After tons of debate and activists’ push regarding a potential Philadelphia land bank to deal with vacant property and blighted land, City Council is expected to introduce a Land Bank Bill in one week, on February 2. The bill, co-sponsored by Bill Green and Maria Quinones-Sanchez, is similar to what activists had been pushing for and may solve the city’s vacant land/property/blight problem.

The main community group that’s been pushing for such a bill is the Campaign to Take Back Vacant Land, a coalition which includes Action United, Liberty Resources, Neighborhood Networks, the Philadelphia Orchard Project, Unite HERE, the Women’s Community Revitalization Project and several others.

Marcus Presley, of the Women’s Community Revitalization Project, was the subject of a PW report last year surrounding the growing need for a land bank—“a quasi-public entity to hold and manage vacant land”—in Philadelphia.

“We’ve been talking about this with Maria Quinones Sanchez and Bill Green,” Presley says over the phone from his office at the Women’s Community Revitalization Project. “A central city agency that would take all the city owned vacant land and put it in one place. That would solve the problem of having this alphabet soup of city agencies owning land right now and really prioritize uses that benefit community residents, spelling out what the priorities would be on agriculture with a real lens toward urban agriculture and community control over the land in the city.”

The Brookings Institute has estimated about 15 percent of land in major American cities is vacant. In Philadelphia, there are more than 40,000 parcels of vacant land, 12,000 of which are city-owned. The city spends $20 million a year on vacant land maintenance and, according to the Campaign to Take Back Vacant Land, every home losses between 6.5 percent and 20 percent of its resale value when it shares its block with vacant properties.

Currently, vacant land and property is owned by a series—or “alphabet soup,” if you will—of city agencies. This bill would essentially put them all under one umbrella and use a combination of administration officials, Council appointments and community leaders, like heads of Community Development Corporations and nonprofits, to decide what should be done with the land that would help out local communities.

Presley points to similar legislation enacted in both Detroit, Michigan and Atlanta, Georgia, the latter of which has had a Land Bank Authority in its city government for more than 14 years. The Atlanta LBA notes that in addition to cleaning up blight, land banks have created additional funding for schools (due to an increase in property owners in school districts), increased tax revenue (for the same reason) and have unburdened the cost of property maintenance amongst the city, since the community surrounding the vacant land has a responsibility and stake in keeping the property clean.