by Rich Lord, PublicSource
When the roof next door caved in, it created more than an eyesore for LynnDee Howell’s family.
Living in a townhouse community on Park Hill Drive in East Hills, the Howells loved the sense of shared responsibility that pervaded when they arrived in the 1980s. But things changed.
The place next door went vacant five years ago, kids broke the windows, the roof failed, and rainwater started to seep into the Howells’ walls.
“It was definitely frustrating, because we try to take care of our property and make sure that we aren’t doing anything that is impacting anybody else,” said Howell, an IT professional, on a rainy late-May day. What to do? Their former neighbor was no longer caring for the property, and insurance would cover just a fraction of the cost of repairing the Howells’ walls, even as the seeping continued.
Such frustrations are common in Park Hill, a 167-townhouse complex on the Pittsburgh side of the city’s border with Penn Hills. Around one in five of the townhouses are vacant, and no one — not the absentee owners, nor the city, nor a cash-strapped homeowners association — has addressed more than a handful of the collapsing roofs, let alone the broken windows, abandoned cars and missing front doors.
“Gentrification is not the risk here,” said Kendall Pelling, executive director of Rising Tide Partners, a year-old nonprofit dedicated to stopping displacement. “I would say the risk here is ‘rotrification,’” a term he coined to describe how unchecked decay spurs abandonment.
“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,” said Pelling. He estimated that more Pittsburgh neighborhoods are “rotting away” from neglect than facing large-scale gentrification.
Built to be a homeowner paradise, with maintenance staff to tend the shared spaces in which Howell played as a child, Park Hill may yet succumb to rot.
LynnDee Howell, a Park Hill Drive resident and IT professional, photographed outside of the home she shares with her parents on May 28, 2021. The property next door was abandoned, causing damage to her adjacent townhouse until the roof was replaced. (Photo by Quinn Glabicki/PublicSource)
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Can East Hills residents reverse ‘blightlining’ and ‘rotrification’ on Park Hill Drive?
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