🔒Settlemyer aims to turn Hartford’s eyesore properties into neighborhood assets

Until she attended law school, Laura Settlemyer had never heard the term “blight” applied to buildings.

Now the issue of blight in Hartford occupies most of her on-the-job thoughts and time.

Last month Settlemyer became the inaugural executive director of the Hartford Land Bank, a quasi-public agency that acquires blighted and abandoned properties for resale to responsible owners looking to renovate them.

Settlemyer, an attorney who became Hartford’s blight remediation director in 2016, has long supported the concept of land banks. In fact, in law school at Emory University in Atlanta, she studied under Frank Alexander, a pioneer in the field. And she said Hartford Land Bank’s presence will speed up the city’s effort to transform neighborhood eyesores into neighborhood assets.

“I think what the land bank adds is an opportunity to streamline a process that can be very frustrating,” Settlemyer said. “My hope is what the land bank offers the city and the community is something beyond blight.”

Settlemyer knows something about home renovations. Her family moved around a lot as a kid, but she spent most of her childhood in Charlotte, N.C. Her parents value education, so when they moved to the city, they opted to buy the best house they could afford in the best school district.

The house needed work.

“For them to be able to afford a house in the best school district, they had to move into the worst house on the block,” Settlemyer said with a laugh. “They’re still fixing it up 20 years later.”

But her interest in housing law really kicked into high gear as a first-year law student at Emory. It was 2005, and Hurricane Katrina just tore through New Orleans, destroying thousands of homes.

A few months after the storm hit, Settlemyer traveled to the city with professors and other students to help assess the damage. Some of the legal questions that arose fascinated her.

“Four months after the storm you still had houses on top of houses, and houses in the street,” Settlemyer said. “If you own a house, but it’s in the middle of the street — which is a public right-of-way — is that still your house, or does the city have full clearance to just bulldoze and clear the street?”

After completing law school, she became assistant city attorney in the administration of then-New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu.

But what she learned about the land bank model at Emory stuck with her.

Land banks are designed to simplify the process of getting property that has been abandoned or seized by a city — for nonpayment of taxes, or other issues — into the hands of responsible, usually nonprofit, owners. Land banks can be established as nonprofits or departments within a municipality, but in either setup the city grants it special powers to acquire property without jumping through the onerous hoops often required.

If the Hartford Land Bank had existed years ago, it would have simplified a renovation of a burned-down house on the corner of Maple Avenue and Bond Street, said Melvyn Colon, chairman of the land bank’s board and executive director of Southside Institutions Neighborhoods Alliance (SINA).

The city had acquired the abandoned property and was able to wipe out many of its liens, but there were still a number of legal hurdles SINA had to clear before they could begin renovating it into the house that stands there today.

“Getting this property from the city and taking care of some of the past liens would have been much simpler if the land bank had been a presence then,” Colon said.

Strategic targets

In the approximately 3.5 years since Settlemyer became Hartford’s director of blight remediation, the city reduced blight by about half, she said. She points to the state’s initial $5-million contribution to the creation of the Hartford Land Bank and early coordination with Hartford city officials as evidence that there is real support for its mission. The Hartford Foundation also contributed a $175,000 grant.

By Settlemyer’s calculations, Hartford could eliminate its blight problem altogether with a $25-million to $30-million investment. But in lieu of that lump sum, she said the land bank’s focus right now largely lies in strategically targeting houses in specific neighborhoods for acquisition and renovation.

“[We are] identifying properties in the North End and Frog Hollow and Barry Square that are the only properties on the block that are blighted and abandoned,” Settlemyer said. “So, if we can get that property fixed up, then we’ve got an entire block that’s blight-free.”

On a recent afternoon, Settlemyer stood with Colon outside the 198 Bond St. house Colon’s organization acquired and renovated. The two looked across the street at a vacant lot that used to be home to another burned-down house that took Settlemyer years to have demolished. Once that land is no longer vacant, the street will be complete.

“That lot is my white whale,” Settlemyer said.