A Brief Look at
Vacant Land in Pittsburgh
Vacant property is
a public policy concern.
The Vacant, Abandoned, and Distressed (VAD) Land Administration and Direct Services Policy Working Group, or the VLADS Policy Working Group for short, is a collection of policy staffers representing a cohort of Pittsburgh City Council Members. The goal its work far has been to partner with both internal and external stakeholders to offer holistic operational and fiscal policy improvements that would better address vacant, VAD land that’s held by the City of Pittsburgh.
The VLADS Policy Working has been seeking to identify easily-actionable steps for constituents and residents to employ as an outreach method to lobby their elected officials. But, why should they even bother contact their representatives over a concern like this?
As is often the case, it's hard to translate a matter of public policy into a concern for the average resident. They have a lot going on, and sometimes assume that their opinion is unwanted. We don't want to get too in the weeds (pun intended), yet want to communicate some cause for concern.
Data shows that residents have complaints about this type of property, and we know that the City could be spending more money on this issue. And, don't forget that elected policymakers often respond with more alacrity when they hear from their constituents.
Photo by Rafał Malinowski on Unsplash.
The City of Pittsburgh holds
vacant land everywhere.
It's all around you, irrespective of where in Pittsburgh you find yourself.
This features a short focus on five Pittsburgh neighborhoods: Brighton Heights, Garfield, Hazelwood, Perry South, and Sheraden.
While a city of 90 neighborhoods requires a more in-depth neighborhood analysis on an individualized level to make per-category observations, these five communities nevertheless are provide a valuable look at the vacant lots.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash.
What's this property like?
Comparing the inventory of the City to private owners shows that barren lots dominate the VAD landscape.
There's an almost even count of empty lots and land with vacant residential structures on it among the portfolio held by collective private owners.
That doesn't hold for public land, though, with empty land appearing close to10 times as often as property with a vacant residential restructure on it.
Differentiation of land use is a characteristic that not only applies to occupied parcels, but vacant ones as well.
Photo by Erik Eastman on Unsplash.
Good news: Residents' property values haven't suffered at large
...yet.
Keep in mind that messy data isn't always a cause for comfort.
A common first-order concern from policymakers and residents when it comes to vacant land is the effect that it has on property values.
Yet, despite no shortage of complaints about the presence and upkeep of publicly-owned vacant land in the five observed neighborhoods, a clear-cut connection between home values and complaint volume — used as a proxy for vacant land prevalence — is difficult to deduce.
A neighborhood's corresponding marker moves up or down along the vertical axis to show an increase or decrease in median home sale prices for that time period. That same marker grows larger based on the number of 311 complaints tied to that neighborhood during that same time window.
The data doesn't clarify things to great degree. In fact, we see a fair amount of variation in the effects of vacant property complaints.
It can be assumed that the raw number of vacant lots remained static during this three-year period, or at least experienced a minimal amount of variance. All things being equal, an increase in the number of complaints should be indicative of lower property values.
However, that simple of a causal mechanism can't be observed here.
Photo by Brandon Griggs on Unsplash.
That isn't to say that complaint data isn't useful.
In fact, it tells us that residents in these neighborhoods aren't quiet about their displeasure with these vacant lots.
The complaint counts refer to requests for work from City Source, the contractor that the City uses to maintain the vacant property that it owns in CDBG-eligible census tracts. Each of the five neighborhoods shown fit that criteria, and thus are helpful locales for this look into complaint volume.
All in all, vacant lot complaints are growing in number and frequency for each neighborhood observed.
Photos by Rodion Kutsaev on Unsplash and Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash.
The City is paying for this land in one way or another.
The financial consequences of VAD properties are inescapable in an urban setting.
Plus, this collection of unallocated yearly expenses deducts usable money for other projects — think of senior centers, potholes, public pools, and firehouses.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash.
So, what's to be done?
Is there anything that the City of Pittsburgh can do to change this?
The City could spend down more of the Three Taxing Bodies (3TB) Trust Fund to allow for more maintenance and landscaping of publicly-owned lots.
The 3TB Trust Fund is housed within the City's Department of Public Works, and its financial records can be used to glean insight into how the money allocated to it is spent. It receives a yearly budget allocation. This is the funding source for City Source work and activities, as well as any other contractor that the City may have to employ to deal with non -emergency, non-safety VAD concerns.
But, it isn't given much thought, and most runs on autopilot. An almost invisible entity has 40% of its expenditures going toward administrative fees, legal work, and more.
Should the City invest additional money into the 3TB Trust Fund, it could finance more mitigation efforts for VAD properties, especially maintenance and landscaping.
Photo by Sérgio Rola on Unsplash.
Contact your municipal government's elected officials and ask for more VAD maintenance funding.
Call, email, or tweet them.
Use the method that's the most comfortable for you!
Bibliography
City of Pittsburgh. "2019 Operating Budget and Five Year Plan." December 2018. July 2019. <https://apps.pittsburghpa.gov/redtail/images/4650_2019_Operating_Budget_as_amended.pdf>.
"Inaugural Strategic Plan." 2018. Pittsburgh Land Bank. August 2019. <http://pghlandbank.org/content/2-about-us/3-policies/plb-inaugural-strat-plan-adopted.pdf>.
Grounded Strategies. "Vacant Land Management: Strategies for Equitable Property Management in the City of Pittsburgh." November 2018. August 2019. <https://groundedpgh.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/DRAFT-VLM_WhitePaper_Grounded.pdf>.
Kluge, Alex. "Pittsburgh Vacant Land Budget Guide." 2019. Grounded Strategies. August 2019. <https://infogram.com/vacant-land-1ho16vwjk8972nq>.
Mallach, Alan. "The Empty House Next Door: Understanding and Reducing Vacancy and Hypervacancy in the United States." 2018. The Lincoln Institute. August 2019. <https://www.lincolninst.edu/sites/default/files/pubfiles/empty-house-next-door-full.pdf>.
Redfin. Redfin Data Center. n.d. July 2019. <https://public.tableau.com/shared/D6JBXTN9Q?:display_count=yes&:origin=viz_share_link&:showVizHome=no>.
The Center for Community Progress. "The Cost of Vacant and Blighted Properties in Pittsburgh: A Conservative Analysis of Service, Tax Delinquency, and Spillover Costs." March 2017. August 2019. <https://www.communityprogress.net/filebin/The_Cost_of_Vacant_and_Blighted_Properties_in_Pittsburgh_-_A_Conservative_Analysis_of_Service_Tax_Delinquency_and_Spillover_Costs_Center_for_Communuty_Progress.pdf>.
Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center. "311 Data." July 2019. City of Pittsburgh. July 2019. <https://data.wprdc.org/dataset/311-data>.
"City Revenues and Expenses." July 2019. City of Pittsburgh. July 2019. <https://data.wprdc.org/dataset/city-revenues-and-expenses>.
July 2019 Property Assessments Parcel Data." 2019 July. Allegheny County. July 2019. <https://data.wprdc.org/dataset/2b3df818-601e-4f06-b150-643557229491/resource/f2b8d575-e256-4718-94ad-1e12239ddb92/download/assessments.csv>.
Photo by Alvaro Reyes on Unsplash.
