A black and white image by Michael Greenlar showing a man in a hoodie riding a bike past an abandoned building. Planets and other scenes of the night sky have been painted over the boarded up windows.
A burnt out Land Bank house on Fitch St. Credit: Mike Greenlar | Central Current

Thousands of Syracuse property owners are behind on their taxes, making their homes and lots subject to foreclosure. Those parcels typically end up in the hands of the Greater Syracuse Land Bank, an organization that rehabilitates homes and repurposes land to build more housing.

But a lack of administrative capacity at the city of Syracuse to process foreclosures, and two years-long pauses on seizing tax delinquent homes ushered in by the COVID-19 pandemic and a U.S. Supreme Court decision, have created a backlog of around 2,000 properties. 

That backlog, Land Bank leaders and city officials say, could hold back the organization’s ability to secure the land required to build more housing under deadlined state programs meant to redevelop land in cities across New York. 

“It impacts a lot of the grants the Land Bank gets,” said Pat Hogan, the chair of the Land Bank board and the outgoing president pro tempore of the city’s common council. “To me this is about how an administration sets its priorities.”

Catching up on that backlog would require the city foreclosing properties at a much more rapid pace. Land Bank Executive Director Katelyn Wright sent a letter to Mayor Ben Walsh in late August, asking the administration to unclog that pipeline. 

Wright wrote in the letter that, on average, the city would need to foreclose on an average of 20 homes per month to clear out the city’s backlog. In 2025, the city has averaged foreclosing on about eight properties each month. City officials believe they can comfortably bump that up to about 15. 

The city will likely have to also supply close to 80 new construction sites on foreclosed parcels in the next year to keep up with demand for newly rehabbed housing, Wright said. The Land Bank will broker properties to other nonprofits like Jubilee Homes and Housing Visions who can use grant funding to build more housing. 

Wright also provided the city with a list of 100 properties the Land Bank needs to control to continue clustered housing development — a type of planning that envisions the grouping of residential properties on one site. 

“We are eager to acquire strategic lots that we can assemble into building lots since the state is investing unprecedented amounts of funding into new housing,” Wright said. “These will be for us to build on, to enable our nonprofit partners to secure site control and apply for grant funds, and for private buyers to build on.”

City officials are working to improve how fast they can foreclose on properties and feed them to the Land Bank, they told Central Current. They said they are also prioritizing the foreclosure of properties on Wright’s letter.

Some of those improvements made in the past year include the hiring of a second attorney who can work on the legal steps of the foreclosure process. 

The city also contracted a second title search company last year that can help speed up the process of locating the owner of a property if the city fails to reach them via a mandated notice of delinquency.

“We’re in a really good position to begin foreclosing our properties at a more stable rate,” said Cimone Jordan, the director of housing and neighborhood planning at the city’s Department of Neighborhood and Business Development. 

The need for a more efficient foreclosure process, other Land Bank officials say, is key to attacking the roots of Syracuse housing woes — a lack of available and safe housing stock and rising rents. 

Land Bank Board Vice Chair Maurice Brown said increasing the housing supply could give city residents more choices.

“The supply of housing is so weak that bad landlords know they can charge whatever they want,” said Brown, who also represents the Onondaga County Legislature’s 15th district. “They know there is really nowhere else for you to go.” 

The city forecloses homes in phases; sending notices to delinquent properties, searching for any entities like banks that hold equity in the property and eventually sending them to the Land Bank after a Common Council vote. 

That process slowed down for almost two years during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2023, the city had to wind that process down again due to the Tyler v. Hennepin County U.S. Supreme Court decision that forced states to overhaul their foreclosure laws. 

Foreclosures typically begin with city officials checking a list of properties available for seizure after property owners fail to pay taxes for more than two years.

The owners of those properties receive a 60-day notice from the city, commencing the foreclosure process and outlining how much is owed. After that, those properties then become an item at common council meetings. Jordan said councilors vote to transfer the property listed in the item to the Land Bank, not on the foreclosure itself.  

Once that vote is completed, the city requests a title search from the companies it has contracted, which notifies anyone with a financial interest — like a bank — about the property. That bank or any other individual or entity who has a lien on the property can choose to pay the owed taxes and protect their investment, or they can file a claim with the city to recoup any surplus equity against what is owed.

That last step is the result of the Tyler v. Hennepin County decision, which allowed individuals and entities with a financial stake in their property to receive a check from the locality foreclosing their home. 

The city had to stop the foreclosure process from 2023 until 2024 as New York updated its tax laws to allow property owners to file the claims allowed by the court’s decision. 

The city was dealing with a backlog of about 900 seizable properties prior to the halt to foreclosures that year, Jordan. That backlog has grown to around 2,000, Wright said. 

Since last year, the city has taken steps to cut down on the time it takes to foreclose a property and deliver it to the Land Bank, Jordan said. Adding a new attorney to oversee the foreclosure process and a new title search company has reduced the time the title search process from two to three months down to one, Jordan said. 

Further improving the foreclosure process will be vital as the Land Bank and its nonprofit partners like Housing Visions and Jubilee Homes apply for state funding through programs like the Affordable Homeownership Opportunity Program, or AHOP, Wright said. The program subsidizes new home construction and multi-family homeownership projects to create affordable housing for low-and-moderate income families and first-time homeowners.  

The Land Bank needs to have shovel-ready sites to broker to these nonprofits so that New York’s housing agency — Homes and Community Renewal — can consider the nonprofits’ application. 

Beyond that, Wright believes foreclosing on blighted homes and renovating them can improve Syracuse’s neighborhoods

“We hear from neighbors all the time wondering when we’re going to address the boarded up homes near them and the sooner we get title the sooner we can secure that property and get it either stabilized or into our demolition pipeline,” Wright noted.  “If we delay foreclosure and allow delinquent homeowners’ balance owed to grow, it puts them in a deeper hole that’s harder to pay off to avoid foreclosure and keep their homes.”

For Brown, a more efficient foreclosure process will be key to the future of the city.

“If the city was able to help us speed up those foreclosures, it would help us move toward getting people in homes, getting houses back online,” Brown said. “As long as that’s not happening, we’re not moving at our top speed.”

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Eddie Velazquez is a Syracuse journalist covering economic justice in the region. He is focused on stories about organized labor, and New York's housing and childhood lead poisoning crises. You can follow...