The Vacant Home Tour through Wilkinsburg took place on a hot Saturday, May 9th. 88 degrees was too hot to bike from Millvale comfortably, but I didn’t know that until I was standing (uncomfortably) at the registration desk. The walking tour was a little over two miles round trip and, while technically not in the City of Pittsburgh, included a hill or two. Each tour goer picked up a booklet that had descriptions of each home and a map then were sent up the hill to Singer place to the first home.
1329 Singer Place is a shy home, trying to hide behind a pine tree, content to be upstaged by its neighbor across the street: the Singer Mansion.
It’s a fitting first stop. The nearby Singer Mansion stands as a reminder of the importance of preservation. The estate of John F. Singer covered much of the immediate area before it was parceled out, including the land that 1329 Singer Place stands on now. An important example of Gothic Revival architecture, it once stood vacant before being used as a bachelor’s club, a 2-unit apartment and, unsurprisingly, the set for The Spiral Staircase, a 1946 horror film. 1329 Singer Place is more modest in history and detail, but there are photographs to entice the first wave of tour takers, showing the interior in surprisingly good condition. “How easy it might be to have a piece of history of your own,” the volunteer-constructed signage beckons.
The second stop, 740 Hill ave, hints at the underlying goals of the tour organizers. The home appears to occupy the middle position in an “evolution of a vacant home.”
The students who designed this tour did so as a way of addressing blight. Blight, a term borrowed from botany, refers to the decay of neglected properties, the cause of which is sometimes unknown and the effects, often irreversible. It’s the plant form of cancer, something to be feared and removed. The label of “blight,” repeated again and again, has been used to so devalue individual properties, city blocks and entire neighborhoods as to render them expendable.
The stigma of blight, used to justify archetypal policy disasters like Pruitt-Igoe: this is the attitude toward blight that the tour hopes to change. Rather than tear down and start over, the tour seeks to bring in new residents to work with what’s there.
Despite the heat, tour goers and docents were in good spirits, even at the homes without shade. The docents I spoke with had moved to the community within the past decade, some more recently, their residences a block or two away from the houses they were minding. Among people taking the tour, I expected to find a lot of spectators, those with a passing interest in DIY culture, but mostly just looking for unique thing to do on a nice Saturday afternoon. I was surprised, then, to talk to a fair amount of people who seemed genuinely interested in pursuing a purchase of vacant property. Artists were common among people I talked to; the sculptor interested in acquiring a second property as a studio space, the potter who wanted a primary residence with room to expand into a detached studio. The workshop at the end of the tour was targeted towards these people, where experts were on hand to lead an in-depth discussion of how to acquire a vacant property. People were still trickling into the second session when I stopped in for a head count, but I got an estimate of about 60 total people who took part in both sessions.
Reaction from residents that I spoke to ranged mostly from positive to indifferent, but there is some deep-seated skepticism and suspicion as well. During the radio interview in the lead-up to the tour it took just two phone calls before a woman brought up the ‘G’-word: “It sounds a lot like gentrification to me. I would think that a community land trust would be a better option for getting young families, people of color in these houses. It’s my understanding that a lot of the houses that are being renovated in Wilkinsburg right now are enticing to a lot of middle class, wealthy people, and I just don’t think that’s fair.” Walking between the second and third house, another longtime Wilkinsburg resident put it to me a little more bluntly: “50, 60 years ago everyone here looked like you before you all left. Now we see you on your bicycles, smiling, wanting to come back in and push all of us out.” I, a smiling cyclist, was trying to figure out if there was a way to explain to her that a line of white people parading through her neighborhood was not a coordinated effort, when her voice caught in her throat and she abruptly turned to leave. “I have to go, but I just hope you are listening.”
Marita Garrett, for one, is listening. As representative for the First Ward on the Borough Council, she knows that people are passionate about protecting their community and takes steps to engage them as much as possible. “We’re not going to just wake up one day and say hey, there’s a Wal-Mart here,” she says, addressing economic concerns about gentrification. “There’s a lot more transparency in the new leadership on council and the school board.” The community is responding to that transparency, attending events such as Community Conversations, a series of workshops aimed at strengthening the community from within. Marita told me about the most recent Conversation, the third in their series which “focused on economic development through entrepreneurship, and we’ve gotten a turnout of 70 or 80 people for that.”
The last three homes are clustered just a few blocks from each other. As I learn about their famous occupants (Vernon Royce Covell, who designed the three sisters bridges) and their famous neighbors (Frank Conrad, radio pioneer for KDKA), I remember the decade-old study of vacant homes that concluded that 70% of them could be saved. That means that statistically speaking, at least one of the homes on this tour is likely to be unsalvageable. When that happens, they’ll once again have to get creative about how to deal with it and others; it’s not going feasible to give each doomed property a “House of Gold” sendoff (a nearby art project by Dee Briggs, who advised the designers of the tour).
Nobody is in denial of this being an uphill battle and even the most enthusiastic potential vacant home-buyers have their optimism tempered. Crime is in the back of your mind when you consider moving to Wilkinsburg; one of the docents tells me that their car damaged in a shooting recently, and another tour taker is overheard saying that their neighbor’s car was stolen. But perhaps more disturbing for potential home buyers are the taxes. One of the docents introduced me to the phrase ‘tax trap’ to describe Wilkinsburg’s situation: Wilkinsburg’s population has declined to about half of what it was in 1950, and the borough, having to maintain an area of the same size, had no choice but to levy higher and higher taxes on the residents that remain. Now, the only way to lower the tax burden is to attract new residents, who are scared off by the high tax burden. Community groups are trying to reduce barriers to home ownership in their own ways. For instance, the borough is being more aggressive about seizing tax-delinquent properties so that interested buyers don’t have to track down the owners on their own. Meanwhile, the WCDC is talking to banks ahead of time about the viability of restoring properties so that lenders don’t simply dismiss a loan application for a distressed property. But remove or navigate every other obstacle, and the taxes still remain the last, highest barrier. Tax deferral programs are difficult to take advantage of, and taxes that seem manageable when a vacant home is purchased can quickly become unmanageable after renovations are complete and the property is reassessed.
The tour is not a solution to these problems; it doesn’t try to be. What it is is a small step on the road to revitalization. It’s likely that of the 500-odd tour takers, only a small fraction possess the means and desire to pursue a vacant property, and a large fraction of them will be scared off by crime, or taxes, or the amount of elbow grease it will take to restore them. But in the future, the hope is that even the faint of heart will read “blight” and think of what could be done with the what’s there, not what could be done once it’s gone.
The Three Rivers Arts Festival opened yesterday. Lots of people are planning on coming down to see the art, but come between 11am and 2pm from today through June 14th and you can help create it. Muralist Kim Beck has begun stenciling an 850-foot mural underneath the Fort Duquesne Bridge and is ready for volunteers to help fill in the “paint by number” with black, white and gray paint.
Looking at her Tumblr, you can see that Kim Beck (previously featured on I Heart PGH) has a fascination with the mundane and ephemeral aspects of the urban landscape, like billboards, sky writing and plastic security fencing. She carries that idea forward here with the mural that depicts common, hardy, native plants. In other words, weeds. I like the project because it works at different scales; up close I think it will read as almost abstract because of how large the plants will be, and from the other side of the river it will be cool to see weeds sprouting at the foot of the city.
If you miss the window to help with the mural, you should still stop by and see some of the items on display. Riverlife has partnered with the Pittsburgh chapter of the American Institute of Architects to showcase past proposals by young architects on how to better utilize “urban voids”. The proposals were submissions to the Young Architects Studio Competition over the last few years, which was created as a way for young architects to express themselves and be involved in Design Pittsburgh, an annual event held by the AIA to celebrate architecture and give awards for design. The exhibit will last all summer, and Riverlife is planning events in the outdoor exhibit for every Wednesday through the end of August. Stay tuned for more details on those events as they become available. The mural and gallery are collectively known as #tbd, so follow Riverlife on Twitter, search that hashtag or just keep reading I Heart PGH.
So come down and create some art of your own, this weekend or any day until the Arts Festival closes on June 14th. Between 11am and 2pm you can help paint a mural under the Fort Duquesne Bridge. If you’re walking, it’s most easily accessed by walking towards the Point fountain and turning right after walking under the bridge. When you hit the Allegheny River, walk upstream until you see people with brushes and rollers. See you there.
This Saturday, May 9th, is the Vacant Home Tour of Wilkinsburg. Tour takers will spend 45 minutes walking through Wilkinsburg, be shown five vacant historic homes by knowledgeable tour guides, then be able to sit in on a workshop to learn what goes into buying one. If you’re thinking “that sounds unique”, you’re right: it may be the first tour of its kind. And if you’re thinking “I should go”, then you’re not alone: nearly 500 people have RSVP’d on their Facebook page. Best of all, the tour is free for you to take because of a Small & Simple Grant from Neighborhood Allies, additional funding from the Fels Challenge and Carnegie Mellon University, and residents generous enough to volunteer as guides.
Five Carnegie Mellon University students were exploring ways of highlighting and alleviating urban blight when they came up with the idea for a vacant home tour. Kenneth Chu, a student in Public Policy and Management at the Heinz College, spoke on WESA this week about working with students in other programs including design and human-computer interaction during the semester long class. Knowing that they wanted to deal with urban blight, their research and personal connections led them to Wilkinsburg, where they worked with the Wilkinsburg Community Development Corporation (WCDC) and local residents to develop the program. The resulting proposal for a Vacant Home Tour won a cash award from the Fels Challenge, a national public policy competition.
Planning for the Wilkinsburg Vacant Home Tour
Ultimately, the designers of the tour want the people who take it not to see the vacant homes as blight, but as a possible home or an investment opportunity. To help change perceptions, docents at each of the five homes will be on hand to talk about the history of these properties. The houses were chosen without knowledge of their histories and residences have pieced together their histories through online records, physical archives and good old-fashioned oral history. Marlee Gallagher, Communications & Outreach Coordinator at the WCDC, says, “I do think that having the historical background increases the value by adding emotion and humanity to an otherwise vacant, blighted, inanimate object.” She’s seeking to capitalize on a growing trend of wanting to know the history of your home, something that cannot be maintained if you demolish and start over.
The task of restoring these homes will be difficult; in their current condition, they can only be viewed from the outside due to safety concerns. But it is not impossible. The neighborhood of Wilkinsburg has been looking for ways to deal with blight since the collapse of the steel industry. One such effort began in 2005 when Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation (PHLF) conducted a survey of vacant properties in Wilkinsburg, concluding a year later that about 70% of the housing stock could be restored rather than torn down. But PHLF does not have the resources to restore all of the properties on it’s own. Karamagi Rujumba, Director of Public Communications and Advocacy at PHLF, told me that “we cannot do all the work; we can only be leaders”. By way of leading by example, PHLF acquired a former auto repair shop at the nexus of Hamnett place. They restored that property and opened the Landmarks Preservation Resource Center in 2010, a program that serves to educate community members on how to restore, maintain and preserve their homes. They attract people from Wilkinsburg, the greater Pittsburgh area, and even as far as Ohio and West Virginia to take their workshops. They offer lectures and film screenings as well as popular hands-on carpentry and masonry workshops where people can see firsthand how to do the hard work of restoring a home. The final stop on the tour will be the LRPC where they will be offering a workshop for people who might be interested in acquiring a vacant home.
Wilkinsburg Vacant Home Tour Map
The project is poised for success. It has received international attention (Brussels has asked what’s up) and people are responding to the subversion of the typical home and garden tour, and uniquely honest approach of highlighting blight rather than hiding it. The [Your Neighborhood Here] Vacant Home Tour is about to become a thing, and you can still be a part of the very first one on Saturday May 9.
The tour is free to attend. RSVP on Facebook here.
