As I knock on doors around the city meeting voters, I’m struck by the number of empty houses I encounter. I’m not just talking about depressed central city areas. Empty houses now exist in our working and middle class neighborhoods as well. The windows are not boarded up. Someone is cutting the grass. No for sale sign is posted in the front lawn. From the sidewalk, the house appears to be occupied, but peering through the window, I see no furniture, no sign of life.
From the neighbors, I’ve discovered what has happened to some of the properties. In some cases, a grandparent recently passed away or is in a nursing home. The children and grandchildren have decided just to hang onto the property for a while, pay the taxes, keep up the house, and wait until the economy turns around before placing it on the market.
In other cases, a homeowner has moved for employment reasons. No one is interested in buying the home so renting the unit out might become an option.
Milwaukee Public Schools is in the same dilemma. We have a lot of empty school buildings we will never use, but our chance of selling those properties right now is pretty remote. When I attended a school closing conference a year ago, I discovered that most school districts just drain the pipes and board up the windows. Then thieves come in and start tearing out anything of value. In the end, the buildings become totally worthless. The abandoned building becomes a blight on the community decreasing property values all around.
In Milwaukee, we still cut the grass, keep the heat just high enough to prevent water pipes from freezing, and shovel the sidewalks in the winter. By all outward appearances, the schools are still open. Other school districts were shocked to discover that Milwaukee’s empty schools rarely even have windows broken or other acts of destruction.
It costs Milwaukee tens of thousands of dollars to maintain an empty building, but it would cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars to tear the same building down. Pressures from citizens and other governmental officials are demanding that we get rid of our excess property, but selling this property in the present economic conditions is easier said than done. Even prime real estate like the Park West Freeway corridor property has trouble finding buyers.
So like the family members who just don’t know what to do with grandma’s house, MPS keeps cutting the grass and shoveling the snow. At what point do we cut our losses? Do we just give the buildings away? Do we spend millions of dollars tearing down old buildings? And it will cost us millions of dollars to tear those buildings down. There are no easy answers in this economy.
