An empty townhouse on Park Hill Drive in the East Hills where Rising Tide Partners is working with the community to address blight. (Photo by Quinn Glabicki/PublicSource)
Conversations about the “dark side” of development often center around displacement caused by rising rents, but there’s a problem far more pervasive plaguing Pittsburgh neighborhoods, one that often gets overlooked even though it’s right under our noses.
Kendall Pelling, executive director of the community development nonprofit Rising Tide Partners, calls it “rotrification”—what happens when decay and blight causes neighborhoods to rot away and become uninhabitable.
As he told PublicSource, “Displacement doesn’t just happen because there’s a hot market, and the evil developers come in and buy things up and raise the rents.” Instead, he estimates that more neighborhoods are suffering from neglect than gentrification.
Data from Pittsburgh’s Housing Needs Assessment backs this up. The report found that neighborhoods with worsening neighborhood conditions and high vacancy—like Homewood, Larimer, Lincoln-Lemington, and many others—are seeing large losses in low-income populations.
“While much attention is given to displacement caused by rising rents, deteriorating housing stock in many neighborhoods is also forcing households out of Pittsburgh,” the report states. “As housing conditions continue to deteriorate, many households, particularly low-income households who do not have the means to make needed repairs, have been forced to leave Pittsburgh in pursuit of safe, habitable housing elsewhere.”
The neighborhoods most at risk? It will probably come as no surprise: those that have seen systematic disinvestment over the years.
“Basically, if you take a redlining map from 50-60 years ago and superimpose it over the maps where all the neglected, rotted properties are, they’re pretty much the same,” explained Shivam Mathur, real estate project manager at Main + Elm Development Company, a new project management nonprofit working with Pittsburgh communities to develop properties aligned with their community plans.
Another force driving the “rotrification” phenomenon is the fact that Pittsburgh was a city built for almost 700,000 people in the 1950s while now the population is just over 300,000.
“With both negative forces working together, anyone from those disinvested neighborhoods with financial mobility took their families to the inner ring suburbs or further outside of the city, leaving behind those to ride out the declining quality of housing until they were basically forced to leave due to uninhabitable conditions,” explained Main+ Elm Executive Director Jonathan Huck. “This decline didn’t happen overnight; it took years and decades and continues to happen to this day.”
Add the above to the reality that the bulk of the housing in the city was built in the early 1900s with limited incentive to renovate those properties in the last half of a century, further exacerbated by the growing divide between wages and costs of construction, the quality of existing housing continues to decline.
It’s a struggle that Mathur and Huck have witnessed first-hand for decades as they have worked to renovate homes throughout Pittsburgh while working for ELDI and others: historic patterns of underinvestment in non-white neighborhoods have left many Pittsburgh communities with a sea of abandoned homes.
“It starts with the economics of people simply unable to maintain the houses they’re in,” Huck explained. “With everybody moving out of the neighborhood or city, there’s no equity left in the property.”
This is where the city typically steps in and threatens to foreclose on the house through a treasurer’s sale, a public auction to sell properties with unpaid property taxes.
“But as the value of the house goes down and property taxes become unaffordable, I’ve seen many folks say, ‘Take the property for all I care,’” noted Huck.
The housing and blight crisis in context
As reported by Pittsburgh Quarterly, the city of Pittsburgh owns nearly 24,000 vacant properties, including 12-15,000 vacant residential structures and lots.
Meanwhile, the Housing Needs Assessment estimates a need for 5,800 ownership units (5,000 of which need to be affordable to those earning 100% of the Area Median Income or below) and 17,300 rental units over the next twenty years. To address the scale of the problem, that means the city needs to develop more than 850 rental units and 250 ownership units a year over the next 20 years.
Main + Elm has taken up the cause, making for-sale housing their focus, which, in combination with commercial, “Main Street” development, they see as the catalyst to transforming communities.
“Homeownership is important to anchoring a neighborhood,” said Huck. “It provides stability, improves quality of life, and is a first step towards families building equity and generational wealth.”
However, Huck is careful to note that homeownership isn’t for everyone. What’s important, he says, is finding the right mix between rental and homeownership and affordable and market-rate in each neighborhood.
For many of their projects, Main + Elm collaborates closely with Rising Tide Partners. Together, the organizations work to ensure that they are respecting that balance in each neighborhood where they operate.
Stay tuned for part two of this series to discover how Main + Elm and Rising Tide are working to address the city’s rotrification problem.