nobody home - the rise of vacancy

H O M ET H E R I S E O F V A C A N C Y

pittsburghtoday.org 2

The abandoned house with its windowsboarded and the vacant lot choked with weedsare highly visible evidence of a crisis in ourregion that continues to grow largely unabatedby the limited efforts of government to containit. Vacant and blighted property robs localgovernments of tax revenue, drags down realestate markets, invites crime, discouragesinvestment and makes it far more difficult torevitalize distressed neighborhoods. These arecosts we all end up paying.

This year, Pittsburgh TODAY began toassign accomplished journalists to investigatekey issues that confront our region. The idea isto supplement our data with in-depth reportingto heighten public awareness and understand-ing of these issues, their implications andpossible solutions.

Nobody Home: The Rise of Vacancy isthe first such project and stands as the region’smost comprehensive journalistic treatmentof this issue, which is vitally important to thehealth of neighborhoods across southwesternPennsylvania, the state and the nation. It bringsthe problem to light in human terms, details itsimpact on places and people, and reveals thefailure of shop-worn strategies to control wide-spread vacancy as well as the promise of inno-vative solutions being tried in a few of our

neighborhoods and across the country.A series of this scope is a major undertak-

ing. The research alone involved conductingmore than 50 interviews, walking the streetsof blighted neighborhoods and digesting thou-sands of pages of studies and reports. Wethank all of those we called upon who gavegenerously of their time and expertise, particu-larly our partners at the University of Pitts-burgh University Center for Social and UrbanResearch, whose regional data collection andanalyses rank among the finest in the nation.Finally, we thank our Advisory Committee andour funders, without whose support the kindof in-depth community journalism this seriesrepresents would not be possible.

In the opening article of the series, CourtGould, executive director of Sustainable Pitts-burgh, is quoted saying: “Any community thathas blighted and abandoned properties andsees them only as a strain and a drain is under-valuing the real estate. We need to be thinkingabout those properties as stranded economicassets.”

We couldn’t agree more and hope thisseries contributes to the public dialoguearound finding ways of transforming vacantand blighted properties from liabilities tocommunity assets.

a message from the director

Douglas HeuckSeptember 2011

ast liberty development, inc. was still figuring outhow to jump-start the housing market in the Pittsburgh neigh-borhood when it built 10 houses on Mellon Street across from ahandful of vacant and blighted buildings. At $105,000 for three

bedrooms, a bath and a half, a two-car garage and a zero-percent sec-ond mortgage for income-qualified buyers, the new homes werepriced to sell.

None of them did.“Nobody was willing to buy on that block until we were able

to tell them a good story, something concrete, about what was goingto come about across the street,” said Kendall Pelling, project man-

ager for the community development corporation. “We learnedfrom experience that vacant and abandoned properties have aterrible impact on the housing market.”

Others are getting a similar education. Vacant and blightedproperties are increasing across southwestern Pennsylvania, the state and the nation, robbinglocal governments of desperately needed tax revenue, consuming millions of tax dollars, erodinghousing values, posing health and safety risks and complicating the already challenging job of re-viving distressed neighborhoods.

In Allegheny County, a program for turning tax-delinquent vacant properties into commu-nity assets doesn’t come close to keeping pace with the rate at which properties become vacant.And the story is the same throughout southwestern Pennsylvania.

In Homewood, mapping routes to get children to and from school without exposing themto mean streets littered with vacant lots and abandoned buildings is one of the first steps theHomewood Children’s Village is taking as it attempts to improve the educational outcomes andoverall well-being of children in one of Pittsburgh’s most distressed neighborhoods.

In Philadelphia, one of the few studies of the price that communities pay for vacancy andblight reports that housing values fall by 6.5 percent citywide and that at least $22 million a yearis drained from the city in lost tax revenue and to cover maintenance, police and fire costs.

In Flint, Mich. and Cleveland, Ohio, land banks seize thousands of vacant tax-delinquentproperties using laws Pennsylvania doesn’t have, and sells, rehabilitates or tears them down fol-

H O M Eby jeffery fraser


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Photographs by Matt Stroud

lowing comprehensive blight redevelopment strategiesthat haven’t been developed in southwestern Pennsylva-nia.

If there is a bright side to the growing problem, itlies in the opportunity vacant properties offer to re-design neighborhoods in ways that are better suited totheir down-sized populations, such as widening narrowlots found in many former industrial towns to accommo-date fewer, but more marketable parcels, and turningempty lots and buildings into greenways, communitygardens, recreational space and other amenities that givelocal housing markets more appeal.

“Any community that has blighted and abandonedproperties and sees them only as a strain and a drain isundervaluing the real estate,” said Court Gould, execu-tive director of Sustainable Pittsburgh, which last yearpublished a comprehensive report on vacant property insouthwestern Pennsylvania. “We need to be thinkingabout those properties as stranded economic assets.”

East Liberty Development, Inc. got the message.The new houses on Mellon Street sold after the non-profit bought the vacant properties across the street andcame up with a plan to renovate some of the vacanthouses and build new ones on the other lots.

Recent Pennsylvania legislation offers municipali-ties, community organizations, and even residents amore expansive menu of legal options for dealing withneglectful landlords, absentee owners and the vacantand blighted properties next door.

But when dealing with tens of thousands of vacantproperties, effective intervention comes down to a ques-tion of scale. And in southwestern Pennsylvania, localgovernment attempts to combat vacancy and blight fallfar short of recovering anything but a fraction of the va-cant lots and houses found along city, borough andtownship streets.

Over the past seven years, the Allegheny CountyVacant Property Recovery Program has helped put some500 vacant, tax-delinquent properties into the hands ofbuyers interested in turning them into side yards, smallparks and other neighborhood-friendly uses. At that rateof recovery, the program barely makes a dent.

The percentage of vacant housing in the countyjumped from 6.8 percent to 9.4 percent over the pasttwo decades – a trend experienced in every county in theregion, according to U.S. Census data. More than 55,000housing units, including apartments, stand vacant. Andthe Census Bureau doesn’t count vacant lots, whichgreatly outnumber vacant houses.

“Even if we did 1,000 properties this year – and wewon’t – I would have a job for life,” said Richard Ranii,who oversees the program as manager of the Housingand Human Services Division of the Allegheny County

Economic Development Department.a creeping crisis

Shifting, aging or declining population, weak hous-ing markets, poor housing stock, crime, underperform-ing schools and other factors that make somecommunities less than desirable places to live -- all ofthese factors contribute to vacancy and blight. Highmortgage foreclosure rates, decimated job marketsother consequences of recession have exacerbated theproblem.

Antiquated tax foreclosure systems can take yearsto move against delinquent properties, and many accrueseveral years’ worth of delinquent taxes and penalties. Indepressed markets, such Homewood, where the averageprice paid for residential property was $9,060 in 2009,back taxes and penalties can easily exceed the marketvalue of a house, encouraging owners to ignore its up-keep or to walk away from it entirely.

“There isn’t a place I go where someone doesn’ttalk about a problem property they are frustrated with,”said Irene McLaughlin, an attorney and consultant onvacant property issues for the Housing Alliance of Penn-sylvania and others.

More than 11 percent of the houses and apartmentsacross the United States are vacant, according to the2010 U.S. Census. In states hit hardest by the mortgageforeclosure crisis, the rate is much higher – 17.5 percentin Florida, for example, and 16.3 percent in Arizona.

Nine percent of the housing in the seven-countyPittsburgh Metropolitan Statistical Area is vacant, upfrom 6.8 percent in 1990.

Cities tend to have higher concentrations of vacantproperty, and Pittsburgh is no exception with nearly 13percent of its houses and apartments standing vacant.Higher rates are found in several nearby cities. The va-cancy rate is 19 percent in Cleveland and Youngstown,Ohio. And 15 percent of Steubenville’s housing is vacant.Even higher concentrations are found in poor urbanneighborhoods and municipalities that have endureddecades of economic decline. In other words, the placesshouldering the heaviest burden are the most fragile andthe least likely to have the resources to do somethingabout it.

many pay the price

While those living on blight-ridden streets are themost directly affected, studies suggest the economic andsocial costs of long-standing vacancy are widely shared.What those costs amount to in southwestern Pennsylva-nia is unclear. Pittsburgh’s year-old Land Recycling Task


Force, planning department and others are working onan analysis of the economic impact on the city, which isexpected later this year. And there is no countywide orregional accounting of the total cost of vacant property.

Philadelphia is one of the few places that exam-ined those costs. Its study found that vacant propertiesreduce market values by 6.5 percent citywide and by asmuch as 20 percent in high-vacancy neighborhoods, re-sulting in an average loss in value of $8,000 for eachcity household. Tax-delinquent vacant properties inPhiladelphia owe an estimated $70 million in backtaxes, a sum that grows by $2 million every year. Andvacant properties consume $20 million in city servicesa year, including $8 million spent on code enforcementand maintenance.

When housing values plummet, those who arehurt the most include long-time homeowners, many ofthem senior citizens – the very people who tend to holdtogether what is left of declining neighborhoods.

“We got a call last year from an elderly woman inone of those neighborhoods,” said Rob Stephany, direc-tor of the Pittsburgh Urban Redevelopment Authority.“She had a $9,000 bid from a contractor to replace herroof, which had started to leak. Her next-door neigh-bor’s house had sold for less than that, about $7,000.Here was a responsible, salt-of-the-earth-Greatest-Generation senior citizen asking whether she shouldrepair her roof or just ride it out. That is loss of equity.” Vacant and blighted properties also play a role in unrav-eling of the quality of life in a neighborhood and dim-ming the outlooks of those who live there.

For Malik Bankston, one of the more challengingaspects taking control of vacant properties in Pitts-burgh’s Larimer neighborhood and then creating gar-dens, parks and a safer and more vibrant place to livewas convincing residents that it could be done. “It wastough getting a conversation going,” said the KingsleyCenter director. “For so long, the neighborhoodwatched a deliberate kind of disinvestment play out,which resulted in us having one of the highest inci-dence of vacant and blighted property.”

More than 42 percent of the lots, houses andbuildings in Larimer are unoccupied. And, like mostneighborhoods with high rates of vacant and blightedproperty, crime rates are higher than citywide averages– in Larimer’s case, 30-50 percent higher.

In Homewood, where nearly 44 percent of the lotsand 28 percent of the houses are vacant, finding waysfor school children to avoid them is a priority of theHomewood Children’s Village, which is based on a pro-gram in New York’s Harlem neighborhood that concen-trates community support and services on mending thesocial fabric and improving children’s outcomes.

“The impact of vacant and abandoned propertieson kids is a real concern,” said John Wallace, a Univer-sity of Pittsburgh associate professor of social workwho spent several years planning the Homewood initia-tive. “These properties are risk factors for crime,they’re a safety risk and they’re a health risk.”

The “broken window” theory argues that is not bycoincidence. The theory, introduced by social scientistsJames Q. Wilson and George Kelling in 1982, has be-come widely accepted by law enforcement. It suggeststhat vacant and blighted houses, abandoned cars andother visible evidence of neglect send the signal thatnobody cares, erode community controls and leaveneighborhoods more vulnerable to crime.

Southwestern Pennsylvania police departmentsdon’t track the relationship between crime and vacantproperty. And the few local studies that looked at therelationship offer contradictory, inconclusive findings.

Evidence elsewhere suggests the relationship isnot benign. Philadelphia spends close to $6 million ayear on police and fire calls to vacant properties. Astudy published by the Federal Reserve Bank ofChicago reported violent crime rates in the city rose 2.3percent with every 0.01 percent increase in mortgageforeclosures. After a sharp rise in foreclosures and va-cancy, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Departmentin North Carolina analyzed its records and found thathigh neighborhood foreclosure rates predicted highercrime rates, including violent crime, which rose steadilyin those neighborhoods, but stayed much lower inplaces with few foreclosures.

Whether residents of neighborhoods with a highpercentage of vacant, boarded-up stores and homes, lit-ter and graffiti have a higher incidence of disease andpremature death was a question RAND researcherslooked at in 2003. Even after controlling for poverty,they found that those who live in deteriorating neigh-borhoods have higher rates of premature death anddeath by cardiovascular disease and homicide than peo-ple in neighborhoods that are not in decline.

That was not the only troubling effect they noted.In neighborhoods where residents were seen as willingto work toward a common good, the rate of prematuredeaths was lower. The one exception was in neighbor-hoods with a high number of vacant homes and othersigns of decline, where the willingness of residents tohelp out made no difference.

liabilities to assets

The flip side of vacant and blighted properties isthat under the right circumstances they can be used toimprove conditions in the neighborhoods they helped


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lead down a path of decline. In southwestern Pennsyl-vania, both public and private sector interest in re-claiming vacant property to add elbowroom and a littlegreen to crowded urban neighborhoods is growing.

“With a lot of liabilities, your only option is toeliminate or reduce them. To be able to turn a liabilityinto a asset is a unique opportunity,” said FrederickThieman, executive director of the Buhl Foundation,which funded the Sustainable Pittsburgh report on va-cant property in southwestern Pennsylvania. “Vacantproperty provides us with such an opportunity.”

Demolition is a common municipal response toabandoned houses. Clarksburg. W.Va. took a low-inter-est state loan to finance a campaign against the blightthat had accumulated during decades of economic de-cline, tearing down nearly 300 homes. More than halfof the 900 vacant houses acquired by a public landbank in Cuyahoga County, Ohio last year have beenrazed.

“It’s like cleaning the cancer cells out of the bodyso the rest can be healthy,” said Frank Ford, vice presi-dent for research and development at NeighborhoodProgress, Inc., a Cleveland neighborhood developmentagency. “It’s hard for me to say that. Like most of mycolleagues, I was a preservationist 20 years ago. We re-habbed houses. That’s not feasible now. The marketisn’t going to come back until we clear out the bad stuffand allow it to come back.”

“Greening” vacant lots is an increasingly popularstrategy for helping turn around distressed neighbor-hoods.

In Pittsburgh, the city’s Green Up Pittsburgh pro-gram has put hundreds of vacant lots in the hands ofcommunity groups and residents who use them asneighborhood green spaces and side yards. BeforeLarimer residents decided to reinvent themselves as agreen community, nonprofits used vacant lots to intro-duce them to ideas such as community gardens andurban farming. And in Homewood, a community groupthat began gardening vacant lots a decade ago estab-lished its own urban landscaping company and youthtraining program.

But before any house is rehabilitated or lot seededwith sunflowers, those interested in doing the workmust take title of the property, which can be a time-consuming and costly process. In some cases, theirlocal government lends them a hand.

Allegheny County, for example, helps municipali-ties and others acquire vacant properties through emi-nent domain-like powers granted in the state’s UrbanRedevelopment Authority law and pays for clearing thetitle, which costs about $3,000.

And Pittsburgh takes tax-delinquent properties

through treasurer’s sales, “quiets” the titles and holdsthem in its land reserve until community groupsarrange financing to buy them. But financial andstaffing constraints cap acquisitions at 300 properties ayear, which represents about 1.5 percent of the vacanthouses and lots in the city.

Pennsylvania added a number of legal tools to helpcombat vacancy and blight in recent years. The state’snew conservatorship act, for example, allows commu-nity groups and others to petition courts to appoint athird party to take temporary possession of a blightedproperty, rehabilitate or demolish it, and then offer theproperty back to the owner for the cost of the workdone or sell it under court supervision to someone else.

But the consensus best practice for tackling va-cant property on a large scale is not available in Penn-sylvania. Genesee County, Mich. and Cuyahoga Countyin Ohio are showing how land banking and property taxreform can be used across entire counties to take con-trol of thousands of vacant tax-delinquent properties,keep them out the hands of slumlords and speculatorsand manage them as community assets.

In June, legislation to empower land banks was in-troduced in the Pennsylvania House of Representativesby state Rep. John Taylor (R-Philadelphia). The bill,which received the endorsement of Pittsburgh MayorLuke Ravenstahl, is under consideration in the HouseUrban Affairs Committee.

But costs are an issue. Genesee County and otherland banks are able to recover much, if not all, of theiroperating costs through sales and the collection taxliens and penalties.

Start-up costs are another matter. While a landbank in Pittsburgh is estimated to cost $3.7 million ayear to operate, it could take another $15 million toclear the titles of the more than 7,500 vacant propertiesin the city’s inventory, according to an unpublished re-port prepared for the city Land Recycling Task Force.

Spending that kind of money makes many munici-pal officials nervous, particularly when most face seri-ous budget shortfalls. “We run into that all of the time,”said Dan Kildee, a former Genesee County treasurerwho now directs the Center for Community Progress,a nonprofit that specializes in vacant property issues.“But it ignores the costs taxpayers already pay for va-cant property and abandonment. You have to measurethe cost of change against the cost of the current paththat we’re on. Anybody who argues that the currentpath we’re on is the right one isn’t examining the fullcost of vacant and abandoned property.” zx

(Matt Stroud of pittsburghtoday.org contributed to thereporting for this article).


is hometown of flint, mich. was in steep declinewhen Dan Kildee was elected Genesee County treasurer 14 yearsago. Its days as a thriving, broad-shouldered factory town weregone. Most plants were shuttered or running well below capacity.Some 60,000 General Motors jobs alone were lost. And the citywas well on its way toward shedding nearly half of its population.

The fallout included an epidemic of vacant and abandonedproperties. Blight was overtaking many neighborhoods. Tax delin-quency was starving the city and school district of desperatelyneeded revenue.

When the county’s antiquated tax foreclosure process waspressed into action, it took up to seven years to run its course.Houses deteriorated as they sat vacant. If they sold, it was at pub-lic auction, where they were exposed to speculators who weremore interested in turning a profit on a modest investment than

making repairs to improve them. Market values fell, block after block.“It didn’t take long to realize that not only was the system not up to the task of dealing

with the problem, it was actually part of the problem,” said Kildee. “It was really a destructiveprocess.”

Such a scenario is not unfamiliar in parts of southwestern Pennsylvania, West Virginia andOhio. Places ravaged by poverty, steady economic decline and population loss, find 20 percentor more of their houses are vacant, according to 2010 U.S. Census data. And the legal processesused to control vacant property, such as tax foreclosure, do little to stem the growing problem.

New laws for combating vacant and blighted properties are emerging in Pennsylvania asmore policymakers recognize the risks involved in allowing vacant properties to languish foryears and perpetuate the costly cycle of decline.

But land banking, which is widely seen the best option for dealing with vacant property ona large scale, is not available in Pennsylvania. Creating and empowering a land bank, such as theone that Kildee helped put in place in Genesee County, requires special legislation and propertytax reform, both of which are still being discussed in Harrisburg.

Tax reform and land banking laws in Michigan gave Genesee County a powerful set of legal


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tools that let officials take control of thousands of va-cant properties relatively quickly – within two years,in most cases – and do so without exposing them tospeculators at public auction.

“Having access to vacant property is critical,”said Bethany Davidson, deputy director of the non-profit Pittsburgh Community Reinvestment Group.“It doesn’t matter what your vision is for it, if youdon’t have access to it you’re at zero.”

taking control

Local governments in southwestern Pennsylva-nia rely on long-standing state statutes in their at-tempts to control vacant, tax-delinquent properties.And they use their statutory authority sparingly.

In Pittsburgh, the city takes several hundred tax-delinquent, vacant lots and houses each year throughtreasurer’s sale. The city sweetens the deal for non-profit community groups and others with the willing-ness and resources to reclaim blighted properties byassuming the burden and cost of clearing, or “quiet-ing,” the titles.

In quieting the title, the city Law Departmentsweeps away what often amounts to tens of thousandsof dollars in unpaid mortgage, water and sewage fees,tardy city, county and school district taxes and penal-ties and other liens.

“Probably 98 percent of the time, the amount ofthe delinquent taxes greatly exceeds the market valueof the property. Community groups and the UrbanRedevelopment Authority simply are not prepared topay that amount of money to claim these properties,”said Mary Lou Tenenbaum, city Finance Departmentreal estate manager.

Community groups can also take their time toclose a deal. Once the city claims title of a vacanthouse wanted by a community development corpora-tion, it offers to hold it in its Land Reserve for up tofive years. “It gives us a way to control property and aflexible timeline to plan development,” said KendallPelling, East Liberty Development, Inc. project man-ager.

costs and caps

The city today caps the number of vacant tax-delinquent properties it takes at treasurer’s sale at300 a year. And it limits acquisitions to propertiesthat have an indentified buyer – a resident who wantsa lot for a side yard or a community group that wants

to rehab a vacant house as part of a redevelopmentplan.

That wasn’t always the case, as the city’s inven-tory of more than 7,500 vacant lots suggests.

“Decades earlier, the city took a lot of property,”said Janet Koczerzat, city Department of Law real es-tate supervisor. “The reasoning was: If you’re delin-quent, I’m taking it. We don’t do that anymore. It’smuch more structured because of the cost and the lia-bility. If you take abandoned properties, you ownthem, you have the liability and the costs and youpay.” Take, for example, the postage costs for quietingthe title of a vacant lot in Greenfield sold through thecity side yard program, which offers residents achance to buy a lot from the city inventory for $200.The city had to notify 26 former owners and lienholders of the pending sale by certified mail, at justunder $15 per notice. “It cost us more in postage thanit cost the buyer to purchase it,” said Koczerzat.

And while maintaining a vacant lot may requirelittle more than mowing, the city struggles to stay ontop of the lots it owns, performing annual mainte-nance on only 27 percent of the lots in its inventory oftax-delinquent property, according to an unpublishedreport prepared for the city’s Land Recycling TaskForce.

Allegheny County, through its Vacant PropertyProgram, helps municipalities, community develop-ment corporations and others take ownership of va-cant tax-delinquent property by flexing the eminentdomain-like authority it has under the state’s UrbanRedevelopment Authority law. It also pays for clearingthe title, which costs about $3,000 for each property.But it takes a buyer to step forward before the countymoves to take control of a vacant property.

“Our plan is to help in on-demand situations,”said Richard Ranii, manager of the Allegheny CountyEconomic Development Department’s Housing andHuman Services Division. “Individuals interested in aside yard can come to us about getting that parcel.For others, such as the Mon Valley Initiative, whohave a development plan in place and need to get 12parcels, we will help them do that. But someone hasto come to us first with an interest in a property.”

Since 2004, the program helped transfer owner-ship of some 500 vacant, tax-delinquent properties tobuyers interested in recycling them into somethingthat better serves their neighborhoods.

Yet, at that rate, the program does little to re-duce the number of vacant houses in the county,which stands at 55,000, according to the U.S. Census.And it doesn’t keep pace with the rate at which prop-erties are becoming vacant.


policymakers awaken

Pennsylvania still lags behind some states, such asMichigan and Ohio, in addressing large-scale vacancy.But new laws and additions to existing statutes offerbetter options for taking steps to curb vacancy, such asseizing control of tax-delinquent properties and crack-ing down on chronic code violators whose neglect en-courages blight to spread like a contagion.

“There’s been shift in mentality,” said ElizabethHersh, executive director of the Housing Alliance ofPennsylvania, a nonprofit coalition with 500 memberorganizations statewide. “Cities and municipalities arestarting to think about their land as an asset – a trou-bled asset, maybe, but an asset. And there’s a growingawareness that the problems surrounding those trou-bled assets are problems we can solve.”

Code enforcement was toughened in April whenthe state’s Neighborhood Reclamation and Revitaliza-tion Act became law, despite the concerns of tradegroups such as the Pennsylvania Association of Real-tors. The law, which Hersh describes as “a pretty bighammer,” lets municipalities do more than place liensagainst properties with serious and persistent code vio-lations. Now, they can fine, extradite if necessary andattach the private assets of landlords and other ownersof problem properties, as well as deny them water,building and other permits.

And the two-year-old Abandoned and BlightedProperty Conservatorship Act offers a hedge againstvacant properties and land speculators who tend toperpetuate the problem. Under the law, municipalities,community groups and others can ask the court to ap-point a third-party to take possession of a blighted,abandoned building and rehabilitate or tear it down,then offer it back to the owner for the cost of thework, or sell it under court supervision to someoneelse.

With money from The Heinz Endowments, attor-ney Irene McLaughlin is working with the Housing Al-liance of Pennsylvania and community groups on usingconservatorship and other new legal tools to help con-trol blight in Pittsburgh’s Homewood neighborhood.Nearly 44 percent of the land parcels in the neighbor-hood are vacant, according to a study by the Universityof Pittsburgh Center for Urban and Social Research.And the latest U.S. Census found 28 percent of thehouses and apartments in Homewood as vacant.

“Conservatorship is a way of taking control ofthose properties in advance of taking title,” saidMcLaughlin, a former city magistrate and consultanton vacant property issues. “Rather than wait, you cango ahead and stabilize the problem property while you

try to figure out what the ownership situation is.”But conservatorship is a surgical tool not meant

to address the scale of vacant and blighted propertyfound in major cities, counties and regions acrossPennsylvania.

The seven-county Pittsburgh Metropolitan Sta-tistical Area holds more than 100,400 vacant housesalone, according to the U.S. Census. The percentage ofvacant houses in the region has risen from 6.8 percentto 9 percent since 1990. In Allegheny County, it rosefrom 6.8 to 9 percent; in Beaver County, from 5.8 to 8.7percent; in Westmoreland County, from 6.2 to 8.6 per-cent. Even in Butler County, which has the lowest va-cant housing rate in the region, it increased from 6.3 to6.8 percent.

banking vacant property

Genesee County, Mich. was beset by similartrends when Kildee began his 12-year stint as treasurerin 1997. Needing a better way to control the rising tideof vacant properties before they fell prey to land specu-lators and blight, he turned to a land bank model thatnew laws and property tax reforms in Michigan madepossible.

The land bank allows the county to quickly takeownership of thousands of tax-delinquent propertiesthrough tax foreclosure and reuse them to advancecommunity improvement strategies rather than sellingthem off at auction to the highest bidder, often landspeculators who may not have the community’s bestinterests in mind.

“Speculators prefer competitive auctions becausefor the most part they don’t think of the property asreal estate. It’s just a piece of paper with a dollaramount attached to it,” said Kildee, who left govern-ment to launch the Center for Community Progress, anonprofit that provides technical assistance on vacantand abandoned property issues. “They can buy a prop-erty at a deep discount at a tax sale without ever seeingit, flip it to someone else at a marginal profit and thenit’s not their problem anymore.

“We know those systems have failed. We’ve had ahalf of a century experience with them and all you haveto do is to go to Flint or Cleveland or Gary, Ind. to seehow that process has worked.”

Once the land bank takes a property, it can rehab,sell, rent or demolish it. The land bank in GeneseeCounty created a program to help homeowners avoidtax foreclosure and adopted a redevelopment plan forall of the property it acquires. Today, the land bank hasnearly 4,000 tax-foreclosed properties under its con-


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trol. A similar land bank in Cuyahoga County, Ohio ac-quired some 900 vacant properties last year – threetimes what Pittsburgh takes through treasurer’s sale.

Those land banks also acquire the revenue whichtax-delinquent properties generate. One of the hiddentruths about tax delinquency is that most owners payback taxes and penalties after being threatened withforeclosure. The interest, penalties and principal col-lected go toward maintaining, demolishing, rehabbingand marketing properties in their inventories.

In Cuyahoga County, that amounts to $6 million to$8 million a year in potential revenue. In Michigan, theland bank leverages its revenue potential to borrow in-expensively and pay municipalities all taxes owed on aproperty when it acquires it, rather than making themwait for the collection process to run its course.

Pennsylvania state Rep. John Taylor (R-Philadel-phia) introduced land bank legislation in June. Pitts-burgh’s Land Recycling Task Force, Mayor LukeRavenstahl and the Pittsburgh Community Reinvest-ment Group, a coalition of community organizations inand around the city, endorsed the bill, which is beingconsidered by the House Urban Affairs Committee.

Kildee, whose organization works with severalstates on land banking and property tax reform, says va-cant and blighted property is one of those rare issuesthat crosses the partisan political divide. “Once there’sthat revelation the current system isn’t working andthere’s a better way, we get a lot of buy in. We saw thatin Ohio, which led to land banks in Cleveland andToledo, and in Syracuse, N.Y. and we’re seeing hopefulsigns in Pennsylvania, too.” zx


hen east liberty development, inc. officialswere roughing out strategies for improving the Pittsburghneighborhood, a big question was what to do with some 50 va-cant properties that were robbing tax-paying homeowners oftheir equity, discouraging investment, and exacerbating crimeand other factors that had led the neighborhood to becomewhat Rob Stephany, director of the city Urban RedevelopmentAuthority, calls “below the line” – a place you don’t visit.

They decided to buy them all, rehabilitate some them-selves, sell others to rehab-minded buyers and tear down therest.

“You can’t change a neighborhood by building 10 houseson one street. We’ve tried that and it doesn’t work,” saidKendall Pelling, East Liberty Development, Inc. project man-ager. “You also can’t change a neighborhood by buying a bunch

of vacant houses and sitting on them like a chicken. We looked at how private developers workand at our situation and tried to come up with an intervention that was the right scale to stabi-lize and grow our market.”

Some 10 years later, taking control of the vacant property in the neighborhood is a key partof a larger strategy for revitalizing East Liberty that has begun paying dividends ranging from arejuvenated business corridor to steadily rising property values.

The notion that East Liberty would need to take such steps would’ve been inconceivable60 years ago, when it was among the city’s most robust neighborhoods with a business districtthat was ranked third largest in the state behind center city Philadelphia and Downtown Pitts-burgh. But a half of century of decline followed, brought on by a number of factors, not the leastof which was an ill-conceived urban renewal program that demolished some 1,200 houses,shrunk the bustling business district by 1 million square feet and reengineered the neighbor-hood’s main artery, Penn Avenue, choking traffic flow in the heart of East Liberty.

Hundreds of the small businesses fled. By 2000, the neighborhood had lost more than halfof its population and 14 percent of its housing stood vacant by the U.S. Census Bureau’s count.One of the first orders of business for East Liberty Development, Inc. was to stabilize and re-


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store confidence in the local housing market. In 2002,the highest home sale price in East Liberty was$150,000 – for a seven-bedroom Victorian restored tohistoric detail with 3.5 baths, a modern kitchen and afully renovated carriage house. To say that it didn’t rep-resent the overall housing stock in the neighborhood isan understatement.

“Structurally, our housing market did not work,”Pelling said. “We had a bunch of houses that needed alot of work that you couldn’t renovate and get yourmoney out of it. No one in his right mind will buy ahouse and renovate with the expectation of losingmoney. A basic question a buyer is going to ask the realestate agent is, ‘Am I going to get money back out ofthis house?’ And the answer in East Liberty was, no.”

The role that vacant properties played in depress-ing the housing market soon became evident. In 2001,East Liberty Development, Inc. built 10 three-bed-room houses on Mellon Street, but could not sell a sin-gle one of them. Each featured a bath and a half andtwo-car garage and was priced a $105,000. Income-qualified buyers were offered deferred second mort-gages at zero percent interest. The problem was acrossthe street, where several tax-delinquent, rundown,abandoned buildings frightened prospective buyers.

The nonprofit bought the abandoned propertiesat city treasurer’s sale and came up with a plan to reno-vate some of the buildings and build on other lots. “Assoon as we had site control of those abandoned proper-ties each of the houses sold, one right after the other, invery short order,” Pelling said.

That led to a “mothball” strategy to buy all tax-delinquent, vacant properties as they became availableat city treasurer’s sale and hold them off the marketuntil ways are found to reuse them to improve theneighborhood somehow. The Pittsburgh Partnershipfor Neighborhood Development, Urban Redevelop-ment Authority and the Local Initiative Support Cor-poration helped East Liberty DevelopmentCorporation secure the financing and other supportthe ambitious plan required, including a grant that al-lowed it to leverage a flexible line of credit.

Other strategies included rehabilitating thehouses it acquired and reselling them, selling otherhouses to buyers interested in doing the rehab workthemselves and doing targeted development, which in-cluded building new homes and offering them as af-fordable housing or selling them at market prices.

Today, the signs of recovery are clear. The “highestcomparable” sale price for a home has reached$300,000, twice what it was a decade earlier. The me-dian value of housing climbed to $69,000 in 2008,

nearly 34 percent higher than values reported in the2000.

The income mix of residents is more diverse. Thehousing stock is better. Homeowners have seen asteady increase in their equity, regardless of their in-come level. East Liberty’s crime rates – although stillhigher than citywide averages – fell 46 percent between1999 and 2008. The business district has been rebornwith retail anchors such as Target, Whole Foods andTrader Joe’s, as well as with bistros, cafes and loungeswith names like Spoon, Ava and Brgr.

“I used to work in East Liberty,” said Stephany.“There were times on Friday and Saturday nights thatyou just wouldn’t go to the corner of Penn Circle Westand Highland Avenue, which is now where Brgr is. Thelesson learned here is that it can happen. You can havespill over. You can deal with low-income people respon-sibly. You can bring equity back to stakeholders. Youcan do all of that regardless of how high the hurdlesare.” zx


erhaps it’s the nearly 750 empty lots and vacanthomes in disrepair, the buckling pavement, shuttered businessesand other visible evidence of years of disinvestment that makesthe idea of turning Pittsburgh’s Larimer neighborhood into ashowcase of economic and environmental sustainability seemwildly ambitious.

Yet, if the redevelopment plans that percolated from theresidents themselves are realized, Larimer will be reborn as agreen, downsized urban neighborhood, and the vacant lots andabandoned houses that have blighted its streets for decades willhave played an important role.

In southwestern Pennsylvania, across the state and the na-tion, leveraging vacant properties to introduce gardens, trees,urban farms and acres of open green space to densely developed,blighted neighborhoods is a concept that is gaining interest.

But it’s Larimer, one of Pittsburgh’s poorest and most challenged neighborhoods, that hasdeveloped one of the region’s most extensive visions for turning high vacancy rates into environ-mental assets in the hope of reducing blight, raising the quality of life and attracting investment. Malik Bankston only had to look as far as Summerset at Frick Park in the city’s Squirrel Hillneighborhood to find evidence that such ambitions can be realized. The upscale residential de-velopment, where home prices exceed $650,000, was built on a desolate brownfield atop 20 mil-lion tons of slag, an end-stage waste product of steel production. Part of the transformationinvolved cleaning up the once-sewage-tainted Nine Mile Run watershed.

“I thought that if the wherewithal exists to create a vibrant, stable community on a moun-tain of slag, then there is no reason that we can’t come together and reinvent a neighborhoodlike Larimer,” said Bankston, executive director of the Kingsley Center, a community organiza-tion that is part of a consortium of residents and others who put their vision for the neighbor-hood in the form of a comprehensive plan they are now working with the city to implement.

Nearly 42 percent of the lots and buildings in Larimer are vacant, giving the neighborhoodplenty to work with. Larimer is not alone. In just about every community where there is vacantproperty, the number of empty lots far outnumbers the number of empty houses. And cities and


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counties end up razing many of the vacant, tax-delin-quent houses they take possession of, creating evenmore empty lots.

At the same time, one characteristic shared bymany places where vacancy rates are high is a shortageof open green space that can be used to improve neigh-borhood aesthetics. That is often the case in denseurban communities, such as Larimer, where open spaceaccounts for less than 1 percent of the neighborhood,according the city Department of Planning data.

“Vacant properties offer unique reclamation op-portunities, and interest in neighborhood greeningstrategies is increasing significantly,” said FrederickThieman, executive director of the Buhl Foundation.The foundation’s support for innovative land use con-cepts dates to Chatham Village in the 1930s, which in-tegrated brick townhouses, garden courts, terraces andparks in what is considered one of the finest Americanexamples of Garden City planning.

Evidence of heightened interest in greening vacantproperties is found throughout the region. The non-profit GTECH was started five years ago as a CarnegieMellon University H. John Heinz III College project tofarm an urban brownfield. Today, its projects include re-claiming vacant lots with sunflower gardens and work-ing with the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy andother partners involved in advancing the Seeding Pros-perity And Revitalizing Corridors (SPARC) strategy forcreating green corridors linking urban neighborhoods.

In Pittsburgh, the city’s Green Up Pittsburgh pro-gram helps volunteers turn vacant lots into side yards,gardens, urban farms, tree parks and other useful greenspaces. During its first four years, the program helpedgreen more than 120 vacant lots. That is less than 1 per-cent of the 14,000 vacant lots found throughout thecity. But the city’s strategy for dealing with vacant prop-erty is still developing. And the use of open space is oneof the first issues being addressed in deliberations todevelop the city’s first-ever comprehensive plan.

Elsewhere, a similar approach is taken in GeneseeCounty, Mich. where the local land bank recruits com-munity groups to beautify and help maintain more than600 vacant properties in its inventory with projectssuch as tree plantings and making flowerbeds and com-munity vegetable gardens.

beyond aesthetics

The idea of greening vacant property is aboutmore than improving neighborhood aesthetics. Researchers at the Wharton School of the University ofPennsylvania report that the value of houses surround-

ing vacant lots that have been turned into gardens,parks or other green amenities rise by as much as 30percent.

And Carnegie Mellon researchers found thatbeing located close to Pittsburgh’s urban parks signifi-cantly boosts the value of a house. The size of the parkand a home’s proximity to it matter when it comes tothe “green premium” reflected in the sales price. For the most part, houses within 2,000 feet of parkslarge or small sell for much more than homes fartheraway, according to the study commissioned by the city’sUrban Redevelopment Authority. They found, for in-stance, that the sale price of a house located 1,000-1,400 feet from a park that is 30-acres or larger wouldbe expected to be more than $39,000 higher than whata comparable house located 2,500-3,000 feet awayfrom the same park would sell for.

Vacant properties also offer an opportunity to im-prove stormwater management. At the most basic level,lots of soil and grass and other low-maintenance vegeta-tion are able to absorb storm water, unlike asphalt,which diverts all of it to storm drains and the region’sovertaxed sewers. Vacant lots also show promise as in-expensive sites for innovative strategies, such as raingardens, plant-filled depressions that draw runoff fromroofs, driveways, parking lots and other impervious sur-faces and allow it to soak into the ground.

Southwestern Pennsylvania is desperate for waysto reduce the pressure on antiquated sewers that over-flow into the region’s rivers when rainwater combineswith sewage and overwhelm the system. The overflowsraise health concerns that have been serious enough toclose the Allegheny, Monongahela, Ohio andYoughiogheny rivers to boating and general recreationanywhere from 24 to 90 days a season since 1995, ac-cording to Allegheny County Health Department data.And it’s a problem the region is under court order tofix, at a cost estimated at $3 billion to $10 billion for Al-legheny County communities alone.

greening larimer

The greening movement in Larimer began with afew small-scale projects on vacant lots that introducedideas such as community gardens and urban farming.The projects attracted interest, and residents organizeda community “green team” to carry out similar projects.Eventually, the notion of transforming Larimer into agreen community as a means of urban renewal tookhold.

A key part of the Larimer plan is to reclaim itswestern border as open green space for athletic fields,


hiking and bike trails and acres of park – somethingthat is considered possible only because of the neigh-borhood’s high rate of vacant property. Relatively fewresidents will need to be relocated. All but a few hun-dred of the 2,000 or more houses that once stood onthe site of the proposed Larimer Park are either va-cant or they have been demolished and now stand asempty lots.

“The level of disruption is far less,” saysBankston. “So when we are having this conversationand only have to account for 238 occupied units, it’ssomething we can get our arms around.”

The park is one of several edges that the neigh-borhood plans to build from, including its border withEast Liberty. Just inside that border is Bakery Square,where an abandoned Nabisco factory was acquired bythe city and renovated to accommodate retail shops,several University of Pittsburgh offices and the newheadquarters of Google Pittsburgh.

Plans call for downsizing the neighborhood’s res-idential core to something better suited to its smallerpopulation. Larimer’s population has fallen more than85 percent since the 1940s, when it was a robust cityneighborhood that nearly 14,000 people called home. The high rate of vacant property that followed de-cline today allows neighborhood planners to pursue a“checkerboard green” strategy to envelope existinghouses with playgrounds, parks, side yards, rain gar-dens, urban farms and greenways that once wereempty, overgrown lots.

The hope is that such steps will improve thequality of life, give the neighborhood more appeal andraise property values – all of which have suffered foryears. The incomes of nearly 29 percent of Larimerresidents fall below federal poverty levels. And in2008, the median sales price for a house in Larimerwas $10,000, far less than the citywide median saleprice of $75,000.

How much of Larimer’s plan will become realityis remains to be seen. The likelihood that governmentagencies will be increasingly tightfisted as cities andstates deal with fiscal crises makes raising moneymore challenging. On the other hand, hundreds of va-cant properties have already been acquired throughcity treasurer’s sale with help from the URA. Supportis also flowing from other directions. GTECH and itspartners in SPARC, for example, have adopted green-ing the Larimer Park corridor as a priority project.

And then there are the residents, their leadersand organizations, who’ve so far have been able towork together and seem clear about what they want,no matter how ambitious it might be. “Neighbor-hoods like Larimer might be on the cutting edge of

urban land reclamation,” said Rob Stephany, URA di-rector. “They want to take control of the land.They’ve come up with a vision. They’re working withlocal nonprofits to repurpose that land. And it’s bring-ing a level of energy to Larimer that hasn’t seen in along time.” zx


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t’s been 27 years since elwin green came to live in Homewood. He hasseen the local high school and the neighborhood Carnegie Library branch renovated, theAfro American Music Institute move in, and a new YMCA, YWCA and community col-lege campus open their doors. Each has added texture to the neighborhood and the livesof its residents. And each is surrounded by evidence of disinvestment and decline thatsuch redevelopment has been unable to reverse.

The house directly across Race Street from Green’s house is vacant. The housenext to that vacant house is also vacant. Next to that vacant house is a vacant lot. OnGreen’s side of the street, the house beside his is occupied, but a vacant house flanks it.And next to that vacant house is another vacant lot.

High vacancy rates are indications of neighborhood distress. And dense swaths ofvacant buildings and lots are found in pockets throughout Pittsburgh, southwestern Penn-sylvania and the state, eroding home values, discouraging investment, and imposing healthand safety risks.

“It’s just plain ugly to a degree that it sucks life out of your soul when you are surroundedby it,” said Green, a former Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter, whose neighborhood blog appearson Homewood Nation, the community website he created.

“But what might be the most dangerous aspect of vacant and abandoned property is that itcan be easy to get used to – that it becomes part of the background of your life that you don’tnotice anymore. So, a lot of us wind up accepting as normal stuff that should never be normal.”

Few communities are beset by a concentration of vacant properties as severe as that foundin his Homewood neighborhood, where nearly 44 percent of the land parcels are empty lots –double the citywide rate, according to data reported in a recent study by the University of Pitts-burgh’s University Center for Urban and Social Research. The 2010 U.S. Census reports nearly28 percent of the neighborhood’s housing as vacant.

Dealing with such high vacancy rates is one of many challenges several organizations face asthey try to jump start the dysfunctional housing market, raise children’s academic outcomes andimprove the quality of life in the neighborhood that captains of industry Andrew Carnegie andGeorge Westinghouse and jazz composer Billy Strayhorn once called home.


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bottom of the bottom

Homewood grew rapidly after it was connected bystreetcar to downtown Pittsburgh and surroundingneighborhoods in the 1890s and the houses built duringthat expansion make up much of the housing stock thatremains today. In fact, the average age of a house inHomewood dates from around 1920.

Major changes swept through many city neighbor-hoods after World War II, and Homewood was no ex-ception. The rise of the suburbs and other factorsdrained the neighborhood of people, retail businesses,jobs, wealth and vibrancy.

Its population fell 79 percent to fewer than 6,500residents between 1940 and 2010, with the sharpest pe-riod of decline occurring over the past 10 years. Crimeand poverty rose to heights seen in few other neighbor-hoods, as did the rate of vacant and abandoned prop-erty.

The housing market in Homewood steadilyeroded to the point where today equity is more a con-cept than reality for most homeowners. AlleghenyCounty Office of Property Assessments data show that87 percent of the homes sold in 2009 sold for less than$10,000.

To get a better picture of home values, Universityof Pittsburgh researchers eliminated from considera-tion sales under $500, reasoning that a good number ofthem might be “love and trust” transfers within familiesrather than standard home sales. By their calculations,the average sales price of a home in Homewood in2009 was $9,060 and the median price was $4,325.For homeowners, the news gets worse. Their homes areoften assessed at values much higher than what theysell for. In 2009, the average property tax bill in Home-wood was $935, based on the average assessed value ofnearly $31,800, which is more than three times higherthan the average sale price in the neighborhood. Butwhen taxes were calculated based on the prices thathomes sold for, the average tax bill was only $271, ac-cording to the Pitt study.

More than 57 percent of the property in Home-wood is tax delinquent, and more than half of thoseowe at least five years worth of back taxes to the cityand school district. Pitt researchers also report thatmost of the tax delinquent properties are “underwater,”that is, the back taxes and penalties owed are greaterthan the market value of the property.

Such conditions discourage home improvementsand contribute to long-term vacancy, abandonment andblight. Empty houses are a particular problem inHomewood. The latest U.S. Census found that morethan 1,000 houses and apartments are vacant. And

more than 90 percent of the vacant houses in theneighborhood remain vacant for at least one year.“When you look at the housing market, everything isbelow the city standards,” said Sabina Deitrick, Ph.D.,co-director of the Urban and Regional Analysis Pro-gram at Pitt’s University Center for Social and UrbanResearch. “Supply exceeds demand. Buyers are oftennot people who want to live in the neighborhood. Theyare absentee owners. Vacancy is high. There is wide-spread abandonment, huge amounts of disinvestmentand nothing gets filled in.

“If you want to rate housing markets, this is thebottom of the bottom.”

The toll vacant property takes on neighborhoodssuch as Homewood is not confined to lower housingvalues, and people who live there appear to understandthat. Abandoned houses and lots ranked second only tocrime as the biggest concerns of 1,000 Homewood resi-dents surveyed last year by Operation Better Block, aneighborhood nonprofit.

“People intuitively understand the relationship be-tween those issues,” said John Wallace, Ph.D., associateprofessor of social work and the Philip Halen Chair inCommunity Health and Social Justice at the Universityof Pittsburgh.

blight takes a toll

Homewood isn’t lacking in amenities that fami-lies, in particular, find attractive. The library that An-drew Carnegie built in the neighborhood is still openand in good repair. There is an elementary school, mid-dle school and high school, as well as an AlleghenyCounty Community College campus. “I don’t know ofmany other places where a parent can educate theirchildren through the first two years of college withoutthem having to leave the neighborhood – or having totake a bus,” said Green.

But vacant property and blight is taking the shineoff such assets.

The Helen S. Faison Arts Academy, Pittsburgh’snewest elementary school, was built with the hope itwould help kindle the revitalization of Homewood.With its modern red brick and glass facade, innovativeinterior design and grassy five-acre campus, it’s clearly acommunity asset – but one that is crowded by blight. Across from the school’s Tioga Street entrance is a pairof vacant, two-story houses of aging brick. While theyappear structurally sound, useless rain gutters droopfrom the roofs and weeds choke the yards. First floorwindows are boarded with city-installed plywood, butbroken-out upstairs windows invite weather, and birds


and other wildlife inside. Directly east across Dunfermline Street are a cou-

ple empty, trash-strewn lots and the ruins of a cementblock building with an uprooted toilet lying exposed ina doorway. Two blocks north, an entire block of aban-doned row houses dominates Formosa Way, a grim cor-ridor that years ago earned the reputation as one of thecity’s most notorious crime havens.

It’s that environment that Dr. Wallace wantsHomewood’s children to avoid as much as possible. Forat least two years, he has planned the Homewood Chil-dren’s Village, an initiative to improve the academicoutcomes and well-being of neighborhood children.The village is based on a model used in New York City’sHarlem neighborhood that concentrates educationalsupport and social services around children from “cra-dle to college.”

Organizers of the Homewood project immedi-ately started assessing the conditions of the propertyaround neighborhood schools as a first step of mappingroutes that allow children to bypass vacant houses andlots.

“The village itself is primarily focused on pro-grams for kids and education,” Dr. Wallace said. “Butwe have to address these property-related issues. That’spart of their environment. There’s stress associatedwith knowing that drugs and other activities often goon in abandoned buildings. We don’t want kids to beafraid to walk their street to get to school.”

Psychologists say there are good reasons to beconcerned about children who are constantly exposedto things that frighten them, such as vacant houses andlots, or the drug trade and other crime often associatedwith them. Chronic fear – even if that fear is onlyrooted in stories a child might have heard – can triggera traumatic response that is often difficult to detect. “A lot of people don’t understand what is happeningwith children who hear about assaults or murders, orhear gunshots at night,” said Christopher Peterson,MD, a child and adolescent psychiatrist and associateprofessor of psychology at Pennsylvania State Univer-sity. “Adults might think children are tolerating itpretty well – they’re not hollering, not screaming,they’re still going to school. But what is happening isthat they are becoming numbed to it.

“When they get numb and avoidant to the pointwhere they can’t function, that’s when they can havedifficulties to the point where they can’t concentrate orthey can’t relate to their friends or they start withdraw-ing into their home. It can profoundly affect children’sdevelopment. They don’t become adaptive or adjustedto it. They become scarred by it.”

Figuring out what to fix first is academic, experts

say. Decades of experience suggest that neighborhoodrevitalization that focuses on one risk at a time is ripefor failure. Two decades ago in Homewood, redevelop-ment that focused on restoring the business climatefailed largely because of a sharp increase in crime, par-ticularly violent crime, in and around the business cor-ridor.

“Don’t think of it as a linear process – that if we dothis, this will happen,” said Dr. Deitrick. “It’s not goingto be that way. Things have to happen simultaneously.”‘This can work’

The idea behind the Homewood Children’s Vil-lage is to take a holistic approach toward giving chil-dren a more promising future and breaking the cycle ofpoverty and violence in the neighborhood, where theincomes of 35 percent of the residents fall below federalpoverty levels and crime rates are consistently higherthan citywide averages. The Harlem Children’s Zone,on which it is based, built a network of in-school, after-school, social service, community-building and healthprograms, including adult mentors, asthma care andclasses for expectant mothers.

Meanwhile, several organizations are trying tostimulate the housing market in Homewood, raiseproperty values and attract investment as ways of creat-ing a healthier, more sustainable neighborhood – some-thing that if they succeed would rank as one ofPittsburgh’s finest hours.

Bridging the Busway is a community-driven plan-ning project that has residents, nonprofits and profes-sionals, such as the architectural consulting firm,Studio for Spatial Practice, looking for ways to capital-ize on the commuting convenience of the East Busway,which separates Homewood from North Point Breeze.Improvements along the busway corridor, they reason,would better position Homewood to draw from thestrength of its more affluent neighbor, where povertyand crime rates are much lower than citywide averagesand the median sales price of a North Point Breezehome is more than $102,000 – about 25 times higherthan Homewood’s.

The two vacant houses across from the Faison ele-mentary school are now in the possession of the cityand are among those that Operation Better Block andothers are planning to rehab and sell in that part of theneighborhood, where they are trying to grow a small,but healthy housing market that they hope will kindle awider recovery.

Behind the school and only blocks from the EastBusway, the nonprofit, Building United of Southwest-ern Pennsylvania bought 45 blighted former subsidizedhousing units from the federal government. In theirplace, the nonprofit built 10 three-bedroom houses,


each with 2.5 baths, a fenced-in back yard and detachedgarage. The houses were priced at $128,000 with a$50,000 “soft” second mortgage through the Urban Re-development Authority that essentially lowered theprice of the house by that amount for buyers who livethere for at least 10 years.

The houses sold. Another four houses are underconstruction and already have buyers. And the non-profit plans to build 14 more houses and rehab two oth-ers in the same Braddock Avenue- Susquehanna Streetblock cluster.

“We’re selling them as fast as we can build them,”said Rev. Samuel Ware, executive director of BuildingUnited of Southwestern Pennsylvania. “We want this tobe an anchor so we can say, ‘Look, this works. People arewilling to buy in this neighborhood.’”

Elsewhere in Homewood, a neighborhood group,the Rosedale Block Cluster is continuing to “green” va-cant lots with gardens, a practice it began more than adecade ago. It also operates its own landscaping com-pany and trains local youths to do that kind of work. InMay, the city gave the nonprofit Homewood-BrushtonCommunity Coalition Organization money to hire aneconomic development specialist to advance its revital-ization efforts.

And there are signs the blight-weary neighborhoodis moving more aggressively against vacant propertiesand those responsible for them. Operation Better Blockrecently received financial support from The Heinz En-dowments to explore with Housing Authority of Penn-sylvania consultants ways of using new, more powerfullegal tools to combat vacant and abandoned properties.

Of particular interest is the state’s conservatorshiplaw, which could allow the nonprofit to force a neglect-ful property owner to improve a blighted property orface having it taken over by a court-appointed conserva-tor. The conservator would rehabilitate the building ortear it down, then offer it back to the owner for the costof the work, or sell it under court supervision to some-one else. “We’re not interested in using it against peoplewho are struggling and need help,” said Jerome Jackson,executive director of Operation Better Block. “But Idon’t have a problem using it against someone who hasbeen sitting on a property for 10 years and hasn’t doneanything with it. This is about our neighborhood.” zx


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he television ad that launched the Levi’s jeans “Go forth”campaign starred Braddock as a bleak example of post-industrial decline.It opened with shots of an empty warehouse boarded with plywood andghostly abandoned houses, windowless and strangled by brush, while agirl’s voice intoned: “A long time ago, things got broken here. People gotsad and left.”

The ad, which portrayed the economically distressed AlleghenyCounty borough as a new challenge to the American pioneering spirit,could have been filmed in several southwestern Pennsylvania municipali-ties and neighborhoods, where the gritty reality of widespread vacancyand blight is just as vivid.

Nine percent of the houses and apartments in the seven-countyPittsburgh Metropolitan Statistical Area are vacant, according to 2010U.S. Census data. That is better than the 11 percent national vacant hous-ing rate and it is lower than rates found in other Rust Belt regions Pitts-

burgh is often compared with, such as the Cleveland MSA, where 10.6 percent of its housing isvacant.

But if such numbers suggest southwestern Pennsylvania has dodged a vacancy crisis, theyare misleading. Dense pockets of vacant and blighted properties are found across the region inpoor urban neighborhoods and older industrial towns, such as Braddock, that have endureddecades of economic hardship.

The municipalities carrying the biggest burden of vacant and abandoned property areamong the most economically fragile in the region and the least likely to have the resources athand to do something about it.

"There's only so much we can do from inside the borough,” said Betty Esper, the mayor ofHomestead, where The Waterfront, a $300 million upscale shopping and entertainment com-plex, has done little to ease the borough’s vacant housing rate, which stands at 22 percent. "Wedon't have a lot of money. Our inspector can fine people with homes that are in disrepair. But isit too late? Is it enough? Is that going to solve our problems? I don't know."

City and county governments may offer some degree of technical support to those who askfor it, most often legal and financial help to gain control of vacant, tax-delinquent properties.

H O M Eby jeffery fraserand matt stroud

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But help is so limited that only a small fraction of thevacant properties in boroughs, townships and cityneighborhoods is being addressed.

And there is no comprehensive strategy at theregional, county or city level for dealing with the hun-dreds of thousands vacant structures and lots insouthwestern Pennsylvania.

“Blight and abandonment has largely fallenthrough the cracks in terms dealing with it as a re-gional issue,” said Court Gould, executive director ofSustainable Pittsburgh, which last year published acomprehensive report on abandoned property insouthwestern Pennsylvania.

‘tale of two cities’

Vacancy and blight make it less likely that strug-gling communities will narrow the divide that sepa-rates them from more affluent neighborhoods.Almost without exception, places where vacancy ratesare high also suffer from staggering population loss,weak housing markets, poor housing stock, highpoverty and crime rates and other factors that makethem less than desirable places in which to live.

“In my estimation, Pittsburgh is becoming a taleof two cities,” said Rob Stephany, director of thePittsburgh Urban Redevelopment Authority. “You cango to Shadyside and Point Breeze and say we areAmerica’s Most Livable City again and people will ap-plaud. But in Homewood, they’ll laugh.”

Concentrations of vacant housing higher thanthe national rate are found in every county in south-western Pennsylvania, as well as in nearby West Vir-ginia and Ohio communities, according to the latestU.S. Census data. And the census doesn’t count vacantlots, which in most cases greatly outnumber vacanthouses and apartments.

In Beaver County, for example, 18 percent of thehousing in Aliquippa is vacant. In Butler County, Slip-pery Rock’s vacant housing rate is 16 percent. InMonessen, Westmoreland County, it’s 17 percent. InYoungstown, Ohio, 19 percent of houses and apart-ments are vacant. Along the Ohio River in TylerCounty, W.Va., 23 percent of the housing is vacant.And in the City of Pittsburgh, 28 percent of the hous-ing in its Homewood neighborhood and 26 percent ofthe housing in Larimer is vacant.

One of the most striking examples of concen-trated vacancy and blight is the Monongahela Rivervalley. The exodus that followed the collapse of thesteel industry some three decades ago has left its com-munities littered with empty houses and lots.

More than 24 percent of the housing in Braddock isvacant or abandoned, as is 21 percent of Duquesne’sand 20 percent of Clairton’s. In Donora, WashingtonCounty, 23 percent of the available houses and apart-ments are vacant.

a shrinking valley

“People have left the area. Overwhelmingly,they’ve left,” said Doug Van Haitsma, housing and realestate director for the Mon Valley Initiative, an eco-nomic development coalition whose membership in-cludes volunteer-driven community developmentcorporations in three counties touched by theMonongahela River and its tributaries.

Braddock’s population has fallen to 2,100 people,according to the latest U.S. Census. That is a 90 per-cent decline since 1920, when the steel town wasbooming and its population density rivaled that ofManhattan.

The borough continued to lose population overthe past decade, despite having U.S. Steel’s EdgarThompson Works, one of the valley’s few remainingsteel mills, in its backyard.

Such trends underscore the difficulties Mon Val-ley communities with high vacancy rates face as theystruggle to recover. “At the end of the day, there aren’ta lot of people who want to live in an industrial set-ting,” said Richard Ranii, manager of the Housing andHuman Services Division of the Allegheny CountyEconomic Development Department. “We used to,but not anymore.”

Other challenges include the distance communi-ties in the Mon Valley are from Pittsburgh and itsjobs, universities, hospitals and cultural amenities.Crime rates and struggling school districts repel newhomebuyers who have the means to settle in more af-fluent areas. And demand has waned for much of thevalley’s housing stock, vacant or otherwise, particu-larly the thousands of aging houses built shoulder-to-shoulder on narrow lots.

“One of the problems is that as a society we’vedecided that what we used to live in isn’t adequateanymore,” Ranii said. “A 20- or 30-foot-wide-lot witha three-bedroom home on it and no garage isn’t ac-ceptable anymore by our standards of living.”

Municipalities in the Mon Valley have littlechoice but to tailor recovery plans to fit their down-sized populations. And the clutter of vacant proper-ties that have been left behind can, under the rightcircumstances, encourage stronger housing markets.Tearing down vacant houses to allow for wider, more


marketable tracts is one example. Turning empty lotsinto greenways, parks, community gardens and othergreen space that studies show boost home values isanother.

“What we've realized is that there's no need totry to even come close to maintaining the density thatboroughs like Homestead experienced in the Fortiesand Fifties," said Van Haitsma. "So we try to consoli-date properties, fix up houses where we can and teardown houses when we're able to do so, so people willfeel safer and feel like there's a reason to live here.”

The Mon Valley Initiative helped community de-velopment corporations in Allegheny, Washingtonand Westmoreland counties rehabilitate or buildnearly 400 houses and apartments. “But building newhouses is an expensive way to stabilize communities,”he said. “So we’re looking into options like urban agri-culture to try and tackle the problem in other ways.”

In Braddock, Mayor John Fetterman’s high-pro-file approach to revitalization embraces its downsizedpopulation and more than 250 vacant structures asopportunities to reinvent the borough as a smaller,greener, art-minded place that appeals to the kind ofyouthful urban pioneers depicted in the Levi’s jeansads—artists and anyone else who “wants to be part ofa community and wants to innovate.”

Empty buildings have been turned into artiststudios, and an abandoned car dealership was remadeinto a furniture maker’s shop. A neglected church wasrestored as a community center. And 10 acres of va-cant lots were reclaimed for organic herb and veg-etable farming.

a matter of scale

But for every blighted property recovered in ahigh-vacancy neighborhood or municipality, severalhundred – in Pittsburgh’s case, thousands – remain aseyesores, safety hazards and a drag on real estate mar-kets and housing values. In the Pittsburgh MSA,more than 100,400 houses alone are vacant.

In counties and cities that act to take control ofvacant and blighted properties, the legal processesthey use sparingly are not intended to tackle vacancyon a large scale.

Butler County was one of the first to use thestate’s recent conservatorship law against neglectfulproperty owners instead of condemning structures inadvanced stages of decay. The law allows a court-ap-pointed conservator to take a troublesome property,rehabilitate or demolish it and recover the cost ofdoing so from the owner or by selling the property to

someone else.“If I condemn it, all that means is the owner still

owns it with more debt. The taxes are still unpaid; thegrass is still uncut,” said Perry O’Malley, executive di-rector of Butler County’s Housing and Redevelop-ment Authority. “Through conservatorship, I can takethat property, demolish the building on it and find anew use for it. The new owner gets clear title. The oldowner maintains all the liens.

“But if you have a property that is of no use toanybody, conservatorship doesn’t make sense.”Few municipalities in the region even have programsor strategies that specifically deal with turning vacantand blighted property into something more than acommunity liability, according to Sustainable Pitts-burgh’s recent survey of municipal officials in 10southwestern Pennsylvania counties.

Only 25 percent of the more than 100 municipal-ities that responded to the survey reported havingsuch programs. And less than one-third keep an in-ventory of vacant properties that would enable themto know how many they have. “Many don’t have thetechnology and wherewithal to do it,” said Sustain-able Pittsburgh’s Gould.

If southwestern Pennsylvania municipalities everdecide to create a regional inventory of vacant prop-erty, they won’t have to look far for a model. The Uni-versity of Pittsburgh University Center for Social andUrban Research runs one of the most comprehensivemetropolitan-area property information systems inthe nation. For longer than a decade, it has mineddozens of sources to report up-to-date, detailed –even street-specific – information on topics that in-clude vacancy, foreclosures, tax delinquency and prop-erty ownership in every city neighborhood.

Other pockets of expertise are surfacing. Thecity Urban Redevelopment Authority and communityorganizations, such as East Liberty Community De-velopment Corp., have years of experience trying savetheir neighborhoods from blight. The city’s Land Re-cycling Task Force and Pittsburgh Community Rein-vestment Group, a coalition of communityorganizations, has for several years been investigatinghow to attack vacancy on a scale large enough tomake a difference that neighborhood residents andhousing markets notice.

And although Sustainable Pittsburgh found thatonly a quarter of the municipalities surveyed haveprograms that deal with vacancy, another 27 percentreported that they have begun to work on greenstrategies and other ways to turn vacancy and blightinto something that will add value to their commu-nity and the lives of those who live there.


“You have to look at vacant and abandoned prop-erty as an opportunity,” said Kim Graziani, vice presi-dent of capacity building at the Center forCommunity Progress, a Washington, D.C. nonprofitthat specializes in vacant property issues. “Because thescale of this issue is so great in some neighborhoodsthat if you look at it as just a problem it’s too daunt-ing.” zx


P A R T I I : T H E R E G I O N

n clarksburg, w.va., there is a landfill where nothing but theremains of abandoned houses are buried. Nearby rests the Department of PublicWorks heavy equipment that put them there as part of an aggressive demolitionprogram to control blight that had accumulated during a half-century of indus-trial decline.

Over the past decade, the program demolished buildings and cleared land onnearly 300 vacant properties trying to reduce blight, increase housing values andadvance the city’s post-industrial recovery. And between 2000 and 2010, housing values rose 25 percent.

A once-booming center for glass and coal production, Clarksburg and itspopulation grew by nearly 700 percent between 1900 and 1950, from 4,050 to32,014 residents. Hazel-Atlas Glass was one of numerous companies that em-ployed thousands of workers who traveled to North Central West Virginia withtheir families to find work in manufacturing facilities. The manufacturing floorof Hazel-Atlas alone took up a full 15 acres.

But after 1950, those manufacturing facilities slowly began to decline. People losttheir jobs, and Clarksburg’s population fell. Today, some 16,550 people live Clarksburg, abouthalf as many who lived in the city during its peak years.

The result was widespread vacancy and the risks that often come with it. After sitting va-cant for 20 years, the Hazel-Atlas plant burned to the ground in 2007, the last embers smolder-ing for five days before firefighters could extinguish them.“When we demolish buildings, that’s exactly what we’re hoping to avoid,” said Adam Barberio,Clarksburg’s code enforcement supervisor.

The problem of vacant buildings in Clarksburg has been high on city government’s prioritylist for longer than a decade. Council members there have chosen a simple strategy to contendwith problems related to blight: prioritize, demolish and clear away.

But addressing vacant and abandoned properties was not always a government priority,said Jim Hunt, former mayor and current Clarksburg councilman who has been instrumental inthe city’s vacant properties demolition program.

“With city budgets, you almost never gain any traction with big demolition projects,” hesays. “Everyone talks about it and everyone knows that vacant properties are a problem, but

by matt stroud

P A R T V I I : C L A R K S B U R G


H O M E

there’s no continuing reward when you tear a buildingdown, so it’s tough to get council to support it.”

So he came up with a plan.In addition to his duties as councilman in Clarks-

burg, Hunt managed the Clarksburg Field Office of theWest Virginia Housing Development Fund. That fundwas established to increase West Virginia’s supply oflow- and moderate-income housing. Hunt argued thatthe fund should also be used to prevent blighted prop-erties from diminishing the value of low-income hous-ing. And the fund made low-interest loans available tomunicipalities to help cover the cost of demolishing va-cant houses that were blighting their streets.

“It was a leap of faith, but the thinking was that ifcities would have these vacant lots, adjoining houseswould rise in value, there would be room for new hous-ing and these places would rebuild and revitalize,” hesaid.

Four cities took advantage of the Housing Devel-opment’s demolition loan – Shinnston, Clarksburg,Fairmont, and Salem, W. Va.

Clarksburg officials identified more than 300homes – all of which had been unoccupied for at leastthree years – that seemed ripe for demolition based oncomplaints from neighbors, observation and other in-formation. Houses were chosen after it was decidedthat large buildings, such as the Hazel-Atlas plant, weretoo big and expensive to demolish first.

They rated each house using criteria such as thevalue of the lot, whether the house was ready to falldown, whether it attracted crime, contained asbestosor other hazards, or had historical value.

Owners were identified and letters were sent ask-ing if they had plans for the house, offering low interestloans and warning they would be fined if they failed toupgrade their property. Fifteen homeowners respondedand were offered low-cost demolition and paymentplans. The city charged about half of the $30,000 ittypically cost to tear down a house.

At first, about 10 houses were demolished a year.Eventually, the program would raze more than 100 ayear.

“Destruction isn’t our goal, but you’ve got to real-ize that in the private sector no one’s going to do any-thing about these buildings unless there’s money to bemade,” Hunt said. “So what the city’s stuck with are allthe remainders – houses that are almost valueless thatcan’t be feasibly fixed up or sold.”

By the end of the decade, the demolition projecthelped reduce the number of vacant houses in the cityto 919 and lower vacancy rates from 14 percent in 2000to 11 percent in 2010.

And between 2000 and 2010, the average sale

price of a house in Clarksburg rose 25 percent – from$72,249 to $90,454 – despite the fact that the city spentthe last several years in lingering recession like the restof the nation.

How big of a role the demolition program had inraising housing values cannot be precisely determined.But from the city’s perspective, it was a citywidecleanup program that paid off. “These vacant proper-ties can be dangerous and bring the prices of otherhomes down,” said Adam Barberio, Clarksburg code en-forcement supervisor. So getting rid of them is like aninvestment into the future.” zx


Center for Community ProgressThe Washington, DC-based nonprofit providestechnical assistance on vacant and abandoned is-sues. The resource page on the center’s website of-fers reports on a range of vacancy issues, includingbrownfield development, demolition, land bank-ing, state laws and economic impact.www.communityprogress.net

City of Pittsburgh Land Recycling Task ForceThe city task force’s resource archive contains pre-sentations and reports on issues related to vacantand blighted property in Pittsburgh and elsewhere,including land banking, legal options and proposedPennsylvania legislation.www.pittsburghpa.gov/landrecycling

gtechThe work of the Pittsburgh nonprofit includesusing environmental “green” strategies to reclaimvacant properties. The nonprofit’s resource pageoffers case studies and reports on greening vacantproperty. www.gtechstrategies.org

Housing Alliance of PennsylvaniaThe nonprofit housing coalition, which has some500 member organizations statewide, provides ed-ucation, training, research and technical assistanton housing issues, including vacancy and blight. Itsresource library holds reports on vacancy, commu-nity development and other issues.www.housingalliancepa.org

Pittsburgh Community Reinvestment GroupPCRG is a coalition of community organizations inand around the City of Pittsburgh that works withits members on a number of issues, including re-ducing blight through land recycling. Its VacantProperty Working Group focuses on public policydevelopment and property acquisition.www.pcrg.org

Pittsburgh Neighborhood and Community Information System Managed by the University of Pittsburgh’s Univer-sity Center for Social and Urban Research PNCIS,it is among the most sophisticated property infor-mation systems in the nation offering data on va-cant property, tax delinquency, foreclosures,property ownership and other topics. www.ucsur.pitt.edu/pncis.php

Pittsburgh TODAYPittsburgh TODAY is an online resource offeringkey indicators of conditions within the GreaterPittsburgh region and in 14 benchmark regions inthe United States on topics ranging from arts andeducation to economy and housing, including va-cancy. www.pittsburghtoday.org

Remaking Cities Institute, Carnegie Mellon UniversityThe institute promotes collaboration between fac-ulty, researchers, and public and private sector pro-fessionals focusing on urban design and rebuildingurban communities. Projects include studying op-tions for reinventing Hazelwood and one of Pitts-burgh largest remaining brownfields.www.cmu.edu/rci/index.html

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University of Pittsburgh University Center for Socialand Urban ResearchIn addition to the PNCIS data warehouse, the centerincludes an Urban Regional Analysis project with re-sources related to housing and other regional andneighborhood issues, including Pittsburgh EconomicQuarterly, technical reports and neighborhood re-ports.www.ucsur.pitt.edu/index2.php

reports

Recent reports on vacant properties, legal issues andoptions for addressing them include the following:

Land Banks and Land Banking (2011)Published by the Washington, DC-based nonprofitCenter for Community Progress, the report detailsthe use of land banks to address vacant and blightedproperty across the nation, including a step-by-stepguide for taking control of problem properties.www.communityprogress.net/land-bank-book-resources-105.php

Quick Guide: New Tools to Address Blight and Aban-donment (2011)This guide published by the House Alliance of Penn-sylvania is a primer on new Pennsylvania laws andchanges to existing laws that offer options for turningvacant and blighted properties into assets rather thanliabilities. www.housingalliancepa.org/resources/46

Recapturing Land for Economic and Fiscal Growth(2011)The paper, published by the Brookings Institute, ex-amines vacant land and abandoned properties, theirlocal economic impact and what actions can be takento repurpose them, including property tax reform,code enforcement and taking control of problemproperties.www.brookings.edu/papers/2011/0503_land_value_mallach_vey.aspx

Southwestern Pennsylvania Blighted and AbandonedProperties Solutions Project (2010)The report, published by Sustainable Pittsburgh, of-fers a comprehensive examination of vacant, blightedand abandoned property in southwestern Pennsylva-nia, including a range of options and recommenda-tions for addressing the issue.www.sustainablepittsburgh.org/Pub/SWPABlightedandAbandonedPropertiesSolutionsProjectReport_12909.pdf

Vacant Land Management in Philadelphia (2010)Prepared for the Redevelopment Authority ofPhiladelphia, the report is one of the few that looks atthe total cost cities and homeowners pay when prop-erty becomes vacant and blighted.www.econsult.com/projectreports/VacantLandFullReportForWeb.pdf

Vacant to Vibrant (2006)The report, published by Carnegie Mellon UniversityH. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Man-agement, offers a guide to reclaiming vacant lots witha focus on Pittsburgh. www.gtechstrategies.org/assets/CommHandbook_VacantToVibrant.pdf


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