Buildings with a past
Preservationists: City can save more historic structures
WSecond of two parts. hen Gilbert and Katie Porr bought the small, three-story Queen Anne-style home in the Perry South section of Pittsburgh in 1974, it was a bargain.
They paid just $3,000 for the twobedroom home at 1953 Perrysville Ave. because they were friends with the previous owner, Louise Lindheimer, whose family had lived there for nearly 50 years.
Mr. Porr, a truck driver, and Mrs. Porr, a Pittsburgh Public Schools security guard, still had four of their six kids at home at the time and the location let them stay in the neighborhood where they had raised their family. But about a decade later, Mr. Porr’s health declined and the Porrs moved in with a daughter in 1992. Maintenance on the home suffered so much that it was condemned by the city in 1995, the same year Mr. Porr died.
“The family walked away from it after that,” said Kim Porr, who was married to the Porrs’ youngest son, Arch, and for a time lived in the home with them in the late 1980s.
The next year the family stopped paying taxes on the home, and with no one maintaining the property, it became completely overgrown. Katie Porr died in 2002 after moving to McKees Rocks. But by then, the future of the home adorned with gingerbread woodwork around the windows and doors — once distinctive enough that it was included in the city’s register of Historic Places as a home worth saving — was already written.
In 2005, the home was torn down by the city, which paid a contractor $9,000 for the work. In 2015, 20 years after the city first noticed it was declining, the city acquired the stillvacant lot at a city Treasurer’s Sale
for $10,465 in back taxes.
The case of the Porrs’ home is not unusual.
When it was adopted by the city as an official document in 1994, the Pittsburgh Register of Historic Places identified 1,889 individual buildings and 15 newly proposed historic districts with hundreds of additional structures, as having historic, architectural or cultural merit that made them worth saving.
A total of 299 are now gone. And two of the 15 historic districts have lost so many buildings since 1994 that they would never be considered for official city historic status.
The city was involved in more than a third of the demolitions and knew of the buildings’ deteriorating conditions long before they were demolished — just like the Porrs’ home.
Many preservation advocates say that though private developers and homeowners have a role to play, it is the city that is in the best position to prevent the loss of even more structures in the register, as well as other buildings that contribute to the city’s neighborhood fabric.
“I think it’s a joint effort” between the city and private owners and developers, said Lucia Aguirre, an architect and chairwoman of the city’s Historic Review Commission. “But the city could probably be the first step.”
Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto said, “The goal of our administration is to preserve whenever, however possible.”
And preservationists do praise Mr. Peduto for his pledges to try to preserve more of the city’s built heritage. But they also would like to see the city be more aggressive in protecting buildings that are deteriorating.
Core-and-shell?
One goal of various preservationists — and even preservation-minded developers and investors — has been to get the city to intervene sooner.
An idea that has floated around for more than a decade is what Arthur Ziegler of the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation calls “core-and-shell.”
Instead of spending the money to tear down a building, the city would seal it up — put a new roof or gutters on, seal all the windows and doors — and make sure it doesn’t deteriorate any further until a new buyer is ready to renovate the building.
“We believe a lot of houses could be done if we could find the legal means and the money, subsidy money, to do what we call ‘core-andshell,’” Mr. Ziegler said. “You fix up the exterior. You clean the interior. And then you put it on the market. And someone buys and finishes it. Some we’d like to buy and finish and keep affordable.”
Ernie Hogan, Pittsburgh Community Reinvestment Group executive director and a former Historic Review Commission board member, said he proposed a similar idea to then-Mayor Luke Ravenstahl’s administration and suggested having a community group do the stabilization work.
“They were very interested in figuring it out,” Mr. Hogan said. “But we couldn’t get through the Law Department’s concerns of liability. Because the city owned [the buildings], the city was like, ‘What happens if the worker gets hurt? We’ve got to make sure the insurances are in place. How are we going to do all of that?’ Typical, like all the reasons why you couldn’t do it, not how do we figure this out.”
Mr. Peduto said he would like to go even another step further and seal up homes that the city does not yet own that are clearly abandoned and deteriorating — even at the risk of technically violating state property laws that prevent the city from doing more than board up doors and windows to prevent access to a home if it is abandoned.
“But again, the likelihood of getting sued is minimal. The people that own the property may not even be around, or if they are, they may be in a different state.” Mr. Peduto said. “As I’ve said to my city solicitor, ‘Let them sue us.’ If you’re going to be able to benefit the neighborhood and be able to preserve a building, I’d rather put a blue tarp on the roof and be sued for doing it rather than lose that building.”
Mr. Peduto said that in an interview a year ago during early reporting on this story.
Asked more recently if the city has begun such a program, his spokesman, Tim McNulty, wrote in an email that the city has yet to implement such a program.
“The mayor would like it as an option, but it would still have to be studied by the Law Department,” Mr. McNulty wrote.
The city’s Urban Redevelopment Authority has stabilized and sealed 14 buildings in the city that it owns in the past two years, said Bethany Davidson, the URA’s manager of land recycling.
“When we hear a building is part of the fabric of a neighborhood, we try to preserve it,” she said.
Stiffer enforcement of a law by the Allegheny County Department of Health may make such a program even more feasible.
In late 2016, the health department reached an agreement with the city that it had to do an asbestos survey for more building demolitions. That small change led to a dramatic increase in the cost of demolitions done by the city, from an average of $9,100 for each building torn down in 2016, to about $39,000 so far in 2019, according to the city’s online building demolition database.
This has resulted in a dramatic reduction in the number of demolitions by the city, dropping from 233 buildings in 2016 to only 42 in 2017 and 73 in 2018. This year, the city has torn down just 12 buildings through April 5, the last date of a demolition in the city’s online database.
But the health department’s change also has the added impact of making a program such as Mr. Ziegler and Mr. Hogan proposed even more feasible, they believe.
“What we wanted the mayor to consider was, instead of spending then $8,000 for a demo, why not spend $5,000 and put a roof on the house to stop a water leakage, do any structural update, board it and take care of the yard for the next 10 years till we need the house,” Mr. Hogan said.
With increased demolition costs, “I think it makes the idea even more possible,” he said.
Another factor that makes demolitions done by the city so costly is that, though the city does place liens on each demolished building in hoping to recover the cost of demolition, the reality is that it almost never recovers those demolition costs.
City records show that between 2016 and 2018, property owners paid off only two demolition liens for a total of $18,500 between the two cases, while the city spent more than $8 million on demolitions during the time period.
Quicker, earlier purchases?
Another obvious measure is to get to the properties more quickly, before they fall apart.
“In my opinion, if they took ownership of these dilapidated buildings and offered them for sale to the public quicker, a lot of them would be saved,” said Ken Reilly, whose demolition company tears down a lot of buildings for the city and the Urban Redevelopment Authority, and who also buys and renovates homes in North Side neighborhoods.
The advantage to the city for acquiring property is not just that it can control its condition. When the city sells the property, it can sell it “free-and-clear” of any back taxes that are owed, which can often be $10,000 or more — a figure large enough to scare away new owners who might otherwise be willing to spend money to renovate a home.
“I’m more willing to invest in a building I don’t have to pay back taxes on,” Mr. Reilly said.
Currently the city acquires nearly all of the property it owns through quarterly city Treasurer’s Sales. This troubled, byzantine process can take a long time — two years or more — is complicated, and ultimately is not a guarantee the city will own the tax delinquent properties it has targeted because anyone can bid to buy them.
The county has a more efficient process called the Vacant Property Recovery Program. The program uses eminent domain and gives the county control over who ultimately owns the property. It is used by 77 other municipalities and can take as little as one year before the property is transferred to a new owner.
Though Pittsburgh does not participate in the program, city Treasurer Margaret Lanier, who has been trying to improve the Treasurer’s Sale process, said she wants to look into the county program.
Mr. Ziegler said the city’s historic foundation has worked with both programs and it has been a night-andday experience.
“There is a problem: The county has a very good, expeditious way of disposing of tax delinquent properties if, let’s say, someone like us wants them. We’ll go in and say, we’d like to have those properties. They’re tax delinquent. They will acquire them and hold them until we’re ready to take them, and they sell them to us for a couple thousand dollars at cost,” he said.
“The city’s process is very cumbersome and can take years. And because of that, they are more and more delinquent and the buildings department says they’re a public safety hazard and takes them down.”
Mike McCabe, an attorney whose firm handles legal work for both the Allegheny County Sheriff’s Sale and the city Treasurer’s Sale, also happens to do work for the Philadelphia Sheriff’s Sale, which takes about half the time to get a property sold compared to Allegheny County.
He would like the state Legislature to change state law so that Allegheny County and Pittsburgh could sell tax delinquent properties quicker, just like Philadelphia.
“Let’s assume the Legislature says we’d like to use the Philly model for Allegheny County and Pittsburgh,” Mr. McCabe said. “If they wanted to do that, they could use [Pittsburgh’s] land bank process to get ahold of the property without competitive bidding.”
Five years ago, the city approved making use of a 2012 state law allowing municipalities to create “land banks.”
Employing the land bank, the city still would enter the Treasurer’s Sale process. But when a property is put up to bid, only the city could bid.
But Pittsburgh has had trouble setting up the land bank, which just last year began the process of trying to acquire its first property — a vacant lot in Larimer. The land bank will also be used to acquire buildings to try to prevent their demolition, said Irene Clark, the land bank’s attorney, who has worked on blight issues in the city for three decades.
Second level of protection
Mr. Peduto said he would like to make at least one move that would give buildings like 1953 Perrysville Ave. a chance to survive.
Pittsburgh’s Register of Historic Places did not provide city-designated historic protection that would have required multiple hearings before an owner could tear down a building — a legal step that has proved incredibly effective in preventing demolition of city-designated historic properties.
Since the register list was created, 44 of the individual structures in the register have been given city-designated historic status. Not one of them has been demolished.
But Pittsburgh lags behind many cities in protecting buildings.
According to the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s 2016 report, The Atlas of ReUrbanism, which compared 50 of the country’s largest cities, Pittsburgh has granted local protection to only about 3,200 buildings, or 2.3% of its 138,000 buildings. That’s about half the average — 4.3% — of the other 49 cities in the survey.
That is about the same percentage of buildings locally designated as Philadelphia has at 2.2%, but far below other comparable cities like St. Louis (which has protected 13% of its buildings) and Baltimore (5.3%) and Denver (5.4%).
Mr. Peduto proposes creating a less-restrictive historic designation that would provide a pause before any of the remaining 1,595 register buildings are torn down.
“The Registry at least gives us a baseline of where we should begin” to save the city’s non-designated structures, he said.
“The properties that remain, that are still on it, should be given, through legislative action, additional requirements prior to demolition, community notification, extended period of time of posting before the demolition, opportunities for people who want to save and preserve it to be able to rally around it to try to put together a plan to try to do so. It shouldn’t follow the same process of any other property, unless it’s a public safety hazard.”
The idea is a step below full historic designation, which would require an application and hearings before the city’s Historic Review Committee before it moves on to city council.
“This is something a number of other cities have addressed, and are addressing, in a number of different ways,” said Jim Lindberg, senior policy director for the National Trust, noting that some cities — including Boston, Washington, D.C., and Nashville, Tenn. — have similar demolition-delay ordinances.
“But I think what [Mr. Peduto] is proposing is most similar to what Chicago has done,” he said.
Chicago, which did its own street-by-street survey, which was completed in 1996, built in a color-coding system for buildings that it thought were worth protecting, starting with red — the buildings most worth preserving — down through orange, green and yellow. But, like Pittsburgh, Chicago did not provide any additional protection to any of the buildings it listed under any color.
After a battle to save the Chicago Mercantile Exchange building in 2002, the city adopted a demolition-delay ordinance. For any building rated either red or orange in Chicago’s 1996 survey, a demolition permit application triggers a 90-day delay before it can be acted on to give the city’s Landmarks Commission time to consider whether the building should be designated historic, or for other alternatives to be acted on, including restoration.
Mr. Peduto said the idea of something like a demolition-delay ordinance has floated around Pittsburgh City Council for years, but has never been enacted. It might have a chance now, given the Pittsburgh PostGazette’s data on the register, he said.
“I think that once people start seeing that over 15% of our historic structures have been lost in a quarter-century, that might be enough to compel legislation,” he said.