By Celia Hack / KMUW
The city of Wichita created a land bank in 2021 to ease affordable housing development in the center of the city. But four years later, city staff have suggested dissolving it, saying it faces too many obstacles.
Two vacant lots near 9th and Ash are dotted with plastic Dillons bags and crushed soda cans.
Laurie Walker — program director for Wichita’s Habitat for Humanity — sees a promising future in the two grassy fields.
“This one will have a driveway on 9th, and that one on Ash,” Walker says, pointing to the two consecutive lots. “We’ll build two, single-family, slab-on-grade homes. The size of the houses will be dependent on the composition of the families buying them.”
Wichita’s Habitat for Humanity builds and sells homes at affordable rates to low-income families. The nonprofit bought the two vacant lots this year from the city’s land bank. Wichita’s City Council created the tool in 2021 with the goal of more easily transferring blighted properties into the hands of responsible owners like Habitat for Humanity who could use the properties for much-needed affordable housing. Wichita is short thousands of affordable units.
Walker says buying property from a land bank can be more affordable, in part because land banks have the ability to clear lingering questions about ownership that often prevent development on long-vacant properties.
“When that process is cleaned up, we’re just accessing that land from the land bank, and we’re able to go our merry way,” said Danielle Johnson, executive director of Wichita’s Habitat for Humanity.
But the two lots Habitat bought are the only properties Wichita’s land bank has been able to obtain – far from what’s needed to make a dent in the city’s blight issue and housing shortage. The land bank has been held up by a myriad of obstacles, including funding limitations and an inability to get special access to properties from Sedgwick County’s tax sale.
Frustration is growing among leaders of the land bank’s board of trustees and city staff, which have recommended dissolving it.
“We’ve been spinning our wheels,” said Sally Stang, the city’s director of housing and community services, at a December land bank meeting.
But the land bank’s board, which is appointed by City Council, is not ready to give up quite yet. The board’s chair, Gary Schmitt, says the land bank needs to address the two key issues that have stymied it thus far in order to move forward.
The land bank and the county tax sale
Every one to two years, Sedgwick County auctions off lots with long-overdue tax bills. The move is meant to recoup unpaid taxes as well as move the properties back onto the tax rolls.
The properties are often abandoned and distressed, like the ones the land bank is seeking. Representatives of the city have met with the county several times since 2022 to discuss ways the land bank could access tax sale properties without having to bid in the auction.
But city staff says the meetings have not produced the results the land bank needs.
“The outreach we’ve done as staff, for example, multiple times to the county, is going nowhere,” Stang told the land bank board in December.
Sedgwick County treasurer Brandi Baily, who runs the tax sale, says the land bank has to compete for properties in the auction.
“These properties are deeded to each individual property owner,” Baily said. “So, I can’t give Joe’s property over here to the city so they can put it in their land bank. I don’t have that authority to do that.”
Other communities and states commonly build their land bank’s inventory through tax sales, assistant city manager Troy Anderson told city and county elected leaders in January. That’s because other states often set the minimum bid at a tax sale to the amount of back taxes owed. Any properties left unsold go to the land bank.
But in Sedgwick County, bidding starts at one dollar – no matter how much is owed in back taxes. At the county’s most recent tax sale, all the properties up for bid were sold.
Baily says starting the bidding low allows potential buyers of all income levels to bid on and potentially win property.
But land bank proponents say this process can fail to fully recover tax dollars that should go to the city, county and school district.
Baily says the most recent tax sale only lost $113,000 in back taxes – a tiny fraction of local government budgets. But analyses by Wichita land bank staff have estimated losses closer to half a million dollars a year on average over 10 years.
Funding challenges
Baily said the city’s land bank can access properties from the tax sale; it just needs to bid on them like other private citizens do.
But that leads the land bank to its second problem: funding and staffing needs.
“The land bank was not given city funds to go out and acquire properties, so we’ve got to ask for donations,” Schmitt said.
When the land bank launched in 2021, the city granted it about $375,000 in federal block grant funding. The dollars have strict strings attached, limiting what they can be used for. That makes it difficult to bid on properties at the tax sale.
Stang told the land bank board at a meeting in December that she didn’t even have dollars to run title searches – research to confirm the legal ownership of a property that’s often important in real estate transactions.
Even providing staff to run the land bank is a challenge, she told the board.
“You’ve got to understand, we are stretched extraordinarily thin with everything that we’ve got going on,” Stang said.
A way forward
Since 2021, the only properties the land bank has acquired are two vacant lots that were previously city property. The City Council transferred the properties into the land bank in 2023. Three organizations, including Habitat, bid on the properties.
In August 2024, the land bank board voted to sell the properties to Habitat – disposing of its entire portfolio.
After the vote, Stang recommended potentially dissolving the land bank due to the challenges it faced.
But board members have consistently pushed back on the suggestion, saying at the August meeting – and again in December – they weren’t ready to give up on the land bank.
“We put too much into it just to throw it away,” said Marvin Schellenberg, the board’s vice chair, at a December land bank meeting. “I mean, there’s two years invested and quite a bit of money, and I think it would be a waste just to say we can’t do it.”
But what needs to change?
The city has spoken with legislators about changing the law so that tax sales are required to set the minimum bid at the amount of back taxes owed, said Anderson, the assistant city manager. Schmitt also suggested requesting the state’s Attorney General weigh in on the laws that govern how counties run tax sales.
Then there’s funding. Stang told the land bank’s board at a December meeting that she requested more funding last year through the city budget process but was denied. Members of the land bank’s board asked whether they could ask for more again this year.
Stang was skeptical about whether such a request would be successful, as the city prepares for a budget deficit in 2026.
“You can definitely do it,” Stang replied. “We had a meeting this morning, and it’s all cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut.”
The City Council, which ultimately votes on the budget, does not seem to have clarity yet on its plans for the land bank. Mayor Lily Wu and council member Dalton Glasscock told KMUW in January they are still determining their opinions on the program’s future, pointing instead to council members Brandon Johnson and Mike Hoheisel, who have taken the lead on housing issues.
Johnson said he would consider a “one-time investment” from the city’s general fund into the land bank to help get it off the ground.
Schmitt said he hopes to gather key players in Wichita’s affordable housing scene – nonprofits, banks, developers, builders, landlords, tenants, Realtors – to explain the land bank’s challenges and gather support for the changes that are necessary.
“I really feel like this affordable housing issue is something the land bank needs to be involved in,” Schmitt said at the December land bank meeting. “It’s going to take all of us coming together, similar to the homeless issue that we’ve been dealing with for the last four or five years.”
In the meantime, organizations like Wichita’s Habitat for Humanity are caught in the waiting game, hoping the city finds a way forward for the land bank.
“There’s really beautiful ideas, and there’s great intent,” said Johnson of Habitat for Humanity.
“But what can we actually do with the land bank and is it – is it going to work?”
This article was produced in collaboration with KSN as a part of the Wichita Journalism Collaborative (WJC). You can read the story and watch the video from KSN here. The WJC is a partnership of 10 media and community partners, including KMUW and KSN.
This article was republished here with the permission of: KMUW