The time has come to tackle city eyesores

Pine Bluff has a ways to go in terms of people driving around, looking at the scenery and coming away thinking positive thoughts about the city.

We recall a real estate agent who said there are ways to drive visitors around town without exposing them to the ugliest patches of our city. That’s not unique to Pine Bluff. We remember when Little Rock had the issue of cab drivers taking people to the airport there and traveling back and forth on Roosevelt Road because, well, it was quicker for a lot of trips. No, no, no, the city said. Take the new bypass. It’s much prettier.

Not to say that some progress hasn’t been made here over the years. Car junkyards and heaping mounds of recyclables that used to be the visual equivalent of wastelands are mostly now behind privacy fences.

But a problem that continues is plain old nuisance properties as well as burn-outs. Drive into any of the older neighborhoods and one finds some — or a lot — of both. And while we know that occasionally one gets torn down and cleared away, by and large they seem to stick around for far too long.

That just seems very out of step with the rest of the world. We can’t remember a time when we drove through a first class city and saw one after another houses that were obviously never going to be lived in again, whether that was because the owner had walked off and let the property deteriorate or because there had been a fire. Whatever system these other cities have in place to get rid of such properties, we need that.

So it was with some relief that we saw on the Pine Bluff City Council’s to-do list that it is working on an amendment to the city’s nuisance ordinance that will speed up the process. Whereas the old wording was a vague timetable of letting an owner get around to taking care of a property, the city will now give owners 15 days to make something happen. That doesn’t mean that 15 days after a fire, the city is there with a wrecking ball. But it does mean the city has recognized this is a problem and is putting in place a stiffer timeline for rectifying these eyesores.

Certainly, homeowners need to be given the opportunity to handle these types of properties, but in reality, if the roof is caved in and the doors and windows are broken out, chances are the owner is long gone or not in a position to make the repairs.

If these properties existed in a vacuum — like way off the beaten path — probably no one would care. But if your house is next door to one of these, you have a big problem. Your property value drops, your ability to sell your house becomes difficult and the overall interest in taking pride in your neighborhood all but disappears. Soon, the cute neighborhood you moved into years ago isn’t so cute anymore.

We also know there’s a cost to all of this, and for the foreseeable future, we are paying the price of not taking care of these properties aggressively over the years. But if the owner is gone, and the city has to demolish a house on its own dime, well, you get the picture: There’s a lot of expense, and the city does not have an infinite amount of money.

But we have to start somewhere, and putting a definitive time limit on part of this process should help hurry things along. Maybe in two, three or four years, we can look around and not see what we see today.