At Catapult, our mission is to ensure systematically disenfranchised communities can meaningfully achieve economic justice and lead dignified and equitable lives. This involves providing support to Black and brown communities in establishing and preserving generational wealth by creating and maintaining valuable assets that contribute to long-term financial stability and security for future generations.
But when we talk about generational wealth building, we tend to focus on the individual, on what they can do to save money, become a homeowner, or start a business. While all of these things are important, there’s a bigger driver of wealth at play that often gets overlooked — the role of community development.
Lessons from St. Louis
Community development was a key topic of discussion at the latest Reclaiming Vacant Properties Conference hosted by The Center for Community Progress, a national nonprofit dedicated to transforming vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated properties into community assets. The conference was held in St. Louis, Missouri from October 9-11. Catapult’s executive director, Tammy Thompson, was invited to attend the conference by the Pittsburgh Land Bank and spoke on a panel as one of JPMorgan Chase’s 2024 grant awardees.
The panel, “Supporting Community Revitalization: A Conversation with Practitioners,” explored how nonprofits across the US approach revitalization in their communities. During the one-and-a-half-hour session, Thompson shared her thoughts on a topic that she feels doesn’t get enough air time — wealth theft.
“I talked about how not addressing vacant, blighted, and abandoned property is stealing people’s generational wealth, and how it’s important for land banks, cities, and municipalities to address it, because the longer they wait, the less wealth that primarily Black and brown people are building,” Thompson said.
Throughout the session, Thompson highlighted Catapult’s new CLEAR program and partnership with Rising Tide Partners which aims to make a dent in this issue in Pittsburgh. The program works by first helping families gain clean titles to their homes and make much-needed home repairs, and then by zooming out and addressing the blight and vacancy surrounding them.
“It's so in my face because this is what we're seeing as we're trying to help these families resolve tangled title issues and repairs. We're doing all of this to try to help people so that they can start to build generational wealth, but the reality is we're not helping them protect generational wealth if there's no wealth being built in these communities — what we're actually helping them do is transfer debt. As long as these communities are in this condition, they're never going to see a return on their investment. And it's not right.”
Addressing vacancy in Pittsburgh
According to a report by the Center for Community Progress, there are approximately 23,757 existing vacant properties spread across the city of Pittsburgh. Over the past decade, the number of abandoned homes and lots doubled in size, with one in five carrying code violations, including collapsed roofs, shattered windows, and electrical hazards.
This longstanding issue has gained renewed attention under Mayor Ed Gainey’s administration, leading to efforts to address it more effectively—including the revitalization of the Pittsburgh Land Bank (PLB). The PLB is designed to manage the city’s deteriorated, tax-foreclosed properties by resolving title complications, facilitating the demolition of structures to make way for affordable housing, or rehabilitating salvageable properties and selling them to individuals who may otherwise struggle to afford homeownership.
In 2024, the land bank introduced a new pilot program to make it easier for private buyers to access the agency’s inventory. The new Residential Rehab Program broadens PLB’s reach beyond nonprofit and government developers, opening the door for individual prospective homeowners and making affordable fixer-upper homes more accessible to lower-income residents.
However, Thompson emphasizes that meaningful progress depends on the approval of a proposed intergovernmental agreement, which would enable the land bank to acquire city-owned properties at a fixed price rather than navigating the complex process of clearing back taxes and liens.
A nationwide problem with shared solutions
What the Reclaiming Vacant Properties conference underscored is that Pittsburgh is not alone in this battle, nor in the fight to find solutions.
“This is not just a Pittsburgh issue. There’s a whole country full of cities and municipalities that are dealing with excessive blight and abandonment,” Thompson shared. “I also learned that there’s a lot of national support around vacant property and how to develop a plan around getting that property back online for communities.”
This national perspective may be the ticket to addressing this issue at scale.
In St. Louis, the host city of the conference, attendees had the opportunity to observe the city’s strategies for combating blight firsthand. In recent years, the city has implemented several initiatives, including the Vacancy Strategy Initiative (VSI) launched in August 2023. VSI is a two-year partnership between the City’s Community Development Administration and the St. Louis Vacancy Collaborative, a coalition of community members, private and nonprofit stakeholders, and city agencies committed to reducing vacant property in St. Louis. The initiative aims to develop best practices and policies for revitalizing vacant properties and strengthening neighborhoods.
Tarik Abdelazim, vice president of technical assistance at the Center for Community Progress, explained that St. Louis is “really identifying where vacant properties are all over the city. Which ones are tax delinquent, which ones can be addressed through code enforcement, and then devising strategies that are based on a block-by-block approach, because underlying all of this…it’s not just policy and practice which we work with communities to address but it’s economic conditions.”
Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and creator of the 1619 Project, also spoke at the conference, reminding attendees that these economic challenges and disparities between Black and white communities are as old as America’s race issues.
“We should be very clear that this history is with us every day,” she said. “So much so that it’s not even history. As Faulkner said, ‘The past is not even past.’”
The path forward for Pittsburgh
For Pittsburgh, Thompson agrees that a block-by-block approach will be essential to addressing these problems and has set her sights on a combination of national fundraising and local problem-solving.
