We're excited that city officials are exploring how to encourage owners of vacant, neglected, boarded-up downtown property to improve and redevelop or sell their buildings. That's a long-overdue good idea, which probably is why the first electronic comment on our news story about it was "use it or lose it. If I don't mow my lawn, I get a fine. ..."

But property rights must be taken into account. While a city should have the authority to maintain a reasonable standard for the condition of privately held property within its limits, especially in a prominent area such as downtown, the solutions can get heavy-handed in a hurry. And that's probably why the second electronic comment on the story was "this is not a communist country so leave these property owners alone except for maintenance that will provide safety for neighboring properties. ..."

It's a classic rights-of-the-individual-vs.-greater-good dilemma. But right now there's an imbalance in favor of indifferent owners. They can let their property's value sink to where taxes won't be a deterrent to leaving it unoccupied while they wait speculatively, sometimes for years, for a massive payday.

It doesn't take a real estate genius to know that being able to name your price because your crummy little corner is all that stands in the way of an ambitious deep-pocketed developer's platinum project is not a responsible business plan. All it takes is a few years of observation of downtown property. Developers haven't been all that busy snapping up property and either renovating the old buildings that have potential or tearing down the ones that don't so something shiny and modern can be put in their places.

The high-rise Cosmopolitan residential-retail building on the site of the old Lichtenstein Department Store is a notable exception. But that time City Hall was the speculator-owner, starting in 1989 when it acquired the Lichtenstein site after earlier efforts to reuse the building fizzled. The city made the deal with the Cosmopolitan developer in 2012. That's a long time for a property to sit not making money for its owner.

We encourage the city to do what it can within reason with code upgrades and enforcement to encourage a cleaner, safer, more vibrant downtown. For everyone's sake, we'd like to see downtown property owners be more successful with their real estate than the city was with the Lichtenstein building. The city can afford a blunder because it has us taxpayers to bail it out. It's time those owners recognize that they and their property aren't getting any younger while they wait for a developer to reward their procrastination.

Read or Share this story: