How many vacant buildings does Albany have?

Walk or drive around Albany and you’ll see the red X sign on the front of some buildings. Frequently dilapidated, sometimes merely obviously vacant, the red X assists emergency services workers in knowing which buildings are vacant and potentially hazardous.

The red X also conveys blight and is frequently the ire of the neighborhood. Red X buildings can exist in the middle of upscale neighborhoods or appear in clusters in lower income neighborhoods.

We wanted to answer a few basic questions about Red X buildings - below we’ll use the term “vacant buildings”:

What governance does Albany have over vacant buildings?
How many vacant buildings are there?
Where are the vacant buildings?
Are there any patterns among the owners and ownership of vacant buildings
What trends exist regarding vacant buildings? Are there more or fewer than in the past?
What work and initiatives is the City of Albany taking with respect to vacant buildings and what impact have those initiatives had?

Albany's vacant building code

Answering the first question, Albany has a section of its code that governs Vacant building registration. The key points of the code include:

Vacant building owners…
- must register their property with the City of it is not being used
- pay a yearly fee that grows over time (e.g. 1-3 unit residential buildings pay a $250 fee in year 1, $500 in year two, $750 in year 3, …) which presumably is meant to help with vacant building monitoring cost recovery
- are responsible for care, upkeep, winterization, utility turn off

The City of Albany…
- enforces Vacant Building Registry compliance and codes
- Identifies vacant buildings that aren’t on the registry
- produces a quarterly report that provides a summary and key metrics on vacant buildings and their processing and status
- works with owners towards outcomes which help owners get properties off of the vacant property list

How many vacant buildings are there?

The Q2 2023 Master list of Vacant buildings contained 921 properties.

The City of Albany has approximately 25,000 properties with buildings. This means that roughly 3.5% of all developed properties (921 out of 25000) are Vacant buildings.

Some basic statistics from the 2023 survey (noting that these numbers may have changed to some degree):

Building Counts by Usage:
1. 2 Family residence - 319 buildings
2. 1 Family residence - 294
3. 3 family residence - 107
4. Apartments - 36
5. Office buildings - 8
6. Schools - 2
Building Counts by Neighborhood:
1. West Hill - 222 buildings
2. South End - 106
3. Arbor Hill - 59
4. Pine Hills - 49
5. West End - 48
6. Delaware Area - 53
Compliance with the Vacant Building Registry code - 33% (308 vacant buildings out 921 Vacant buildings)

There are some additional data that we want to analyze in the future such as the number of buildings that are on the Locally Designated and National Designated Historic Registers and the balance between Vacant buildings that are officially on the Vacant Building Register (VBR) and Vacant buildings that are known but not on the VBR. We also examined the Vacant Building Registry Quarterly Report from September 2023 which is a solid report with a lot of data and context.

Are there ANY ownership patterns to vacant buildings?

In the Q2 2023 data there are nearly 800 unique Owner names that own Vacant buildings, 65 of whom own more than one Vacant building. The Albany County Land Bank Corp is the largest owner (by count) with 47 Vacant buildings.

Other multi-Vacant building owners included as of Q2 2023:

South End Development Llc - 6 buildings
44 HOLLAND AVENUE LLC - 5
Power,Love & Sound Mind Dev. - 4
Kostandin Kacani - 4
Liberty Square Development,Llc - 4

There are also numerous owners that are identifiable as the same owner, e.g. “Liberty Square Development, Llc” and “Liberty Square Development,Llc”. (the small difference is the space before “Llc”)

It is generally safe to say that Albany does not have an issue with a small number of owners controlling dozens of vacant buildings each, rather Albany has an issue with a larger number of owners controlling a single property. It is armchair quarterbacking to truly guess which is a better position to be in. Do you get economies of scale in dealing with enforcing building code with a smaller number of owners? Does individual ownership of properties tend to incent the owners to do something because the building is more directly tied to their net worth? We can only speculate.

Vacant building trends? What is the City doing?

Let’s package these two questions together. Using the Vacant Building Registry Quarterly Report from September 2023 we can see the quarter-to-quarter trends (above).

The number of Vacant buildings (“All Vacants”) is trending downward. The number and percentage of officially registered Vacant buildings are both up. There is a consistent quarterly supply of New Vacant Registrations. The count and percentage of Albany Land Bank owned Vacant buildings are both down. Generally these trends look positive and we would want to see if these trends have continued between Q3/2023 and Q4/2024.

In terms of actions that the City of Albany takes, we will continue to examine and understand the actions and the metrics, and will likely have more conclusions when we receive updated data. The Department of Buildings & Regulatory Compliance does have data on code enforcement (tables below) however that data appears to co-mingle Vacant building compliance with all other compliance so it appears as if we can’t isolate just the Vacant building compliance enforcement actions.

Summary and Implications

With this study of the City of Albany’s Vacant building inventory we have uncovered some interesting data - Albany had 921 Vacant buildings in the Q2 2023 inventory and by our count this represents approximately 3.5% of all developed properties.

What are potential policy and research implications? We can envision a few:

The Vacant building inventory needs more public visibility. We were only able to get the data when we talked with a contact in the Planning Department. The data and quarterly reports should be available on Albany’s Open Data website
We want to examine our Vacant property prevalence versus other cities, e.g. Do Troy and Schenectady have the same issues?
While this analysis does not get into some of the macro-legal forces and trends, the September 2023 Common Council Report mentioned several challenges and legal proceedings that are getting in the way of forcing property owners into certain behaviors. We will want to understand how these have changed the landscape.

Additional Explorations

There are a number of additional studies that are natural next steps:

Refresh the study and outputs (tables, Google map) with recent data
Examine metrics associated with code enforcement related to Vacant buildings
Understand the economics of building tear downs. How much does it cost (the City, the owner) when a building is town down because it is uninhabitable or as a result of a fire?
Understand publicly owned Vacant buildings, their current state and opportunities. This would include the Albany Land Bank properties and University at Albany-owned property such as the Vacant Building at Alumni Quad (Western & Partridge) which was not on the registry in 2023 but now has a Red X sign.

Questions or comments? email us at AlbanyDataStories@gmail.com