“They’re tearing down these houses,” says Penn Hills resident Wynona Harper. “When they tear down the houses, the lots are not being taken care of and they look a whole hot mess.”
Harper is describing what happens when Penn Hills razes single-family homes as part of the municipality’s 50-year-old Townwide Demolition Program. It’s a program that the municipality uses to eliminate what it calls blight, namely deteriorating vacant and abandoned homes in neighborhoods such as Lincoln Park, where Harper lives. Many Lincoln Park residents claim that the program simply removes one nuisance and replaces it with another: vacant overgrown lots.
Some Black Lincoln Park homeowners go one step further, alleging that the program is environmental racism because it imposes burdens on the community not seen elsewhere in Penn Hills.
Lincoln Park is one of Pittsburgh’s earliest Black suburbs. Between 1900 and 1970, middle-class Black families bought and built homes there. They created a thriving community. But since the 1990s, the neighborhood has become ground zero of the municipality’s inventory of vacant and abandoned homes. It’s one of several Penn Hill neighborhoods that have propelled the municipality into the spotlight as a nationally recognized hotbed of suburban poverty.
Sewage spills and dumping in a nearby ravine spurred Black Lincoln Park residents to make environmental racism claims in the 1960s. Back then, civil rights leaders alleged that the municipality sought to displace them. Sixty years later, the conditions are different, but the accusations are the same.
Pittsburgh City Paper spoke with current and former Lincoln Park residents, municipal officials, and experts in housing and environmental protection laws. Penn Hills isn’t Detroit or even Pittsburgh, two cities with significant numbers of vacant and abandoned homes. Yet the municipality takes what some residents believe is a path of least resistance to its vacant housing problem, one most frequently associated with the ills of urban renewal: demolition.
This article is the first in a two-part series digging into the reasons why Penn Hills has so many vacant and abandoned homes, how the municipality addresses these properties, and why some residents believe Penn Hills’ solution is worse than the original problem.
A history of neglect
In the mid-1960s, Penn Hills had a mess on its hands. Raw sewage pouring out of broken pipes and debris trucked in from urban renewal demolitions in East Liberty were making life miserable for Lincoln Park residents. The neighborhood had become “a breeding ground for disease and rodents,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported in 1965.
“In the renewal debris that is being dumped there, I have seen a whole nest of rats,” one Santiago St. resident who lived near the dumping site told the Pittsburgh Courier that year.
The raw sewage and dumping spurred complaints to the Pennsylvania Commission on Human Relations, federal agencies, and protests at the City-County Building.
Some residents believed there was intent behind the conditions.
“Apparently they wanted to rid this little corner of Penn Township, where 90 % of this municipality’s Negroes live, of them,” Dr. Charles Greenlee told the Pittsburgh Courier in 1965. Greenlee, a respected pediatrician and civil rights activist, lived in Lincoln Park in a Travella Blvd. home he and his wife bought in 1951.
Greenlee is a familiar name to many Pittsburghers — his older brother, Gus, owned the Crawford Grill and the Pittsburgh Crawfords baseball team.
Fast-forward 40 years. In the first decades of this century, Penn Hills found itself facing failing infrastructure and a shrinking tax base. The municipality was stretched thin. Decades of deferred infrastructure investment and crushing school-system debt had pushed Penn Hills into what author Benjamin Herold described as a “destructive spiral” in his 2024 book, Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs.
According to Herold, Black families in Penn Hills bear the brunt of those problems. Bethany Smith, a Penn Hills resident and one of Herold’s sources, penned the epilogue to his book. “A lot of white folks don’t care for our presence,” she wrote.
Penn Hills Mayor Pauline Calabrese disagrees with Herold’s findings and his methods. “In my opinion, his research technique was flawed,” Calabrese wrote in response to emailed questions. “He had a narrative he wanted to push and he went in search of anyone whom he thought would support it.”
Herold is only the latest author to dig into poverty and race in Penn Hills. The municipality is the subject of a 2012 Princeton University Ph.D. dissertation, and it figures prominently in the 2013 Brookings Institution book, Confronting Suburban Poverty in America. The earlier books, dissertation, and academic journal articles bypassed the townwide demolition program and the environmental issues in Lincoln Park, focusing instead on other issues.
In 2005, Black Lincoln Park homeowners filed another complaint with the Pennsylvania Commission on Human Relations. The residents had sought relief and answers from Penn Hills officials about the demolition program. Finding none, eight elderly residents who had lived for several decades in Lincoln Park went to the same civil rights commission that earlier residents approached.
“For 2003 and continuing to the present [Penn Hills] has intentionally permitted blight and decay to exist in my neighborhood,” wrote the lead complainant. “I believe [Penn Hills’s] actions were due to my race, and the race of my neighborhood[,] African American.”
Pennsylvania Commission on Human Relations files are sealed to protect the identity of people filing complaints. “Disclosure to a third-party would be against the Agency’s interest in confidentiality in that such disclosure would create a ‘chilling effect’ that would dissuade aggrieved persons from privately seeking assistance,” the Commission wrote in its denial to a Pennsylvania Right-to-Know Law request.
One of the eight complainants and her daughter agreed to speak with City Paper about the case and the allegations of racism in exchange for anonymity. Five others have died since the complaint was filed. The other two could not be reached.
The Commission on Human Relations investigated the complaint for six years and dismissed it in 2011. In its findings, the commission wrote that there was insufficient evidence of unlawful discrimination.
Lincoln Park residents then appealed to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which funds the demolition program through the Community Development Block Grant program. They also reached out to the ACLU, the NAACP, and local journalists.
“We will be non-existent if the current system of demolishing homes continues,” three residents wrote in a 2012 letter to the NAACP Legal and Educational Fund. “We are desperate for assistance if our community is to survive.”
“I wrote to them several times about what was going on. I never got responses,” says Lee, 92, one of the complainants. CP is using her middle name to protect her privacy.
Heirs’ properties
The Townwide Demolition Program was at the center of the 2005 complaint. “I’d say it’s a fairly robust demolition program,” says Penn Hills Planning Director Chris Blackwell. The municipality has demolished hundreds of homes.
“I can’t tell you the exact number,” says Blackwell.
The homes slated for demolition are first condemned. Many, says Blackwell, were abandoned after the last owners died. “Owners are deceased. All you can do is send a violation, but it goes nowhere,” he says.
Known as “heirs’ properties,” these abandoned homes are part of a nationwide problem, especially in Black communities. They are a drag on local governments because property taxes aren’t being paid, and they bring down property values and become eyesores.
“Heirs’ properties are properties with what’s called clouded title,” says Kristopher Smith, a community development officer with the Local Initiatives Support Corporation based in Jacksonville, Fla. “That occurs when the owner of record passes away without a will and the interests in that property are passed down informally to heirs.”
Another way titles become clouded is when a will divides property among several heirs. Sometimes those heirs have already died by the time that the owner of record dies. Other times, the heirs simply ignore the property and their obligations to maintain it and pay taxes. A situation similar to this helped lead to the Sept. 2023 shooting that rocked Pittsburgh’s Garfield neighborhood.
“This cuts across urban, suburban, and rural markets,” says Smith. “The reality of that is that that’s going to overlay with where you see poverty, and that’s definitely tilting towards Black and brown folks.”
Lincoln Park has both types of heirs’ properties. Responding to complaints by neighboring property owners, the municipality draws from a pool of CDBG funds to hire contractors to demolish the vacant homes and grade the lots. Penn Hills slaps liens on each demolished property to recover costs.
The lots are then left untouched by the municipality. “Penn Hills does not have the resources to mow these lots,” read city planning documents. The municipality encourages the reversion to woodlands: “Land is to remain wooded until a development proposal is approved.”
Instead of carefully planted grass and trees, the lots fill with weeds, vines, and invasive plant species and become homes for wild turkeys, deer, snakes, and rats.
Those vacant lots were the basis for the 2005 civil rights complaint. Though the case remains raw among the surviving complainants, it was little more than a bureaucratic nuisance to Penn Hills government. It yielded no changes to how the municipality conducts its demolitions program. “Nothing,” says Blackwell.
“That’s old news,” says municipal manager Scott Andrejchak. “That was resolved. It was adjudicated. It was fully adjudicated.”
“‘Environmental racism’ is a defined term,” he adds. “I think it could be in a situation where you have an industrial polluter. It’s where you have a public health effect.”
To some Lincoln Park residents, the closed case isn’t old news. Vacant lots and abandoned homes left to rot do create public health hazards, according to research by Grounded Strategies. In 2021, the organization issued a report funded by the Heinz Endowments that laid out public health consequences of vacant lots in Pittsburgh.
The study found that vacant lots negatively impact community health, mental health, and physical health. “The mental health implications of vacant land are often the result from continuing negative emotions associated with living close to vacant land,” the study’s authors wrote. Vacant land threatens physical health by creating opportunities for illegal dumping and by attracting wild animals. It can also provide cover for criminal activities.
Daequan McAdam is an environmental justice organizer with 412 Justice. He defines environmental racism differently from Andrejchak, noting that “there is a disproportionate impact on marginalized communities and their quality of life with environmental hazards, whether that be air pollution, water pollution, environmental decision-making.”
McAdam says that the demolitions create cumulative impacts. Individual teardowns don’t necessarily impact a lot of people when they happen. But over time, when lots of homes are demolished and the number of vacant lots balloons, that’s when the problems begin.
“They are linked to a lot of high rates of different types of illnesses and ailments,” says McAdam.
It’s a vicious cycle that is slowly destroying Lincoln Park, house by house. Residents there don’t think it’s a coincidence that their neighborhood bears the brunt of the demolitions program and that disinvestment festers in the once-fashionable suburb.
“I’d say a majority would be in the Lincoln Park area,” Blackwell says. “But we demolish structures all over Penn Hills.”
CP asked Blackwell if there were other demolition hot spots besides Lincoln Park in Penn Hills. “No, that would be the hot spot,” he says.
Root shock
The effects of the demolitions program are evident throughout Lincoln Park. Overgrown lots are one piece of a neglectful disinvestment puzzle that includes haphazardly patched streets.
“After a while, it’s just going to be a few houses and a bunch of weeds everywhere,” says Antionette. Her family has lived on Travella Blvd. since the 1950s. She asked that we only use her first name to protect her privacy. “Then it’ll be like somebody with an old rotten mouth, a tooth here and nothing else, you know, and then a tooth here. That’s how this will look. A couple of houses and the rest will be land.”
Fletcher Hardy lives on Torrance St. next door to a home the municipality demolished in 2023. He’s lived there since 2010. There are two others across the street from his house slated for demolition this year. He supports the demolition program because it eliminates unsafe buildings.
The house next door, which had been owned by the family of a decorated World War II Buffalo Soldier (someone who served in an all-Black army unit), was in bad shape. The roof was falling in on the nine people who were living there. Hardy points to one of the houses slated for demolition and says, “That’s what it looked like.”
Hardy wanted to buy the lot, but couldn’t. It’s heirs’ property, and the municipality doesn’t own it. He didn’t know about the 2005 Commission on Human Relations complaint, but, like the complainants, he’s critical of what happens to the lots once the houses are razed.
“I think it’s not tearing down the property,” he says. “They don’t maintain this main street [Mount Carmel], so grass, bushes take over the whole block where there are no houses.”
Hardy thinks Penn Hills simply forgot about Lincoln Park. “They didn’t keep up with stuff,” he says. Hardy cites antiquated septic tank systems and auxiliary buildings constructed without building permits. He points to the lot where his neighbor’s house once stood and describes a garage that the municipality’s demolition contractor didn’t remove. He pointed it out to the contractor, who replied that it wasn’t part of the project.
“So the garage is still sitting there,” says Hardy.
Even the correct name of Hardy’s street seems to have been forgotten. On street signs, it’s spelled “Torrens” — that’s the name that the Torrens Gas Company gave it in 1895. In Allegheny County and municipality records, it’s spelled “Torrance.”
The greatest impacts might be the ones that can’t be seen from the road. They appear in the ways that Lincoln Park residents describe their community. These narratives fit a pattern found in other communities where residents have experienced urban renewal and gentrification resulting in displacement that happens in stages. As familiar people, buildings, and landscapes disappear, the residents who remain experience stress.
Psychiatrist and urban scholar Mindy Thompson Fullilove describes the responses to displacement pressures as root shock or the trauma experienced when one’s environment is destroyed. “It’s the destruction of all or part of one’s emotional ecosystem,” Fullilove says.
Suburbs are not immune to root shock. “Anybody could have it,” she says in an interview with CP.
“We were a very vibrant community,” says Lee’s 65-year-old daughter. She grew up in Lincoln Park and asked that CP not use her name to protect her mother’s identity. “Sometimes when I drive here, it’s really upsetting because it’s like — like, you see, what, five houses?”
Production vs. preservation
“If we think about what the cost is to build an affordable housing unit, wouldn’t it make much more economical sense to preserve the units that you already have?” says Kim Cutcher, a LISC vice-president based in Toledo.
Like many housing experts, Cutcher believes that preserving existing housing stock is key. “There’s just not enough resources to wholesale build new, affordable units,” she says.
“It’s not just preserving the existing housing stock, but it’s also providing job opportunities for disadvantaged youth in the community who could learn valuable building trade skills, rehabilitating these homes, and then maybe even move into the homes once they’re rehabilitated,” says Cutcher.
Cutcher and Kristopher Smith cite land banks and legal avenues to clear titles to heirs’ properties. These routes require access to low-cost civil legal support and long-term strategies, including estate counseling, to remediate the effects of heirs’ properties.
The solutions involve creativity and money, two things that appear to be in short supply in Penn Hills. The municipality uses the Allegheny County Vacant Property Recovery Program to get some properties back on the tax rolls, but it’s mainly been used by homeowners to buy adjacent parcels, says Blackwell.
Wynona Harper, who has lived in Lincoln Park since 1995, is spearheading a plan to develop five affordable housing units and a community store and garden using the Vacant Property Recovery Program. In October, the Penn Hills Council approved the transfer of eight parcels to Harper for the project.
“So when they took the houses down, I always wanted to do a development in order to help the next person,” Harper says.
But Harper’s project is housing production, not preservation.
Pennsylvania’s conservatorship law is another route, but it’s also a costly and time-consuming process.
“It’s a chore, you know, so not a lot of people are willing to do that,” says Blackwell.
Meanwhile, it’s demolition season in Lincoln Park. “They usually start the end of the year,” says Hardy. This year’s round includes two Torrance St. homes and one on Travella Blvd.
All of the demolished Lincoln Park homes had histories. The people who once lived in them were everyday people and Pittsburgh luminaries, like the Torrance St. Buffalo Soldier or the civil rights leader who lived on Funston Ave. or the Travella Blvd. photo studio owner. Before razing the homes, Penn Hills was required by federal law to account for their history — but didn’t. In Part II, CP will explore how those lost histories have contributed to root shock in Lincoln Park.
Correction: An earlier version of this article used the term “land trust” to describe a land bank. The error has been corrected above.
This article appears in Dec 11-17, 2024.
