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Tuesday, October 15, 2002

By Timothy McNulty, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

The Murphy administration is poised to start an aggressive demolition plan in Homewood next month that would remove nearly every condemned building in the neighborhood.

The city's chief building inspector, whose bureau is introducing the $700,000 demolition plan to Pittsburgh City Council today, says it is an attempt to "stop the bleeding" in the troubled neighborhood and foster reinvestment there.

Incremental efforts to stem decay in Homewood have failed, Chief Ron Graziano said, so the bureau is pursuing large-scale surgery instead. Some 120 structures will be razed, all in the city's 13th Ward.

"If we can remove all the blight, it encourages people to reinvest in what is left. Doing them all, rather than doing some here and there and placing a Band-Aid on the community, will stop people from walking away," Graziano said.

"If we raze 15 to 20 structures each year in bad neighborhoods, it doesn't help these people," he continued. "If I can say, 'There is no more blight in your neighborhood,' maybe it gets some people to come in, get a permit, and put some more money into their homes."

The plans are part of Mayor Tom Murphy's pledge to raze or rehabilitate all of the city's 1,250 condemned structures by the end of his third term, in 2005.

With the Homewood demolitions, this year's total would be more than 600, which would be the most the city has ever razed in one year.

The city razed 500 structures in 1999 after city Councilman Jim Ferlo beefed up the Bureau of Building Inspections' budget, Graziano said.

Those goals are bittersweet, of course. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, population in Homewood dropped 19 percent through the 1990s, one of the biggest drops in the city. Population dropped citywide by 9.5 percent.

While tearing down condemned homes can make a community safer and more attractive, it also acknowledges that people are not living there anymore.

That means after the demolition firms knock down the homes, dig up the foundations and fill them in, something else has to be put in their place.

In the short term, as Graziano said, removing blighted buildings may spur existing Homewood homeowners to improve their properties. In the longer term, Murphy's 2003 capital budget plan proposes spending at least $150,000 next year to acquire and redevelop blighted Homewood properties ultimately for use as single-family homes.

"Tearing down vacant and abandoned homes is, of course, just a beginning," Murphy said in his capital budget address last Tuesday. "The next step is to help in the rebuilding of these neighborhoods."

The city also plans short-term improvements to vacant lots left by the demolitions in Homewood and elsewhere, through a proposed "Urban Forest" program.

The city Planning Department has a committee working on ideas for planting trees and gardens in the vacant lots, rather than allowing them to be strewn with weeds and trash. It plans to spend $10,000 to study the idea and implement a pilot Urban Forest program.

"The whole idea is that with shrinking population, we have an overabundance of housing units, many of them not maintained," Planning Director Susan Golumb said. "What do we do with that space? Hopefully people will come back and it will grow."

The bill being introduced to council today would provide $698,075 to demolish and remove the roughly 120 properties.

The money would be taken from several old Community Development Block Grant accounts and other sources.

Debate will likely be next week and, if the measure is approved, demolition could begin Nov. 1. The condemned buildings are on roughly 60 Homewood streets, including main arteries like Frankstown and Brushton avenues and Kelly and Susquehanna streets.