Toxic Assets; Seeing Like a Land Bank
by Jesse McCormick and Betsy Clifton with Anderson Fletcher, Noah Protas, Kyra Zimmerman, and Richard Williamson
Opening
Citygroup
104b Forsyth Street
Friday May 9th, 2025
5-8pm
About:
What do you see when you see like a Land Bank?
In 2014, the newly created Albany county land bank inherited a problem: thousands of vacant and foreclosed properties in various states of decay, which were distributed across a handful of various municipal agencies and tax foreclosing governmental units. While these properties had begun to accumulate as early as the 1970’s, when the national real estate market imploded in 2008, it pushed already struggling neighborhoods to effective collapse. Hundreds of newly foreclosed Albany properties joined thousands of long-vacant homes and lots in a stockpile of properties with a negative value. These properties were more expensive to repair than they were to sell or rent if rehabilitated; in market terms, a toxic asset.
With little other directive other than to “return these problem properties to productive use,” the land bank was given these properties and got to work. But for the land bank, and for those living in these neighborhoods, they had inherited a city that was designed for uses, densities, industries, infrastructure and relationships that simply no longer exist. Seeing Like a Land Bank, asks, what then is productive, and to whom? And in the absence of a real estate market altogether, what else might be possible?
The exhibition is supported by an Independent Project Grant from the Architecture League of New York and New York State Counsel on the Arts, in partnership with Citygroup Architecture Collective and with additional support from Bard Architecture, and the J. Max Bond Center for Urban Futures at the City College of New York. The research was made possible by the generous sharing of resources, time, and insight from the Albany County Land Bank.