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Jon Mitchell
Mayor | New Bedford, MA

Vacant Property Initiative

Idea Category: 2025 Ideas Challenge, Building & Development, Economic Opportunity & Affordability

2025 Ideas Challenge Entry

As part of "Building New Bedford," the City’s comprehensive housing plan, a core policy priority is to expand the housing supply by making better use of existing housing stock and underutilized space. With limited buildable land and the high costs and long timelines associated with new construction, expanding housing supply requires more than just building new homes. Vacant and underutilized properties represent a faster, more cost-effective way to restore housing, reduce blight, and strengthen neighborhoods.

In 2023, the City launched the Vacant Property Initiative to reactivate unused properties and prevent neighborhood decline. The program is built on three pillars:

Dedicated Staff: Hiring a Vacant Property Development Manager to coordinate and track interventions. These interventions include probate assistance, receivership, tax foreclosure, direct owner support, and more. She also works closely with families navigating inheritance issues, out-of-state ownership, property condition concerns, and legal complexity; providing support that is often as personal as it is technical.
Interdepartmental Collaboration: Creating a Vacant Property Working Group to align housing, inspectional services, treasurers, and code enforcement teams.
Data-Driven Strategy: Developing a more robust Vacant Building Registry, enhanced with a custom ESRI-based property analysis tool which aggregates municipal data to provide a full snapshot of each property. It draws from systems including OpenGov, Lucity, and Nautilus 360. Additional analysis includes reviewing ten years of local death records from the Massachusetts Registry of Vital Records and Probate Court filings to identify properties tied up in or in need of probate; one of the most significant barriers to reactivation.

The initiative addresses not only technical and legal hurdles—like probate, receivership, and tax foreclosure—but also supports families navigating complex ownership or inheritance issues. This high-touch approach blends strategy with compassion, ensuring that properties are restored while trust is rebuilt.

Impact or how it will be measured:

The City measures success through three lenses:

Property Outcomes: Properties tracked from vacancy to occupancy or active rehabilitation, using the ESRI-based dashboard for case management.
Fiscal Returns: Over $1 million recovered in tax revenue and fines in the first 18 months, with properties brought back into productive use and values restored.
Community Impact: Residents report gratitude for personalized outreach, especially help navigating probate, liens, and ownership transfers. Media has described the approach as “part detective, part caseworker.

This initiative is already producing results, bringing in over $1 million in recovered tax revenue and fines in its first 18 months. Other results include:

Dozens of properties have moved from vacancy into development, sale, or occupancy.
One property condemned in 2022 was navigated through probate and sold in 2025, yielding $23,289.
Another long-vacant home tied up in multistate probate generated $90,000 in recovered tax revenue

New Bedford is also emerging as a model for other small- to mid-sized cities, having been invited to present this work at MassINC’s “Reclaiming Vacant Property Conference” and through MassHousing’s Neighborhood Hub. By resolving complex legal and logistical barriers, New Bedford is restoring neighborhood vitality, growing the housing supply, and is demonstrating that reactivating vacant properties is a practical, scalable way to meet the urgent housing needs of today.