City should not block community efforts to fix its blighted properties
The City of Pittsburgh’s legal battle against community groups seeking to remediate deteriorating properties is needlessly obstructing progress on residential blight, while the city offers no solutions of its own.
If the city can’t help, it should get out of the way. It can start by not appealing an Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas ruling that allows private organizations to take control of neglected city-owned properties and do what the city can’t or won’t do: Make deteriorating city-owned properties livable.
The city stands to lose nothing but its pride by letting civic-minded neighborhood groups do this hard and essential work. If the revitalized property can be sold, 80% of the profit would still accrue to the city. Now, the city is only watching the costs of remediation rise, as porches collapse and roofs cave in.
For too long, the city has focused on showpiece neighborhoods, while leaving others to wither, contrary to Mayor Gainey’s campaign promise to shift the focus onto neglected neighborhoods. The result: a cancerous blight is devastating less-favored communities, outside the tony corridors of Forbes and Murray in Squirrel Hill, or the vibrant Butler in Lawrenceville.
At issue is the state’s Abandoned and Blighted Property Conservatorship Act, which allows community groups to assume the management — not the ownership — of neglected properties. The law is meant to remediate the community effects of absentee ownership by giving someone who actually cares a chance to refresh and rebuild (or tear down) blighted homes. The problem here is that city government is the worst
absentee owner in Pittsburgh. It controls 5,000 properties, with more than 20% of them cited for code violations.
An Allegheny County judge recently ruled that the state’s conservatorship act could be used against a public authority. That decision is currently stayed in anticipation of the city’s appeal. We urge Mr. Gainey to let the ruling stand, rather than drag his own communities through years more of expensive litigation.
Overseen by the courts, conservatorship is a tightly controlled process. The city’s reluctance clearly does not stem from a desire to preserve its own blight remediation programs: The Pittsburgh land bank remains non-functional, and the process to buy city-owned properties outright takes up to five years, during which houses only deteriorate further. Community groups represent the only viable way to fight blight, and the city refuses to let them do it.
Mayor Gainey has an opportunity here to bolster community-based governance and mitigate blight: All he has to do is say yes to community groups.