For Cities and Land Banks

The maintenance layer Side Lot is missing.

Detroit transferred 10,000+ vacant lots to neighbors through the Side Lot Program. A 2025 study found it produced no statistically significant uplift in adjacent home values, because it transferred ownership without funding maintenance. Dryad provides the maintenance layer, autonomously, on parcels too small for any city program to bother with.

Blighted lots cost neighbors. Cared-for ones pay them.

The peer-reviewed urban-greening literature is unusually clear, and the most rigorous evidence in the field is a Penn-led randomized controlled trial. Property values move in measurable, predictable directions depending on whether vacant lots are abandoned, transferred without care, or actively maintained.

-20%

Drag on adjacent home values from a single blighted vacant lot

Columbus, OH · multi-city literature

+13%

Six-year cumulative lift on homes within 1,000 ft of greened lots

Branas et al. RCT · Penn IUR

+$12.8K

Sale-price uplift per street tree, including 100 ft spillover

Donovan & Butry · USFS PNW

$2 - $5

Returned per $1 invested in urban tree care

USFS · Arbor Day Foundation

The Voicu & Been (NYU Furman) work on community gardens adds a critical detail: the largest property-value gains land in the lowest-income neighborhoods. In Chadsey-Condon, that means the literature predicts the strongest uplift effects, not the weakest. Full research brief with citations.

02 · The Side Lot gap

What works, and what doesn't, in Detroit.

A 2025 study in Sustainable Cities and Society evaluated Detroit Land Bank programs from 2011 to 2020. The findings are diagnostic. The Auction program significantly increased adjacent housing values. The Side Lot program showed positive direct effects offset by negative indirect effects, netting no statistically significant change. The interventions documented in the property-value literature that do reliably raise values - Branas RCT, Philadelphia LandCare, Voicu/Been community gardens - share one feature in common: sustained planting and maintenance, not one-time transfer.

The gap

What Side Lot leaves on the table

Transfers ownership for $100; no funding for maintenance after the deed changes hands.
10,000+ lots transferred. 2025 study: no statistically significant uplift in adjacent values.
No mechanism for the city to verify which lots stay maintained, regress to blight, or get cleared again.
Excludes neighbors who can't take on the labor or liability of an extra parcel.
Doesn't reach the parcels too small or too constrained for individual ownership to be appealing.

What Dryad provides

The maintenance layer

The agent operates parcels owned by Dryad-affiliated LLCs and partner organizations, funding labor, planting, and recurring care from a small treasury earmarked for the work.
Each contractor job is verified by GPS-tagged photos before payment, and every payment is logged in a public, tamper-proof record.
Native meadows trend toward self-maintenance once established, with ongoing work shrinking to light sidewalk and edge upkeep.
No new burden on neighbors. No annual budget fight. No grant-cycle gap.
Pilot: 9 parcels in Chadsey-Condon. Model: scalable to thousands of parcels city-wide.

"The interventions that raise values all involve sustained care, not one-time transfer. Dryad is the maintenance layer Side Lot is missing."

FROM THE DRYAD RESEARCH BRIEF · MAY 2026

What 9 parcels look like in dollars.

The arithmetic on a single Dryad lot in Chadsey-Condon, using conservative estimates from the published literature:

10 - 15 homes within the 100-ft Donovan/Butry spillover radius of each parcel

4 - 6 mature trees planted per parcel over the first three years

~$5,700 in spillover value per tree to nearby homes (Portland 2010 dollars, conservatively unindexed)

$22,800 - $34,200 per parcel in neighbor home-value uplift from trees alone

Plus 4 - 13% surrounding home-value lift over 6 years from cleaning + greening + maintenance (Branas RCT)

Across 9 parcels: $200K - $1M+ in surrounding home value uplift over 5 - 10 years, before counting cooling, crime reduction, energy savings, or stormwater benefits

That uplift accrues directly to existing Chadsey-Condon homeowners and, eventually, the city's tax rolls. It is not a transfer payment; it is value created by sustained ecological care of land that was previously a tax-base liability.

What else moves when the lots get cared for.

CRIME · Branas RCT

-9.2% all crime

In greened-lot clusters at 18 months. Burglary fell 13.7%. Self-reported depression among nearby residents fell sharply. Lower crime is itself a property-value mechanism.

HEAT · USFS / EPA

-5 to -10°F

Mature canopy lowers local Land Surface Temperature by 5-10°F, cuts AC use by ~30%, and addresses the heat-island disamenity that already depresses values in low-canopy neighborhoods. See Detroit's heat map.

STORMWATER · i-Tree

~150,000 gal

Per mature tree intercepted over 30 years. Reduces flooding, lowers utility surcharges, defers grey-infrastructure spend - benefits the city captures directly.

What we're asking for.

Dryad already operates 9 parcels independently. The pilot doesn't depend on a city contract. But several things would make the next phase faster and more useful to Detroit:

INTRODUCTIONS to Detroit Land Bank Authority, the Office of Sustainability, and the Detroit Tree Equity Partnership. We want to be a known operator, not a surprise.

DATA SHARING on Side Lot transfer outcomes, parcel-level vacancy data, and existing canopy assessments, so we can target the next 50 - 100 parcels where Dryad has the largest predicted impact.

POLICY ALIGNMENT on path-to-ownership rules for autonomous entities, so future parcels can be acquired through the same channels existing nonprofits already use.

A PILOT PARTNERSHIP co-evaluating the next 9 to 25 parcels against a matched set of Side Lot parcels, with property-value, canopy, and LST as the metrics.

Nothing here requires the city to spend money. Dryad's treasury covers acquisition, labor, planting, and maintenance. The ask is administrative and informational, in exchange for a partner that converts blight into measurable uplift on parcels the city has already given up on.

Talk to us, or talk to the agent.

Dryad is real, deployed, and verifiable. The treasury is on Base. The satellite monitoring is live. The agent can answer questions about its own operations, the underlying research, or specific parcels.