In 2024, Penn Hills officials declared that 16 vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated buildings — 14 single-family homes and two apartment buildings — were beyond repair and slated them for demolition through the Town Wide Demolition Program. The demolition program had been created to mitigate community impacts imposed by the worst of the worst buildings in the suburban municipality.
Reporting by Pittsburgh City Paper exposed some problems with the Penn Hills program, and, after two years, some of those buildings are still standing and being returned to the tax rolls as viable housing.
How did some of these buildings beat what looked like an unappealable death sentence? It turns out that the issues exposed in the earlier reporting go much deeper than ignoring a community’s history and swapping one kind of nuisance (abandoned houses) for another (vacant lots). They go to the core of a suburban local government that lacks the resources to effectively protect its residents and preserve affordable housing…