With all the challenges facing leaders of the region’s rural towns, it’s a wonder any of them can claim any successes. But success does happen.
Take a look at Athol, where lots of struggling homeowners took a beating in 2008 when the Great Recession hit. Scores of families could not keep up with their mortgage payments and banks foreclosed, leaving behind abandoned houses.
That’s how Athol found itself with about 180 vacant and abandoned buildings, mostly homes, by 2012. That’s a big number. In Greenfield, whose population is about a third larger than Athol’s, the building department lists about 64 vacant properties.
The impressive part of this tale is how Athol’s leaders responded.
Abandoned houses become a problem for a town if their owners don’t maintain them. They cause blight, pose public safety hazards, make neighborhoods uninviting and lower property values in those neighborhoods and in town generally.
Athol’s building inspector, Brianna Skowyra and its fire chief, John Duguay, noticed the high number of abandoned homes during their day-to-day work. Rather than just shake their heads and lament the situation, they formed a committee to do something. The Vacant and Abandoned Buildings Committee includes the selectmen, residents and others who are in a position to hear about abandoned properties. They’ve won town support to the tune of about $115,000 over the past three years to do the research and take the legal action required to force owners — often out-of-town banks — to maintain the properties. Other times the town takes them over for resale, or demolition in extreme cases.
For a cash-strapped town like Athol, that’s no small commitment. The committee has also tapped into the Attorney General’s Abandoned Housing Initiative that helps to fix and resell or demolish abandoned properties.
Locally, the Athol Credit Union has also been partnering with the town’s leaders by trying to get new people into abandoned homes.
“The key is not so much to do anything particular with the house, but to the extent we can, to get a homeowner back in the house,” said credit union President Kevin Miller.
This stands in contrast to out-of-area banks that foreclose on a property and keep paying taxes, but have been in no hurry to auction off the properties to new owners because values have been depressed since the housing market crash.
Said Miller: “This is a problem that developed over time, and it’s going to take some time to resolve it.”
But the number of identified properties in Athol is down to about 150 now. Property values have rebounded and houses are selling faster. This is good news, due at least partly to the good work of the abandoned property committee. It’s encouraging to see those numbers — and to see that forward-leaning town and business leaders are making a difference.