Oct 6, 2015 3 min read

Fifty or 60 years ago, you could travel from Huntington, W.Va., up through the Mountain State into Pennsylvania, and then head north either to Buffalo, N.Y., or west to cities in Ohio like Cleveland and Toledo, and then north from there toward Detroit and Flint, Mich., and find cities that were purring with industrial activity and filled with densely packed neighborhoods containing thriving middle-and working-class families.

Those days, as everyone knows, started to fade in the 1970s as the Rust Belt started its long, wrenching process of deindustrialization, leaving behind not just shuttered factories but neighborhoods with homes sliding in value and falling into decay. The blight around them caused other residents to leave, and their former homes then became part of the vicious downward cycle.

If only dealing with abandoned homes and deserted businesses were as easy as gassing up a bulldozer and aiming it at these forlorn structures. But, as a story by Natalie Reid Miller on blight in Sunday’s Observer-Reporter examined, there is a thicket of issues that must be cut through before neighborhoods and downtown business districts can be freed of these repellant eyesores.

Not least of these issues is the cost. We reported that the building once used as the law office for the late Washington County District Attorney John Pettit on North Main and East Chestnut streets is being, at long last, torn down, but with a $90,000 bill that is being covered by taxpayers. That drains away money that could be used to rid the city of other structures.

Then there is the murky netherworld of out-of-town and, indeed, out-of-country buyers who snap up properties for peanuts with the hope of making a quick profit off them, but who do little, if anything, to maintain them. Some simply walk away and neglect to pay the requisite taxes when they realize the rehabilitation costs would far surpass any profit they could make if they tried to resell.

Washington is hardly an outlier in this region. An in-depth article on vacant and abandoned properties that appeared in Pittsburgh Quarterly in 2011 found that in Homewood, perhaps the region’s most downtrodden corner, 44 percent of land parcels and 30 percent of homes were vacant.

In Braddock, 24 percent of houses are vacant, and 23 percent are vacant in Donora, the beleaguered borough on the eastern edge of Washington County.

Simple solutions are not easy to come by. When last-ditch “repository” sales are conducted in Washington, new buyers are absolved of having to pay long-overdue local, school district and county taxes.

And there have been ongoing discussions about the establishment of a land bank in Washington County that would purchase unwanted properties, refurbish or demolish them, and get them back to productive use and on the tax rolls. Land banks are typically financed through a variety of means, including property sales, lease and rent payments, grants and loans. A land bank like this was established last year in Westmoreland County, and a similar entity has been established in Detroit, which auctions off three properties per day.

Along with dragging down a community’s prospects, blight is a reminder of a past that is not coming back.

In Washington and in other communities like it, blight needs to be conquered so that residents and elected officials can discover a new purpose and build for a more promising future.