It's not the age of the housing stock, but the ability of property owners to maintain it: Disinvestment in Pittsburgh

Vacant house and lots in the Larimer neighborhood.  PPG photo.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has an article, "Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods pay the price for abandoned and decrepit homes," about how Pittsburgh's lower income neighborhoods suffer from serious housing disinvestment.  

The story focuses on the Larimer neighborhood ("Larimer and Orphan," Places Journal), but there are many neighborhoods with similar conditions.

And that's pretty typical of cities that are weak markets overall but with pockets of success.

From the article:

... just blocks away are the signs of a neighborhood in distress: empty, boarded-up buildings, shuttered brick churches, fire-ravaged homes and weedy, barren lots on street after street.

"Look around here. Do you see any businesses?" said Demond Braddy, 49, who has spent nearly all of his life in that neighborhood: Larimer. “The neighborhood ate itself."

Houses with crumbling roofs, collapsed porches and peeling exteriors line many of the streets, where the vast majority of housing was built decades ago. These decrepit, blighted properties — many devoid of residents — are relics of another time and, some say, another place.

The homes in Larimer are emblematic of an aging housing stock that dominates the entire city, according to the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Half of all housing units in the city were built before 1940 — the third oldest stock among major cities in the nation, a Post-Gazette analysis found. ...

While the numbers point to a rich history and a host of architectural styles that have been preserved in all their splendor, they also highlight the critical urban problems that continue to plague Pittsburgh’s oldest neighborhoods: abandoned homes and communities in dire need of revitalization.

Aged housing stock isn’t inherently problematic, showcasing a city’s historic character while sheltering its residents. For instance, in Manchester-Chateau, the median age of homes is nearly a century, according to the city, and the neighborhood, which encompasses Pittsburgh’s largest historic district, is touted by the city as a prime example of urban preservation.

But in many of the neighborhoods beyond, preservation and age don't go hand in hand. The numbers are striking: Residential properties built prior to 1940 garnered over eight times more housing code violations than homes that went up in later years, according to a Post-Gazette analysis of city data.

PPG photo.

Disinvestment is a matter of income.  More than anything, the issue is income of the residents.  

Better off segments have the money to maintain aging houses.  

A perfect example are the historic districts in DC or Brooklyn or the controversial rehabilitation of Harlem, which has been led by people with money not necessarily African-Americans.

If residents lack the necessary income to maintain aging houses, then communities need to step in with extranormal support.

Aging cities usually lack the money to take on this issue at the scale it requires.  But they need to be way more purposeful about it.

Pittsburgh has an incredible history in successful community development.  Ironically, while Pittsburgh was an early innovator in "urban renewal," perhaps in response, the city has also been a leader in preservation- and ground up community-based improvement initiatives, with a number of transformational organizations such as:

• the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation, which didn't just advocate for improvements, but became a developer and took on major projects, and was a leader in the development of loan revolving funds
• Allegheny Conference on Community Development and the Northside Leadership Conference, community development collaborative organizations
  
• the Design Center of Pittsburgh, which I think is defunct, which provided technical assistance and guidance to residents renovating their aging houses
• rehabilitation loan programs supported by local banks and the city providing lower cost funding, at a time when interest rates were more than double the rates
• Community Technical Assistance Center, also defunct, which provided support to community-initiated planning programs

• Pittsburgh Cultural Trust owns cultural facilities at scale ("How the Arts Drove Pittsburgh's Revitalization," Atlantic Magazine)
  
• Penn Avenue Arts Initiative -- a joint effort of two neighborhood groups who recognized that artists were already "colonizing" their communities and so they decided to leverage it. They gave one of best ever community tours I've been on at a conference ("Artists bring flourish to Penn Avenue," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "A Transformed Penn Avenue," Pittsburgh Magazine, Vacancy to Vitality in Pittsburgh’s East End: Penn Avenue Arts Initiative, case study, Metris Arts Consulting).
• urban commercial district revitalization initiatives across the city's neighborhoods, East Carson Main Street is one of the first urban Main Street programs
  
• Manchester-Bidwell Corporation, a community development organization in the Manchester neighborhood
  
• Sprout Fund -- a seed fund for grassroots projects
  
• Heinz History Center -- a great local history museum
• The Heinz Endowment and other foundations have been committed to funding revitalization efforts
• and others...
  

Those initiatives have influenced me greatly and taught me a lot.  I wrote a few pieces, one even was re-tweeted by Richard Florida.

-- "Urban economic development strategies: do you invest in people or places? ... yes," 2010
- "Economic restructuring success and failure: Detroit compared to Bilbao, Liverpool, and Pittsburgh," 2014
-- "One hidden element of the revitalization of Pittsburgh's East Liberty neighborhood," 2015
-- "Why do Rust Belt rivals Cleveland and Pittsburgh have diverging economies?," 2021

It is a shame that many of those programs seem to have fallen by the wayside, but that shouldn't be surprising as it's difficult to maintain organizational momentum, and after awhile funders are interested in the new thing, not organizations doing the day in, day out slog.

Purposeful neighborhood revitalization.  In 2020, I wrote a series of articles about creating systematic neighborhood revitalization planning and implementation systems to address disinvestment in large and small communities, focused at the scale of the neighborhood.

Ironically one of the influences is a program developed in Pennsylvania by the State government, called Elm Street.  The idea was to use the same concepts and approaches developed for the Main Street commercial district revitalization program, but applied to neighborhoods. It was never really implemented on a large scale--I think it was probably created at the tail end of one administration and never really got picked up by successors.

-- "The need for a "national" neighborhood stabilization program comparable to the Main Street program for commercial districts: Part I (Overall)"
-- "To be successful, local neighborhood stabilization programs need a packaged set of robust remedies: Part 2"
-- "Creating 'community safety partnership neighborhood management programs as a management and mitigation strategy for public nuisance programs: Part 3 (like homeless shelters)"
-- "A case in Gloucester, Massachusetts as an illustration of the need for systematic neighborhood monitoring and stabilization initiatives: Part 4 (the Curcuru Family)"
-- "Local neighborhood stabilization programs: Part 5 | Adding energy conservation programs, with the PUSH Buffalo Green Development Zone as a model," 2021

Pittsburgh needs to go back to its revitalization roots, and should create and implement an Elm Street neighborhood revitalization program that focuses on neighborhoods and the state of the housing stock, whereas the programs today focus more on larger projects that have impact, but over many years, and not on the average state of housing.

Not unlike how I recommended that Montgomery County Maryland needs to have an East County revitalization program, because that section of the county lags the economic and social success enjoyed by West County.  

-- "East County, Montgomery County, Maryland: Council redistricting spurs ideas for revitalization," 2021

Or how Oakland County Michigan needs to do something similar for Pontiac, a economically laggard majority black city in one of the nation's richest counties.

-- "Pontiac Michigan: a lagging African American city in one of the nation's wealthiest counties," 2022
-- "The rise of Oakland County is built upon Detroit's fall," 2014

And St. Louis:

-- "St. Louis: what would I recommend for a comprehensive revitalization program? | Part 1: Overview and Theoretical Foundations"
-- "St. Louis: what would I recommend for a comprehensive revitalization program? | Part 2: Implementation Approach and Levers"

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A little different but one of the best resources on thinking about stoking revitalization in the face of disinvestment is the long out of print book Building Neighborhood Confidence by Rolf Goetze.

It makes the point that government housing rehabilitation programs aren't supposed to breed dependency, but to rebuild confidence, so that residents will begin re-investing on their own.  That momentum from the program will be continued by independent actions by property owners.

Early on, reinvestment in the H Street NE corridor ("The community development approach and the revitalization of DC's H Street corridor: congruent or oppositional approaches?," 2013) was actually spurred by fewer than 10 property owners who fixed up properties with little help from others, and fortunately all were committed to doing aesthetically supportive repairs to undesignated but eligible for historic designation buildings.

It's the same principle.

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-- "100000 tulip bulbs to be planted on South Side vacant lots," Chicago Sun-Times

Titled “Redefining Redlining,” the work aims to spark conversation around the disempowerment of Black neighborhoods that followed from banks refusing to lend to residents.

A team of graduate students from the Illinois Institute of Technology is still researching what stood on the land. So far, they know it was a mix of single-family homes and apartment buildings, like the one still standing on the northeast corner of the block.

The full impact of the project won’t be seen until the tulips bloom in the spring.

“Around April, May it’s gonna be a sea of red, and it’s going to let us have conversations about what we want for our communities,” said Ghian Foreman, the president and CEO of Emerald South, a South Side development group.