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While money may be tight for budgets on all levels of government, the General Assembly has been working to curb blight and abandoned properties and lots across the state with new legislation.
With Senate Bill 900 — also known as the Neighborhood Blight Reclamation and Revitalization Act — weaving back and forth between the House and Senate since being introduced last year, state Rep. Kenyatta Johnson, a member of the House’s Urban Affairs Committee, held a public hearing on the issue in Point Breeze Oct. 14 — the same day the bill made its final passage unanimously in the Senate. As of press time, it awaited Gov. Ed Rendell’s signature.
“My response was to start with the area that had the majority of blight and abandoned houses,” Johnson said of Point Breeze following the hearing at the Church of the Redeemer, 1440 S. 24th St., that included legislators statewide and members of City Council including state Rep. Michael O’Brien and Council President Anna Verna.
Conversations with residents at his summer nights constituent block meetings surrounded blight.
“We talked about developers coming into the neighborhood and tearing down houses and damaging the houses that are next to long-standing homeowners,” Johnson said. “We talked about developers coming in and tearing down houses and leaving a vacant lot that becomes a public nuisance with drug dealers running in and out with drugs, prostitution takes place and also burglaries from individuals running down the alleys and preying on people at the back of their homes.”
Currently, the laws do not make it easy to find some of these owners of rundown properties, Licenses and Inspections Commissioner Fran Burns testified.
“At the real heart of the issue is ownership and it seems to be the missing link in the struggle of our enforcement and some of the struggle over time,” she said. “Our department is constantly defeated because we’re not successful in finding homeowners of properties. Homeowners have free range to leave abandoned properties without enough consequence.”
But if signed into law, the act will make the process easier giving municipalities new tools to fight blight, state Rep. W. Curtis Thomas, who represents parts of North Philly, said.
“It will be able to go after the assets of folks who have been sitting on blighted properties and doing nothing,” the committee’s majority chair said.
In addition, those who fail to keep a property up to code could be denied building and similar permits while counties could establish a housing court to tend to real property matters as a part of the bill.
Residents including Claudia Sherrod, executive director of South Philly H.O.M.E.S., Inc., whose organization advocates for affordable housing and improving the neighborhood, gave the panel a local perspective on the issue at hand. Her organization has helped to jump-start the construction of reasonably-priced housing recently in the areas of 16th and Federal streets and 17th and Latona streets, but there is still much more to be done, she said asking the elected officials for $1 million or $1 billion.
“Many of our developers are messing up,” she said. “They’re messing up because they think they can get around the regular system, but we’re not going to let them do that. We are urging you, our elected officials, to continue to keep the money flowing. Work with us so that we can grow Point Breeze because Point Breeze is not only our home, it’s the home of others who would like to come into our community.”
Speaking on behalf of the neighborhood just north of Point Breeze, Janet Lorenz, South of South Neighborhood Association vice chairwoman, noted that even though her neighborhood has improved, she estimated there is still at least one vacant building remaining per block.
“We went through tremendous transformation, but we have these perpetually vacant and unoccupied and unattended properties,” she said. “You kind of have to ask yourself in a neighborhood that has undergone such rapid transformation — the developers are still incredibly interested in working in our neighborhood — how can we have these intractable properties sitting there year after year?”
She cleans up that one dwelling that she refers to as a lights-out property on her block weekly, but it still prevents the area from flourishing, she said.
“If you have a lights-out property on your block, that diminishes the appeal of the block and the community and it invites problems,” Lorenz said. “And it doesn’t matter how affluent your block is, a lights-out property invites problems.”
Citywide there are about 34,000 vacant structures and an additional 40,000 vacant lots now, according to Burns.
Recently her staff located a memo from 1987 that asked for $91 million in government funding to make a dent in the 34,000 vacant buildings. In 2002, with an estimated 37,000 and 31,000 vacant buildings and lots, respectively, Mayor John F. Street’s administration issued $295 million to blight for the Neighborhood Transformation Initiative.
“Unfortunately, blight is no stranger to our streets and for decades, anti-blight efforts have surfaced to combat the significant problem that took decades to develop,” she said.
But strides have been made at the city level as demolition costs have been reduced from $26,000 to $17,000 per property and the timeline between inspection and sealing went from 10 months to 10 days, Burns said.
A recent partnership between the Redevelopment Authority and the Pennsylvania Association of REALTORS, aimed to create affordable housing by selling government-owned vacant buildings and lots.
“The revenue these sales generated exceeded the city’s expectations and demonstrated that active marketing would identify a larger pool of buyers even in a down market,” Brian Abernathy, chief of staff to Managing Director Rich Negrin, said adding the program will be expanded.
Another success came from programs provided by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s Community LandCare program, which is set to cease Oct. 30 without additional city funding, where community groups such as Ready, Willing & Able, 1211 Bainbridge St., and Universal Companies, 800 S. 15th St., are responsible for overseeing the maintenance of certain empty lots. Also, Vacant Land Stabilization Program has beautified vacant lots in transition increasing adjacent property values by 37 percent, Maitreyi Roy, the society’s vice president of programs, said.
“This is really a strategy,” she said. “While the future use of the sites are being determined, this is an interim solution that doesn’t continue to bring the community down.”
On the other hand, Universal Companies has been working on a permanent solution to fixing the South of South neighborhood, its Vice President Eve Lewis testified. The nonprofit founded by Kenny Gamble, who relocated his family back into his former neighborhood since its establishment in 1993, has been striving to remove blight and rebuild the community where its founder grew up
“We have some wonderful people who have lived in South Philly for a very, very long time and everybody deserves the opportunity to live in a blight-free community,” Lewis said. SPR
Contact Staff Writer Amanda Snyder at asnyder@southphillyreview.com or ext. 117.
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