Land bank fails to fight blight

With crucial support from community leaders, the Pittsburgh land bank was launched seven years ago as a powerful urban tool to put hundreds of boarded-up homes back on the tax rolls, clear out empty buildings and transform the most distressed city neighborhoods.

Citing the success of similar programs in other cities, the agency was emboldened under a new state law to take ownership of abandoned homes in areas that have been losing residents for generations.

Since its creation, the agency has spent hundreds of thousands on consultants, lawyers and experts to draw up plans to make it one of the most successful programs of its kind in Pennsylvania.

“This Land Bank will become an important and powerful tool in our efforts to empower residents to take back control of their neighborhoods,” said Mayor Bill Peduto, who championed the legislation in 2014.

But after all the meetings and spending, this is what taxpayers got for their money: a single, empty lot in an area long vexed by blight and crime.

Ultimately, the program created to help turn around the burgeoning problem of urban blight failed at every level, from the lack of money to buy the properties, to the inability of the land bank to strike agreements with other public agencies, to a critical lack of leadership, a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette investigation found.

“A huge missed opportunity,” said Joanna Deming, executive director of Perry Hilltop Citizens Council. “Why has the land bank taken so long to get going?”

Even its website — a basic tool for land banks to sell properties — was down part of last year, leaving advocates at a further loss to determine what went wrong with an agency that once garnered strong support from City Council.

After operating independently since 2014, the agency was moved into the Urban Redevelopment Authority last month as an affiliate of the URA in an action that raises questions over whether the program will survive.

The scrutiny comes amid a growing crisis for Pittsburgh: Ownership of roughly 11,500 properties scattered across the landscape, many dangerous and decrepit eyesores that have devalued neighborhoods for decades.

An analysis by the Post-Gazette shows that about half the structures have been slapped with code violations by the city’s own inspectors, including homes with rotting porches and collapsed roofs, and empty, deteriorating storefronts.

At least four dozen were so bad they were declared unfit for human habitation.

Beyond the violations, nearly half the properties are laden with court liens — encumbrances from unpaid taxes and utility bills — making it even more difficult to put them on the open market, the Post-Gazette found.

And those are just the city-owned properties. Thousands of vacant lots burdened with liens and owned by others are scattered through nearly every neighborhood.

Betty Lane, 83, who lives around the corner from the empty lot the land bank owns, said she was surprised to learn it had only acquired one parcel in seven years.

“Unreal,” said Ms. Lane, who has worked on vacant land issues for three decades. “Someone needs to explain that to the community… There’s over 700 vacant lots [in Larimer]. We need development.”

During a recent interview, she pointed to a broken-down row home owned by the city with crumbled bricks and a condemned sign plastered across the front.

“I don’t get it,” she said. “There are thousands of dollars worth of water bills on this. If they would drop the liens and let somebody fix it, they could get some money.”

From the Sheraden neighborhood, to the Hill District, to the far corner of Homewood, tax delinquent homes have fallen into disrepair. Vines and weeds engulf entire front porches; shattered windows mark homes that have been deserted for years — many clustered in the city’s majority Black neighborhoods where homeowners bear the brunt of crime and sinking property values.

Land bank experts across the country and local leaders on the ground say the delay in getting properties back on the tax rolls more than likely has taken an even greater toll on abandoned homes.

Many are “too far gone,” said Aaron Sukenik, executive director of the Hilltop Alliance, which represents some of the most blighted streets in the city’s southern hills. “Water starts to get in. Roofs start to give, gutters and downspouts start to give.”

When Pittsburgh launched the land bank two years after Pennsylvania lawmakers passed enabling legislation in 2012, the programs had already been operating in other cities, in some cases helping to revive some of the most devastated neighborhoods across the Rust Belt.

The land bank shares some of the same functions as the Urban Redevelopment Authority — Pittsburgh’s agency that fights blight — but with a crucial difference: It has the power to clear titles of properties and strip away liens and delinquent taxes. That means getting homes and vacant lots back on the tax rolls in a quicker, more efficient way.

In Flint, Mich., Detroit, Toledo and Cleveland, the agencies acquired old homes — many of them tax delinquent — for small amounts of money and put them on the market.

Philadelphia prioritized affordable housing and green space, turning barren lots into parks. And in Detroit, the focus is getting developers to invest in old homes to turn them into affordable units.

Detroit is selling 300 individual homes and parcels a month, more than double its pace from three years ago.

“It really goes back to what’s the political mandate. How do parties agree on how to utilize the land bank?” said Saskia Thompson, executive director of the Detroit Land Bank.

Starting in 2010, Pittsburgh began to rapidly acquire abandoned properties — hundreds every year — as people had left for the suburbs and the city looked to protect what was left.

The land bank was to be one of the weapons to take on the properties, work out agreements to remove the liens and get the parcels to potential buyers.

But a critical series of missteps would keep the agency from executing its plan and following the city’s path.

Though the land bank board included elected and nonprofit leaders, including City Councilman Ricky Burgess as chairman, it didn’t hire a permanent executive director, an important step in leadership that it needed, say land bank experts.

The agency declared that 2018 was going to be its breakout year, with the goal of starting to build a portfolio of 50 properties, half of them lots and the other half homes and buildings.

It even reaped the benefit of a $400,000 grant from the Heinz Endowments, but in the end, it never carried through on its pledge, acquiring just the one lot in Larimer, which still shows $525 in tax liens.