The flow of foreclosed properties to Syracuse’s land bank has slowed. The city says lawmakers bear some blame.

At the beginning of September 2024, Syracuse lawmakers were set to vote on the transfer of a tax delinquent property on Baldwin Avenue to the Greater Syracuse Land Bank. The land bank sells formerly tax delinquent properties to buyers who rehabilitate or build more homes. 

The council abstained from voting on the item until the end of November, holding the agenda item six times, and citing the need to conduct more outreach about the delinquency with the property owner, giving him a chance to pay back taxes on their two-family home.

The owner of the property at 113 Baldwin Ave. owed almost $75,000 in taxes, accrued over 18 years. The property is part of the city’s most ambitious foreclosure operation to date, which started in 2023 and was meant to return almost 1,000 parcels to the city’s tax rolls. 

While the Common Council eventually voted in November 2024 to transfer the land — after a city official said they had not heard back from the owner — the process dragged out nearly three months.

“If a property needs to have more outreach we are going to do that,” said Councilor Patrona Jonnes-Rowser. 

Central Current reported in October that the city was trying to add more administrative resources to smooth out its already long foreclosure process. City councilors criticized the city at the time saying the city needed to do more. 

But city officials have said that the council, by delaying votes on seizable properties, has slowed down the foreclosure of almost 500 properties by a year. Councilors were briefed at the start of 2023 on the operation to foreclose almost 1,000 properties, a number that winnowed down as owners paid during a year-long moratorium on foreclosures due to changes to the state’s tax laws.

Now, city officials have laid out the cost of the council holding up foreclosures: Land bank revenues are on track to shrink to a third of the organization’s most optimistic projections. 

The land bank could lose out on critical state funding for the construction of more housing because it doesn’t have enough shovel-ready sites to pitch — at a time when politicians agree Syracuse’s housing stock needs a boost. 

Michelle Sczpanski, the city’s deputy commissioner of Neighborhood and Business Development, said tax delinquent properties are also sometimes in a blighted state. The longer derelict properties sit in a neighborhood, the more they contribute to the decrease of property values, she said.

It is also harder for owners to catch up on owed taxes when properties languish and tax payments accumulate through the years, she said.

“The effects and impact compound pretty quickly when you think about it at scale,” she said.

Delays on votes to sell properties to the land bank, which are key to the city’s procedures, add to an already lengthy, multi-step process that drags on for about 14 months, city officials say. 

“The challenge is that we can’t take a lot of those legal steps until the council votes on

the property,” Sczpanski said.

The city intended to be done with its current phase of foreclosures, internally known as phase 18 by the end of 2024. Now, city officials don’t believe the operation will be done before the end of 2025. 

Jones-Rowser, who oversees the agenda items regarding property transfers, say councilors are hesitant to vote on the properties, wanting to avoid dispossessing struggling homeowners.

“It is not about it being held up on our end. We shouldn’t be looking at this as a ‘feed the machine’ situation,” Jones-Rowser said. 

Jones-Rowser said that the city’s legal review operation is the step where seizable properties get jammed in the process. 

Sczpanski, other city officials, councilors and housing experts say they agree with the need for more outreach, but they disagree on the timelines.

Greg Loh, the city’s chief policy officer, and Sczpanski said the city conducts a lengthy process notifying property owners of their tax delinquency. NBD also gives councilors ample time to review the list of properties that will be on the council’s agenda before councilors have to vote. 

The foreclosure process can also halt if property owners show effort in communicating with the city about paying off their tax arrears, Sczpanski and Loh added. 

“There is significant time built into the schedule to allow for intervention,” Loh said

How does the city go through a phase of property foreclosures?

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. 

Phase 18 started in May of 2023 with a list of 921 properties but was unable to continue due to a pause in foreclosures. The pause was caused by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on Tyler v. Hennepin County that made New York and other states retool its approach to foreclosures. 

The owners of those properties received a 60-day notice from the city, commencing the foreclosure process, and outlining how much is owed. 

Along with the letters, the city sent an information packet notifying the owner of foreclosure workshops where they can learn about entering a payment plan known as a tax trust. 

After that, the city sets up a schedule presented to the Common Council, detailing the meetings when the council will vote on the transfer of those properties to the land bank. The council votes on these items at their biweekly meetings. For phase 18, that step did not take place until February 2024 due to the year-long pause. 

At that time, city officials said they wanted to incrementally bring to the council the transfer of 437 seizable properties over the course of 2024.

More than 120 of those parcels remain unaddressed because the council prevented a vote, or because the legislation hasn’t been submitted to a vote yet. The city has processed around 125 parcels from this phase, Sczpanski said at a recent Neighborhood Preservation Committee meeting. 

The city prioritizes first seizing vacant structures, parking lots and commercial structures over occupied homes. Then it moves homes with the most tax delinquency, later moving to owners who are frequently in the foreclosure process or are outside of Syracuse.   

Jones-Rowser and Councilor Rasheada Caldwell say they want to take extra steps to help property owners keep their parcels. 

“Sometimes we move too fast and then we have all these houses, then we’re responsible, and then the neighborhood starts falling apart,” Caldwell told Central Current earlier this month during an interview about her re-election campaign.

Sczpanski and Loh say they agree with the idea of being lenient with communicative property owners. But they noted that in some instances the council withdraws, tables or delays a vote on items that would begin the foreclosure process without notifying city officials. 

Caldwell at the November Neighborhood Preservation Committee meeting objected to the seizure of properties where owners owe between $3,000 and $5,000. 

About 22% of potential seizures brought to the council fall into that category, city data provided to Central Current shows. 

Delays can lead to a slower legal review process after the council votes on transferring the property to the land bank. That process already lasts about eight months, Sczpanski said. 

Holding votes on some properties ends up pushing back the city’s scheduled cadence for council votes. For instance, Sczpanski said holds on agenda items regarding the transfer of property to the land bank began to pile up in May 2024. 

“It was around [then] that councilors had requested that we don’t add any more properties to agendas until we fully worked through one full list,” Sczpanski said. “That’s where you start seeing a cascading effect from there.”

According to a city analysis of the council’s votes reviewed by Central Current, the council in 2024 tabled votes on properties 76 times, and another 71 times in 2025, delaying the foreclosure process. 

Occasionally, NBD will request a withdrawal or a hold when they establish contact with the property owner and set up steps for that owner to pay owed taxes.

Sczpanski said that councilors receive the list of properties to be transferred to the land bank on average around 45 days before the study session, when they are publicly considered as agenda items. Loh said that is plenty of time for the council to conduct additional outreach and notify the city if the outreach is successful.

For Jones-Rowser, the holdup happens with the city’s legal review process.

“The process isn’t being held up by the council,” she said. “If you send down 15 properties at a time and two or three of them get held for us to conduct more outreach, I don’t see how that is a complete issue.”

After the council approves the transfer of a property to the land bank, Sczpanski said there is still a period of about eight months for owners to pay while the city conducts its legal review process. 

Delaying votes or withdrawing properties from the list not only slows down the pace of the city’s legal review process, but it also makes it more difficult for a property owner to be able to redeem their property, Sczpanski said.

“The longer we delay this part of the process,” she said, “we are not doing people favors.” 

Effects on the land bank

Council President Pro Tempore Pat Hogan, who has in the past criticized the city for not having enough administrative staff to quickly process foreclosures, said he agrees that conducting more outreach is important. However, he added, not being able to vote on properties that have been on agendas for more than one meeting is frustrating.

Hogan is the chair of the land bank board. It needs shovel-ready parcels to secure vital state funding that can help the organization build housing at a large scale, he said. 

“We have such a need for housing in this city that it is unbelievable,” he said. “I am frustrated by the process.”

For Wright, the executive director of the land bank, it is hard to tell if the council’s delays are at fault for a slow foreclosure process. In a letter to Mayor Ben Walsh in August, Wright said there is a backlog of more than 2,000 properties. 

She said the city should average around 20 foreclosures a month to clear the backlog at a reasonable pace. The city transferred 22 parcels to the land bank in August, showing some improvement compared to the rest of 2025. Since then, foreclosures have slowed down, with only 15 and 13 properties transferred to the land bank in September and October respectively. 

Earlier this month, city officials told Central Current the city has added a second attorney and an additional title search company to speed up its legal review process. 

“They put all these additional resources in, and we’re still not getting as many properties per month as we would like,” Wright said. “I think there’s plenty of blame to go around.”

Wright said at the October meeting of the land bank board that the organization has seen declining sales revenue this year, projecting that it is likely the organization closes the year with $500,000 in sales revenue. Wright typically expects $1 million to $1.5 million from the sale of properties on an average year. 

Lower sales come from the land bank’s waning property inventory. Wright said at the October meeting that the land bank has only had four or five property listings at a time to sell to prospective homeowners or developers in recent months. 

At one time the land bank had 20 listings at any given time, she said.

“We are running out of good properties to sell,” Wright said.

In the past month, councilors have expressed concerns about the land bank’s finances. Jones-Rowser set up the November Neighborhood Preservation Committee meeting, which she chairs, to discuss the organization’s financial sustainability and the future goals of some of its programs.

At the meeting, Wright said the city and county’s annual financial contributions to the organization are vital. For the current budget year, the city gave the land bank $750,000 in funding, and Onondaga County contributed another $250,000. 

In a report presented to county officials in April, land bank officials noted that at the time the organization has, since its inception in 2012, sold over 1,400 properties post-foreclosure, leveraging over $53 million in private renovation investment into those properties. 

Those properties have generated around $2.6 million per year in local property taxes since being returned to the tax rolls, officials wrote in the report. 

Since its inception, the land bank has leveraged $13.4 million from the city and council into $80 million in federal, state and local grants. 

The organization has also sold or demolished 80% of the 2,200 properties it had acquired at the time the report was filed.

Maurice Brown, organization’s vice chair, said he felt disappointed in the council’s inquiry and added that he hopes to stress to councilors that the point of the land bank is to provide better housing.

“We are falling behind pace, and we operate by selling properties,” said Brown, an Onondaga County legislator representing a portion of the city. “So if we don’t get properties to fix up ourselves then we can’t do our job.”