Worcester's Adopt-a-Lot: Sum is greater than its parts
By eva ilic
Aneighborhood improvement program run by the City of Worcester is helping turn unbuildable lots into tax-paying property. The program, nicknamed Adopt-a-Lot, benefits not only the city, but small-business builders such as William Randell – and the buyers of his finished product.
Under Adopt-a-Lot, Randell’s company, ABG Realty Co., paid $6,000 for a 3,300-square-foot, city-owned lot at 143 Eastern Ave. next to an empty lot he already owned. Neither parcel was large enough to be buildable, but combined, they met the 5,000-square-foot minimum. Randell built two 1,320-square-feet townhouses, which recently sold for $187,000 each.The city’s Division of Housing and Neighborhood Development has offered the Adopt-a-Lot program since the 1990s to encourage private maintenance of generally unmarketable, undevelopable, and abandoned vacant parcels in Worcester’s inner core neighborhoods. Originally aimed at homeowners who might want to add parking or a yard, Adopt-a-Lot has in recent years attracted more builders, says Dennis Hennessey, director of Housing and Neighborhood Development.
Targeted parcels are usually 4,000 square feet or less in size, abut private dwellings, and are not part of a larger, developable land plot.
This was just the kind of program that appealed to Randell. His 20-year-old construction and property management company started with a liquor store his parents own in Worcester’s Main South area. To keep the neighborhood stable, ABG purchased several triple-deckers and renovated them prior to rental. During the process, Randell assembled his construction team.
The rising cost of housing is causing more builders to look closely at doing "infill" housing such as Randell’s project, as demand grows from people priced out of neighboring suburban markets and Boston-Metrowest.
On a few occasions, developers have purchased a lot next to a city-owned, undevelopable lot and then offered to purchase the city-owned parcel with the intent of combining the two lots to make a development opportunity, says Hennessey. Worcester Common Ground offered to purchase city-owned lots located at 141 Austin St. with the intent of combining them with adjacent lots WCG had purchased, and built first-time homebuyer opportunities on parcels that, until then, had been the target of repeated illegal dumping. The Main South CDC used the Adopt-a-Lot program as part of a strategy to assemble the Gardner-Kilby-Hammond Street Initiative in Main South.
In developing the Eastern Avenue townhouse project, ABG stayed away from public funding, financing the project privately. While Randell says there’s an abundance of good publicly funded programs, getting help through them takes time – maybe a year – as opposed to the two or three months it takes him to complete a privately financed project.
Assistant City Manager Julie Jacobson notes that over the last four years, the Division of Neighborhood and Housing Development has disposed of more than 70 tax-foreclosed properties which are now generating about $650,000 in taxes. Of those 70, 15 were conveyed through the Adopt-a-Lot program.
Jacobson anticipates that when all construction on the 70 conveyed properties is complete, the city will get up to $4 million in taxable property value it didn’t have before.
Christina P. O’Neill contributed to the reporting in this story. Eva Ilic can be reached at eilic@wbjournal.com
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