Fighting blight a building at a time

A new Pa. law allows conservators appointed by a court to take control of and rehab buildings.

PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER | 11/29/08

By Amy Worden
Inquirer Harrisburg Bureau

HARRISBURG – Gov. Rendell last week signed legislation aimed at cleaning up neighborhood blight, not with wholesale urban renewal, but one building at a time.
The law, which takes effect in February, will allow a court-appointed “conservator” to assume control of a neglected property in order to renovate it.

The law stipulates that owners will be given fair notice about the conservatorship proceeding, and they can agree to take care of a property. But if they fail to respond, the court can appoint a conservator – in most instances, a nonprofit group or redevelopment authority – to take control of the property.

“It’s not a transfer of title. It’s more like a receivership,” said Cindy Daley, policy director for the Housing Alliance of Pennsylvania, an advocacy group. “Once the building is rehabbed, the owner can come back and take possession, providing they pay back the conservator, or the conservator could sell it.”

The law will allow communities to respond more quickly to address blight than is possible under often-cumbersome tax sales or condemnations.

Private-property rights groups, realtors and the banking industry had initially opposed the bill, but changes were made to win broad, bipartisan support, said Rep. Don Walko (D., Allegheny), who sponsored the House bill.

Unlike neighborhood-wide urban renewal programs, the law – similar to statutes that have helped blighted communities in Baltimore, Cleveland and Chicago – targets individual buildings that might be dragging down a block in a depressed community, or slowing efforts toward revitalization.

“It’s a surgical tool, not something to blow out a whole city block,” said Walko, who first proposed the legislation in 1995.

Walko, speaking yesterday by cell phone from a North Pittsburgh coffee shop, said he was looking at a candidate for conservatorship right across the street in the community of Brighton Heights.

“The house is overgrown with weeds,” he said. “You can see it has a good roof, but nobody’s living in it. Then there are nice duplexes on either side that are well-maintained.”

Rep. Bryan Lentz (D., Delaware), a cosponsor of the bill, said communities in Chester have been frustrated for years by blighted properties.

“With the new soccer stadium and casino intended to start the revitalization, you continue to have blocks with one or two buildings that are drug dens or rat-infested, and the community has been paralyzed to do anything about it,” Lentz said.

Affordable-housing advocates point out that it’s not only metropolitan areas that are facing blight, but also many aging, rural boroughs in depressed coal regions and elsewhere.

In Philadelphia, which has an estimated 35,000 vacant buildings, blighted properties depress property values by as much as $10,000 on a block, Housing Alliance executive director Elizabeth Hersh told a House committee in February.

The 2000 census identified 300,000 vacant properties statewide, Daley said.

“Conceptually, this make absolute sense,” said Herb Wetzel, executive director of the Philadelphia City Council’s housing and community development committee. “Having the capacity to undertake this is tremendous, but the question is, in this market, could you get the resources to fix the property?”

Daley and Walko said that many challenges lie ahead. Chief among them is finding private and public funding sources.