic neighborhoods.
