Mar 30, 2024 3 min read

Let’s say you’re house hunting, and you find a property that seems to check off all the boxes.

Enough space, the roof is solid and so are the heating and cooling systems. And the price is reasonable.

There’s one catch, though. The house across the street has long been abandoned. Its paint is peeling, yellowed curtains wave in broken windows, the grass is knee-high and someone has spray painted an obscenity on a side wall. You assume that the house is a year-round domicile of a whole variety of rodents.

With that, you decide to keep on looking.

That illustrates the pernicious effect that blight has on communities. There aren’t many places in the Rust Belt that aren’t dealing with the problem, and places like Washington, Uniontown and Pittsburgh are no different. Blight opens the door to increased crime, economic decline, and a lower quality of life for everyone in its vicinity.

There are now 16 million abandoned or vacant properties in the United States, according to data released last year from the U.S. Census Bureau, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and Bureau of Economic Analysis. Whether it’s a house or a shopping center, they are sitting unused mostly due to shifts in the economy or changes in consumer habits. One observer noted that it’s not so much that some places are overbuilt, but they are underdemolished.

Washington County is taking a step forward on the demolition front through the creation of a $12 million program that will attack blight. It will focus on blight mitigation in the Mon Valley and the city of Washington, demolishing and condemning priority properties throughout the county and identifying opportunities for development and redevelopment.

The money is coming from federal pandemic recovery stimulus funds, and the program is a collaboration between Washington County’s redevelopment authority, the county’s land bank and county officials. According to Nick Sherman, the chairman of the board of commissioners, “Addressing blight is essential to sustaining healthy communities, economic development and the quality of life in Washington County. Blighted communities are liabilities that drain municipal resources and inhibit economic growth. They also bring despair and a negative image to a community.”

Sherman touched on a couple of the complications when it comes to eliminating blight: First, there are often many knots to untie when it comes to determining who owns a house or building, and that’s a drain on legal resources and time; and tearing down a structure is not as easy as firing up a bulldozer and putting it in drive. On average, it costs about $18,000 to demolish a house, and about $30,000 for a commercial building, so eliminating blight is a process that can unfold over years.

Nevertheless, it’s an important and necessary step to move our communities forward.