Cozy home deal?
Scrutinize sales of city-owned properties
If nothing else, the purchase of a tax-delinquent property by the city employee in charge of selling tax-delinquent properties is an opportunity to take inventory of city rules and procedures. Officials should reassess the city’s code of ethics, consider stepped-up marketing of city properties for sale and ask the controller’s office to review recent sales with an eye toward improving the process.
The Post-Gazette’s Rich Lord reported Wednesday that Aaron Pickett, the city real estate manager, paid $2,500 for a 1,912-square-foot house on a 10,720-square-foot lot in Beechview. The property appears to be overassessed at $102,600. Yet the previous owner paid $30,000 for it, and some neighbors griped that Mr. Pickett got a heck of a deal that they’d like to have had themselves.
Mayor Bill Peduto has asked the city’s Office of Municipal Investigations to look into Mr. Pickett’s purchase, a prudent step. While the city made some effort to put the property up for grabs, its marketing was wanting and Mr. Pickett showed poor judgment when he signed papers on the transaction both for himself and as the city’s representative.
In 2015, the city began the process of selling the house and lot because the owner fell behind on real estate taxes. The city said it twice advertised the property’s availability in the Post-Gazette and then offered it at a public auction. No one submitted a bid, so the city eventually took title to the property, cleared it of debts and included it on an online list of cityowned properties for sale.
When Mr. Pickett asked to buy the property in summer 2016, the city sent out an employee to value it and removed it from the website. City council approved the sale — members generally look very closely at who’s trying to buy such properties in their districts — and Common Pleas Court approved the transaction as well. Yet the city said it advertised for bidders one more time, and getting none, inked the sale with Mr. Pickett last June.
If the city’s account is accurate, Mr. Pickett’s neighbors had opportunities to buy the property themselves. But the city certainly could do more to let people know about available homes, lots and commercial sites. It’s taken one such step since Mr. Pickett’s purchase, debuting a website last July with photos and information about 3,000 or so properties the city is hawking. Some are featured on the site, while users can search out others by street name or parcel number.
“Improving the process of city property sales helps to eliminate blight, create neighborhood stability and allow a family to own a new home,” Dan Gilman, then a city councilman and now Mr. Peduto’s chief of staff, said at the time.
That should be the motivation for making still more improvements in marketing efforts. Helping Pittsburghers achieve homeownership is good policy at a time when the city’s economic growth is edging some would-be buyers out of neighborhoods like Lawrenceville and East Liberty. Given the surging interest in urban living, there shouldn’t be a shortage of bidders if the city works diligently to make people aware of what’s available.
The city ethics code prohibits city officials and employees from parlaying their positions into advantages the general public lacks, but there’s no rule against them buying cityowned property. It would be good to revisit the ethics code and plug any holes, like one that would allow officials to sign off on their own property acquisitions. Even if that is legal, the optics look bad.