![]() The City of Detroit, an urban government that famously suffers resource limitations, just this month used that authority to go after hundreds of delinquent properties in three large lawsuits. The Michigan Supreme Court has interpreted this provision to grant municipalities broad authority to create and enforce public nuisance regimes. An example outside Eisenberg’s piece is illustrative. ![]() States could, for example, provide even small towns with expansive “home rule” authorities. Yet Eisenberg also stresses that state governments must empower rural municipalities and counties. They could also, as towns in West Virginia have, impose liens on fire insurance proceeds to force absent owners to pay. For the ambitious, Eisenberg outlines measures to extradite out-of-state owners that fail to maintain their rural properties. Just as consumers can act as “ private attorneys general,” rural residents could act as private code officers.īut working within their means does not mean that local rural governments have to be timid. consumer protection laws, which provide individuals the means and financial motive to sue when government resources are lacking. This proposal resembles the enforcement of U.S. Local governments could also empower local residents to go after blighted property through conservatorship laws. If state law allows it, a more politically palatable approach is for local governments to share resources, like law enforcement, through intergovernmental agreements. Understandably, though, local residents tend to resist mergers that erase historical boundaries. This could, on one extreme, occur by merger. I highlight only a small sample here.įor starters, local governments could expand their available resources by drawing upon neighboring jurisdictions. Instead, Eisenberg identifies a series of realistic local, state, and regional approaches. Many common approaches by urban governments-like aggressive eminent domain usage-are simply too “drastic” for their rural counterparts. Local rural governments often lack the fiscal resources to pursue solutions in earnest because of declining revenues, a situation made even more difficult by a pure human capital shortfall due to a chronic shortage of rural attorneys, meaning there are not enough legal resources to support solutions.Įisenberg centers these limits on local rural governments in her solutions. Though the law provides mechanisms to hold these owners accountable, the procedures are often tedious and span years. Further complications come from the problem of absentee landowners who sometimes live out of state. But many states’ foreclosure proceedings are drawn-out and confusing. Tax foreclosure, for example, is a common cause of blight, rural and urban alike. The theme of the last cause is complexity. And the effects of globalization and agricultural consolidation are a tragic but all-too-familiar story. Courts tend to protect rural land from public control and only reluctantly conclude that rural properties are nuisances. ![]() Policymakers at the local, state, and regional levels have much to learn from Eisenberg’s piece.Įisenberg sorts causes of rural blight into three buckets: judicial doctrines that overly protect rural property rights, macroeconomic changes that steadily undermined rural economic livelihoods, and proximate causes that sap local governments’ power to address blighted properties. As my title suggests, Eisenberg’s analysis is deeply practical, identifying real challenges that rural governments face while pinpointing solutions learned in other communities. This last step is the piece’s chief virtue. The literature rarely acknowledges blight in rural areas and even less frequently prescribes solutions tailored to rural spaces.Īnn Eisenberg’s aptly-named Rural Blight is a welcome effort to fill this gap and builds on the author’s earlier work. And more insidiously, the term historically implied a particular target for removal: communities of color. Yet when blight is discussed, it is almost inevitably preceded by the same adjective: urban. President Trump’s inauguration speech referenced “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones.” Think tanks like Pew discuss blight’s harmful effects today much as groups like RAND did decades ago. ![]() Blight-empty and decaying buildings that harm their communities-receives significant attention from politicians and wonks alike.
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