An Old Home Dies

On a busy corner of a main street in my town there sits a blighted house. Not much different from all of the hundreds of other blighted houses out there, but this particular house sits near a friend's shop and I drive by it quite frequently. Devoid of all exterior coverings that one would expect to find on a home, it is particularly hideous in appearance.

She tells me that it was reputed to have last been occupied by drug dealer. Once he was caught, the occupants disappeared and the house has been vacant ever since, at least by official occupants. Empty homes are a magnet for rats, pigeons and mice. Not to mention unwelcome human visitors who find such homes a good shelter from busy eyes, therefore useful for drug dealers and "shooting galleries".

Not that the house is totally without value. When I drive by, I see pipes, wires and windows, all which could be reused. There are two Satellite dishes that appear to be in good condition mounted on the side of the home. The pipes could be stripped and sold for scrap metal. Some of them may be reusable. The windows appear to be recent installations, albeit done shoddily in plywood nailed onto the original window frame. It is possible that they could be reused. If not, the glass could be recycled, as could the metal frames. The house is obviously quite old and on the interior there could be some quite beautiful light fixtures, hardwood flooring and other pieces that might be reusable. Of course those sorts of reclamation type demolitions take money. Old walls bear lead paint. Old tiles and insulation have asbestos. But eventually, that house is going to have to come down.

As do probably a couple hundred other blighted homes. It bears a red condemned tag on it as do all of the condemned homes. Most of the red tags posted on homes like these have long faded to pink or even near white. The owners are supposed to bear the burden of bringing the homes back to code or demolishing the building, but the cost to tear down the structure is greater than the cost that the property would sell for. In some cases the owners have simply died of old age and their children, if they had any do not want anything to do with the property and simply abandon it. The city is supposed to give the owners every opportunity to reclaim their property before razing the building causing even more delays. Federal stimulus money did have some benefit to the community in allowing several houses long awaiting demolition to be brought down and cleaned up. But the hundreds more waiting have yet to be touched.

The number grows every day. The area's long standing Republican representative does not live in the city proper and never sees the decay that his constituents see every day. Riding in on the coattails of his father, his long time tenure as Representative to Congress has done nothing to improve the economy in the area and the layoffs in the area grow daily. This is a working class community to begin with and many of the homes in the city are of little value on the real estate market. Certainly nothing worth fighting for when the foreclosure notice comes. The end result is another home is left to decay.

The recent removal of some of the blighted homes in the area of the city surrounding the downtown area has removed a few of the eyesores around town but it is only a drop in the bucket compared to the growing numbers that remain. The holes they leave look like the gaps in a line of poorly cared for teeth. This always leaves the question of what to do with the property. For the adjacent owners, the property would probably be a welcome addition to the anemically narrow lots they survive on. Homes from this era were built with little more than a few feet for a walkway to pass between them. The problem is that most homeowners in the area are either slumlords who do not care or poor homeowners who cannot afford to buy this land. The areas are too run down to redevelop without tearing down the entire area. The end result is displacing an entire neighborhood of people who can barely afford what they have. In some areas, local businesses have bought some of the properties, largely to pave over as parking lots, but the land does not go unused at least.

In one area where a large enough strip of land was cleared to be useful, the city made the decision to convert the area to a park. This, on the surface sounds like a good idea. To someone who has seen this before, it is a terrible one. I have lived in a big city long enough to see what happens in a small park surrounded by a decaying neighborhood. The children do get a playground to play on but the drug pushers quickly find a new whole new location in which to pick up customers. Get them young while they are too naive to know better and they become your slaves. Driven to dealing themselves to support their own habit, an entire new and growing network of addicts is born. There are always abandoned houses to hide in to shoot up.

I know what this city needs. We need jobs. But bringing jobs in is a lot easier said than done.

Can this city be saved?