The work of Ohio’s Foreclosure Prevention Task Force is nearing its end, and a report of its findings and recommendations will soon be making its way to Governor Strickland’s desk.

Among a variety of responses to the unquestioned statewide crisis in the area of foreclosures, which involved an amazing 60,728 houses in Ohio during the first half of 2007 alone, is a recommendation that the State create a fund to financially assist communities in redeveloping older neighborhoods – including substantial money, as reported by the Columbus Dispatch, to, among other goals, “tear down blighted and abandoned houses...”

The work of the task force is part of a multi-year push by a variety of interests to address the issue, which is as critical in Ohio as anywhere else in the country. The Chair of the task force has been careful to emphasize that any demolition decisions would be up to local communities, and apparently demolition or other strategies to redevelop entire neighborhoods will have a higher priority than addressing individual problem properties.

Across the country, cities have adopted massive demolition strategies to encouage redevelopment in problematic areas. The strategy recommended by the Task Force seems designed to boost communities like Youngstown, which has set out on a purposeful course to remove a very large number of older properties in a programmatic and designed fashion.

As the majority of Ohio’s listings on the National Register of Historic Places (including those in National Register Districts) are residential structures, the future of the state's older neighborhoods should be important to advocates of preservation and revitalization. The non-profit statewide preservation community was somewhat frustrated at the National Vacant Properties Forum in 2005 by the lack of integration of preservation-based considerations into the vacant properties discussion. Time will tell how this new strategy will impact Ohio’s older neighborhoods and the history that lives there.

Photo: House demolition - tobo/Creative Commons License