The increase in vacant houses is accompanied by various urban problems, such as the deterioration of living environments, regional decline, and issues regarding crime and safety. To address these, many cities are utilizing land bank systems as a polic...
The increase in vacant houses is accompanied by various urban problems, such as the deterioration of living environments, regional decline, and issues regarding crime and safety. To address these, many cities are utilizing land bank systems as a policy tool. A land bank is an institution that acquires and manages abandoned properties to resolve urban vacancy and revitalize local communities. South Korea also operates a land bank system led by the Korea Land and Housing Corporation (LH), with its primary goals being public-led land acquisition and management. However, performance evaluations of Korea's land bank have focused mainly on objective indicators, such as supply performance and project scale, which has the limitation of not adequately reflecting the experiences and opinions of citizens—the actual beneficiaries of the policy.
In this context, there is a growing need to integrate a citizen experience-based perspective into land bank evaluations. With this awareness, this study conducts a case study of the Detroit Land Bank Authority (DLBA) in the United States to derive implications for the operation and evaluation of the Korean land bank system. Since the 2000s, the U.S. has actively utilized land banks to address vacant housing. In particular, the DLBA is considered a prime example, having accumulated extensive institutional experience along with various policy controversies. These projects are gaining attention for positive outcomes, such as providing affordable housing, improving the environment, and revitalizing local economies. However, they also face criticism for issues like a lack of operational transparency, business practices favoring certain developers, and racial inequality.
Existing studies have primarily relied on objective indicators like real estate value, crime rates, and tax delinquency rates for their analyses, which limits their ability to reflect the actual experiences and opinions of citizens. To address this gap, this study aims to investigate how key topics emerging in the land bank operation process are perceived by different stakeholders by combining citizen-generated online platform data with local media citations. By setting Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) as the central analytical framework and combining topic modeling, sentiment analysis, and deep neural network-based SHAP (Shapley Additive Explanations) techniques, we quantitatively measure the importance and performance of each topic. The analysis utilizes 97 Google Maps reviews directly reflecting the experiences of Detroit citizens, 1,263 Reddit posts and comments, and 222 quotes from local news articles—including official statements from Detroit Land Bank officials—to compare the gap between citizen perceptions and institutional stances over approximately a decade, from 2012 to 2024. The analysis revealed that perceptions and evaluations of the Detroit Land Bank differed significantly depending on the platform's information structure and user characteristics. Overall, Google Maps reviews and user-generated content like Reddit highlighted service experiences and administrative inefficiencies, while official media outlets focused on physical outcomes, revealing a gap between the citizen experience and the official perspective. These results suggest that the operation of the land bank may have been managed with a focus on tangible, quantitative performance.
Based on the results derived from analyzing the US case, this study suggests the necessity of incorporating a citizen experience-based perspective into the operational evaluation of land banks and derives implications applicable to the performance evaluation and policy design of the Korean land bank system in the future.