How Do Houses Get Like This?
"How do houses get like this?," my friend asked me as we walked through an unoccupied home on one of Pittsburgh's hillsides. "Unoccupied" might not always be the case. Once when I walked in a black cat scurried away. Even the cat knew it wasn't supposed to be there. If a house sits like this, before long plants, raccoons, and other animals, if not occasional transient humans, will begin to take over.
The "how" of my friend's question is one that's hard to answer. I understand no one has lived in this particular property for more than a decade. This house isn't alone, in a city with a long-declining population and suburban flight. That would put us at 1990. If you go back a couple more decades, the average house like this probably would have been occupied by an elderly couple.
We could guess that this typical elderly couple had lived in this average Pittsburgh hillside home for a good portion of their lives.
They might have been too old to move to the suburbs, or prevented from doing so because of a fixed income. They stayed until they moved farther up the hill.
Then the home was probably inherited by someone who had little interest in it. This average inheritor lived in the suburbs or in a different city. They didn't need the home, so they might have tried to sell it. This might put as at 1975 or 1980.
With little interest in the property, the new owners might have rented it. It could be that a tenant moved in, made a mess, and was evicted. A couple repeats of that and our imaginary inheritor, who didn't live in the city and had little connection to the home, decides to quit trying and stops paying the taxes.
The home might then have been taken by a city which has an array of homes taken for delinquent taxes. In a few years this will get to the point where the city doesn't aggressively seek to take homes for back tax because the value is essentially negative--taking the homes costs the city.
At the same time, the first wave of investors is coming in to town, attracted by the low prices and a desire to save old buildings. This is at a time when other people are leaving Pittsburgh and other cities like it. v In the mid-1980s the city is awarded a "most livable" status, and things start to look up. An investor might have bought the home we were wandering through, or one like it. They fixed it up and put it on the market. Luckily there were enough stubborn old people to keep the neighborhoods fairly stable, even though an increasing number of homes were becoming vacant.
Unable to sell the home or pay back a loan for the renovations, the home is repossessed by a bank--a bank which is not able to do any better squeezing money out of a rock.
Eventually the bank realizes this and sells the home to another investor. This could also be a first-tome homebuyer enticed by a program to get people living in the city again. For whatever reason, that doesn't work out, and the house sits vacant. The roof leaks, scavengers break in and steal the copper plumbing to sell for scrap, vandalizing the home, all while the owners, likely out of town, had left it to rot.
And then we walk up, finding the back door open and the rear wing of the home ready to collapse. From here the story could continue in one of several ways.
Urban living is certainly gaining in popularity in what seems like a rapid pace. The price of oil is going up--predicted to reach $3.00 a gallon inside of a year. There are certainly buyers who want this home or ones like it, but the red tape is tangled and wide.
In one scenario the home will be purchased, renovated, and lived it. It will be a part of a renewed interest in the city and urban culture. (I am convinced there is a genuine rise in an interest in the city at this point. I am not convinced there is a reawakened consciousness and an interest in urban culture. What we are likely seeing is a desire to build urban suburbs.)
In the other scenario, the city will consider this home a danger to public health and safety and demolish it. The likelihood of a home being built to replace it is far less than the likelihood of this home being rehabbed. The city in this way becomes less dense, and each home more valuable (if ever so slightly). This is because supply shrinks. Too many demolitions, and all the value goes away, however. That's because a big space with scattered homes is not a city anymore.
The reason we are able to find a home in this condition is complicated, and yet very simple. There are more houses than people who want them. That's changing.
Today, more people want these houses. More people want city life and therefore our chances of coming upon a house like this so close to the central city are less each day.
Eric Miller is editor of The New Colonist.
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