Portsmouth joins Norfolk in efforts to eliminate blighted lots

By Meghan Hoyer
The Virginian-Pilot

Norfolk and Portsmouth, tired of boarded-up houses blighting their neighborhoods, are taking aim at the owners of such properties, pushing for changes in state laws that they hope will drastically curb the problem.

City leaders say the aggressive changes are needed to stem an issue that hurts property values, contributes to blight, and often leads to safety issues, crime and fires. Boarded-up and vacant houses have been found to decrease the value of neighboring homes by as much as $7,500.

According to the 2000 census, Norfolk and Portsmouth each have about twice as many vacant properties as any other city in Hampton Roads.

“We need to be aggressive in doing this,” Norfolk Vice Mayor Anthony L. Burfoot said. “It’s an atrocity that a property will be boarded up in a community for five years, 10 years.”

On Tuesday, the Portsmouth City Council voted to ask the General Assembly to study the effect of vacant housing on urban cities, and supported a strongly worded law proposed earlier this month by Norfolk that would severely punish homeowners who keep properties boarded up for more than a year.

Under Norfolk’s proposal, owners of boarded-up houses would be charged $2,500 annually.

They would be required to submit rehabilitation plans quickly. Owners who fail to do so or finish renovations would face additional fines of $250 each quarter.

A story in The Virginian-Pilot this summer revealed that Virginia’s General Assembly has restricted cities’ ability to penalize people who abandon their houses. As long as houses are secure and not a safety hazard, the law allows them to sit vacant. State law also prohibits cities from fining property owners and limits vacant housing registry fees to $25 a year – an amount set in 1993.

That minimal fee gives owners little incentive to improve vacant properties, critics have said.

State law also prevents Norfolk and Portsmouth from using measures that have been successful in other states. For instance, Wilmington, Del., reduced its number of vacant houses by boosting fines to thousands of dollars a year, making the cost of abandoning property prohibitive.

“When you look at some of the areas we’re trying to revitalize, some of the most fragile communities in our city, we have a plethora of boarded-up houses,” Burfoot said. “And the state law makes it almost impossible, if these properties are boarded up and secured, to do anything about it.”

On Tuesday, members of Portsmouth’s Neighborhood Quality Task Force, who attended a national conference this summer on the issue, showed the council pictures of vacant and boarded-up properties.

“Abandonment is not a victimless crime,” chairwoman Kerry Messer said, pointing to the picture of a house in Brighton. “Someone has to live beside that property.”

The task force thinks Portsmouth leaders should change how the city uses a property profiling system, which tracks code violations and building permits. The hope is that one system could track tax delinquencies, police and fire calls, and other indications that a property has become troubled, Messer said.

Task force members said putting data into one centralized system could avoid “future CM Development disasters,” a reference to the Virginia Beach-based company that once owned more than 60 properties in Portsmouth, roughly half of which were vacant and in disrepair.

Portsmouth officials were unaware of CM Development’s effect on the community until The Virginian-Pilot published an investigation about the business in March.

The task force also recommended tougher fines for severe code violations and prosecuting code problems as a criminal, rather than civil, matter.

Council members said they’ll review the task force’s recommendations in upcoming months.

“It’s some unique and innovative stuff in there,” Councilman Bill Moody Jr. said. “What you’ve given us is a lot of food for thought and action.”

Meghan Hoyer, (757) 446-2293,