Intervention strategies for housing blight around the country: Pittsburgh vs Birmingham
Pittsburgh and Birmingham are two very similar cities. Both have been strong players in the steel and railroad industry in the past and have seen serious population decline over the years, which has led to a significant amount of housing blight. This article will address the blight these cities are experiencing and compare and contrast the intervention strategies they are using to combat it.
Between 1960 and 2010, Pittsburgh saw a 50% decrease in its population (604,332 to 305,405). As people leave, houses get abandoned and as of 2017, 30,000 properties were considered blighted. Pittsburgh and Allegheny County each had many initiatives running to combat blight, but as Bethany Davidson, acting administrator for Pittsburgh’s land bank, said, “it was no one’s job… to look at all of the vacant and blighted property and to get it back into productive use.” This rings true for Birmingham as well. The “100 Houses in 100 Days” initiative was announced earlier this fall, but has not yet gotten started. Birmingham is a smaller city than Pittsburgh, but still has over 10,000 unmarketable properties. Birmingham has less abandoned properties overall than Pittsburgh, but a much higher percentage. As of 2010, 12.8% of properties in Pittsburgh were vacant compared to 18% in Birmingham. Vacant properties do not necessarily mean they are blighted, but it makes it much more likely for them to be. Both cities are meant to harbor much more people than they actually do. At its peak, Birmingham had nearly 350,00 people, but now only has around 200,000. As more people leave, more houses becomes blighted which makes moving into even less appealing than it was. It’s a cycle thats extremely hard to break, which is where Birmingham and Pittsburgh land banks and other initiatives come into play.
A land bank’s purpose is to acquire distressed and blighted properties so that it can eventually return it to benefit the community in the best way possible. The Birmingham Land Bank Authority says their mission is, “to serve the citizens of Birmingham by working… with community stakeholders and the City of Birmingham to steward vacant, abandoned, tax-delinquent properties and dispose of them to the best use… to reduce community blight…” Clearly the land banks in these two cities are going to be crucial and effective when it comes to restoring blight homes. It wasn’t until 2014 that Pittsburgh’s city council even decided to create a land bank, and three years later it had created a draft policies to help target blight. The Birmingham Land Bank Authority’s policies and procedures weren’t adopted until 2014. So, the land banks in both of these cities are only just beginning their processes and policies to target blight.
Other than the land bank in Birmingham, Build Up is also another initiative that targets housing blight, but in an indirect way. It is the first of its kind: “Build Up is the nation’s first and only workforce development model that provides low-income youth with career-ready skills through paid apprenticeships with industry-aligned secondary and early-postsecondary academic coursework, leaden them to become educated, credentialed, and empowered civic leaders, workers, homeowners and landlords.” Build Up’s main focus is to help Birmingham communities and empower the people in it, and helping with housing blight is something that naturally happens.
Sources: https://www.buildup.work/ http://birminghamlandbank.org/about/ https://theincline.com/2017/03/15/pittsburgh-land-bank-101-what-you-need-to-know-about-the-blight-program/ https://theincline.com/2017/03/15/pittsburgh-land-bank-101-what-you-need-to-know-about-the-blight-program/ http://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/pittsburgh-population/