Commercial blight: The epidemic’s next chapter
Charles Morseman has seen firsthand how blight can take over a commercial property.
Before the recent recession, a large animal feed mill next door to his equipment company “was a real thriving business” until the owner retired and sold it, he said.
Morseman, who has owned Morseman Equipment Co. on lower Fifth Street in Macon for more than 30 years, used to see more than a dozen trucks hauling grain from the feed mill every day, but that dwindled to just two or three trucks after the sale. Then the mill’s workers showed up one day and didn’t get a paycheck.
“It was a bad situation,” he said.
It was bad for the industrial neighborhood, too.
Without a tenant, the mill began to deteriorate. For the past few years it has been vacant except for rats and vagrants, Morseman said.
The mill was sold at a foreclosure auction in 2009, but the building was never reoccupied.
“From then on, it’s been a vagrant hangout,” Morseman said.
COMMERCIAL BLIGHT’S SCOPE HARD TO NAIL DOWN
The former mill, condemned by code enforcement officials, is just one example of the worst of the worst blighted commercial properties in Macon-Bibb County.
But determining the scope of commercial blight is challenging at best.
Macon-Bibb officials contacted by The Telegraph agreed the problem is not as pervasive as residential blight, but no government entity appears to keep a countywide list of blighted or condemned commercial properties.
Earlier this year, a list of about 900 total condemned properties included only about 40 that were considered commercial. The list includes retail stores, apartments and warehouses, many built in the early 1900s.
The condemned buildings are scattered across Macon-Bibb, but the list shows higher concentrations along Houston Road and Houston Avenue. Several of them appear to be houses that at some point had a commercial use. Some of them are boarded up. Many have holes in the roofs.
For example, the only thing remaining of a cinder-block building with peeling, white paint along Houston Avenue is a portion of the walls. The roof, windows and doors are missing.
Blight can take hold almost anywhere. Across town, a red-brick apartment building on Third Avenue, two blocks from Vineville Avenue, is missing windows and doors.
But not all commercial property that’s blighted is condemned.
The definition of blight is tough to nail down, local officials say. Some point to long-vacant buildings while others say blight includes places with overgrown weeds or caved-in rooftops.
“Our definition of blight is those buildings that are deteriorated to the point where they need either major rehab or demolition,” said John Baker, building abatement supervisor with the Macon-Bibb County Department of Business and Development Services. “They have been either vandalized -- where the heating and air systems have been stripped and removed -- or a roof has been neglected and water leaks are causing major damage to the structure.”
Pat Topping, senior vice president of the Macon Economic Development Commission, said “you know it when you see it.”
His own definition would include trash, dilapidated roofs, broken or missing windows, graffiti and grass growing over sidewalks.
Topping said he didn’t know if he could measure how big the problem is here, but “many of our gateways ... are what might be considered blight. And there are others too.”
No matter how it’s defined, blighted properties hurt economic development.
“Blight discourages companies from locating in an area,” Topping said. “It probably lowers the value, and therefore the tax base and the ability of the government to provide services to the area and the community. And it reduces the owner’s investment in their property so it discourages (them) from making improvements or just keeping the property up.”
Art Barry, a commercial real estate broker with Coldwell Banker Commercial, Eberhardt & Barry Inc., said problems with blighted and empty commercial buildings started with residential properties.
“You have job loss, and you have economic disparity,” Barry said.
But some areas of town, like Mercer Village at Mercer University, have seen a revival in recent years.
“Other neighborhoods,” he said, “are not as fortunate.”
COMMERCIAL OWNERS MORE COMPLIANT
A higher percentage of commercial properties comply with building standards because the owner or developer doesn’t want to lose the property, Baker said.
Even when empty, most commercial property owners pay their taxes, according to the Bibb County Tax Commissioner’s Office.
“Very rarely do we sell a commercial property for nonpayment of taxes,” Tax Commissioner Tommy Tedders said.
But empty commercial properties can create a negative impression of the community.
“The part that’s more worrisome for me is not so much blighted as it is empty,” Macon-Bibb County Mayor Robert Reichert said. And empty storefronts along major thoroughfares add to the problem.
“A lot of it just has to do with perception,” he said.
Reichert said he would like to figure out a way to produce a list of properties that are chronically vacant, especially those that have been empty more than 12 months.
King Kemper, associate broker at commercial real estate firm The Summit Group, agrees that commercial vacancy is a big issue, but he said Macon is no different than other comparable-sized cities in the Southeast.
It’s common for developers and retailers to want to be close to their customers, he said. If customers move to the north side of town, for example, that’s where the retailers want to be, he said. Sometimes that movement leaves vacant buildings behind.
“You are never going to tell a private developer, ‘We are not going to let you do this and force you to do that,’” Kemper said. “I don’t think cities are going to have too much say to ‘go here and don’t go over there.’ That would be kind of drastic.”
Baker, who heads up code enforcement, said his office doesn’t have the resources to keep up with vacancies.
“I wish we did,” he said. “I wish we could do a survey. ... Vacant is not blight, but it can give us a sense of what to look for in the future.”
His office has seven inspectors to cover the entire county, and only two of those focus on commercial properties.
Over the past few years, several former vacant commercial buildings in Bibb County have been revived and repurposed.
Among them, the former Kmart on Eisenhower Parkway is the home to Virginia College. Ortho Georgia renovated the former Mansour’s department store on Northside Drive that had been closed for years. Central Georgia Technical College opened its Charles H. Jones Advanced Technology Center in the former Toys R Us building off Eisenhower at the end of 2014.
On Tom Hill Sr. Boulevard, Planet Fitness moved about two years ago into a portion of the former Edge 14 movie theater, and later this year a Sky Zone trampoline center is moving into the other part.
In downtown, the Tax Commissioner’s Office is now in a building at Third and Walnut streets that sat vacant for three years after Capital City Bank moved out.
“It wasn’t a blighted building,” Tedders said. “We didn’t have to do any major repairs.”
Commercial condemned properties in Macon
REUSE OF BUILDINGS ‘COMPLICATED’
Baker is a member of the city’s blight task force, and one of its goals is to find better ways to deal with blighted properties.
“I’m particularly interested in how we can hold the responsible parties more accountable,” he said.
Several task force members, including Baker, recently went to Detroit to learn from that city’s massive blight removal process that began about two years ago.
Kim Graziani, director of National Technical Assistance for the Center for Community Progress in Flint, Michigan, has worked with communities across the country to address blight. The majority of the property the nonprofit has dealt with was residential.
She said commercial issues can be more complicated, such as getting a new user in vacant space.
“It involves things like market dynamics and consumer demand and financing,” Graziani said. “I think it gets more layered and complicated when it comes to the commercial side of blighted properties.”
Sometimes demolition is the best answer, “given the state of the property,” Graziani said.
Morseman said he’s been encouraged by some of the redevelopment in Macon in recent years, especially downtown.
“It takes time,” he said. “That stuff didn’t go down overnight, and it won’t come back overnight. It’s one of those things that somebody has to take an interest in it ... and if enough people can get together, they may redevelop it.”
To contact writer Linda S. Morris, call 744-4223.
This story was originally published April 25, 2015 at 8:32 PM with the headline "Commercial blight: The epidemic’s next chapter."