Land Banks in Missouri: A Comparative Analysis of Statutory Schemes in Kansas City and St. Louis

Authors

Yelena Bosovik

Abstract

The housing and financial crisis of 2008 may be behind us, but a drive though any community, especially large urban areas, reveals too many boarded up buildings and abandoned properties littering an otherwise prosperous horizon. For many municipalities, the solution has been to create land banks to take possession of tax-delinquent properties and to sell them, with clean titles, for redevelopment or public use. This paper begins with a brief overview of the evolution of land banks, and a discussion on Missouri’s two land banks, one in Kansas City, and another one in the city of St. Louis. At the crux of this discussion is Missouri’s tax foreclosure process, which is intricately tied to how a land bank obtains its inventory. The bulk of the paper focuses on how to solve the growing problem of blighted properties in the county of St. Louis. Specifically, the recommendations propose statutory language that, if a land bank is established in St. Louis County, would allow the land bank to efficiently transfer abandoned and vacant properties into productive use.

First Page

1

Recommended Citation

Yelena Bosovik, Land Banks in Missouri: A Comparative Analysis of Statutory Schemes in Kansas City and St. Louis, 1 Bus. Entrepreneurship & Tax L. Rev. 1 (2017).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/betr/vol1/iss1/4