Land Use Law Commons^™

Abating Neighborhood Blight With Collaborative Policy Networks—Where Have We Been? Where Are We Going?, Kermit J. Lind

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Blight is a term with multiple meanings and a complex legal and policy history in the United States. Currently, blight and its community costs are frequently associated with vacant and often foreclosed homes, defective and abandoned buildings, litter, vacant lots, and graffiti. As a legal and policy term, blight has roots in the common law definitions of public nuisance. Researchers and scholars in other disciplines have cited blighted neighborhoods as both a cause and symptom of larger socioeconomic problems such as poverty, crime, poor public health, educational deficits, and other personal or systemic distress.

This Article traces the seeds of …