One Suburban Community's Struggle to Revitalize

Transcript

Vacant lots and abandoned houses aren't just urban issues. Suburban communities can suffer the same real estate problems as big cities. Three students from the Heinz Endowments Youth Philanthropy Project traveled to Heidelberg, a small town of just outside of Pittsburgh to see how suburban communities are handling their neglected properties. Ethan Busis has this story.

This busy stretch of route 50 cuts through five blocks of the small town of Heidelberg. Itís in need of a face-lift.

KAUER: We're in the process of making route 50 look more like a downtown setting other than this old ugly highway. Next year, summer 2012, we hope to have a nice business road.

That's Joe Kauer, borough manager in Heidelberg. For a small town manager, he's got a lot on his plate. Besides revitalizing downtown, he's tackling vacant property. The spark for this big undertaking happened back in 2004. That's when flooding from Hurricane Ivan left about a third of the community underwater -- and afterward, many residents just walked away from their properties. Since then, Kauer's been on a mission to fight blight.

KAUER: To be honest with you blight is our biggest enemy, in a small community like this I'm 100% built up, I have no room for future development, I'm surrounded by growing communities all the way around. What I have is what I got. If no one is willing to step up to the plate then it has to be the municipality because at the end of the day the only one who is going to lose is the municipality in the community, because it is going to correlate into a lower tax base, its going result in increased crime.

Through partnerships, Kauer has raised more than 2.1 million dollars of outside funding to create 4 affordable homes with another planned for this year, plus a sizable park, and a handful of parklets in place of empty lots or abandoned properties. He says as a result, property values have increased - and so has civic pride. Neighbors are painting their houses, and making improvement to their own properties.

KAUER: The whole methodology of this is sustainability, we viewed it that we are a small municipality, our resources are very limited, our staff is very limited, so we are very progressive, we spearhead a lot of multi-municipal projects through Heidelberg.

One of Kauer's benchmarks for his success is the latest census data. Heidelberg's population increased slightly to 1200 and 50 but the small jump was enough to get him excited.

KAUER: Thirty..(laughs) I was so happy that it went up to thirty...I really thought that it was going to drop by the hundreds.

Susan Hokenberry agrees that it's important for municipalities like Heidelberg to clean up blighted property - what she calls "private infrastructure." She's the executive director of the Local Government Academy, a Pittsburgh nonprofit that trains municipal leaders.

Hockenberry quote

KAUER: It's bingo time at the Lifespan Chartiers Senior Center. One regular here, 84-year-old Florence LaSota, the mayor's cousin, appreciates Heidelberg's improvements and says she thinks she knows why people would live in her home town.

LASOTA: I was born and raised there, never moved out because I like the place so well and when houses are for sell and people seem to buy them up right away because they like to live in a small community like that...Down towards the back end of Heidelberg they put a playground there. A very nice playground.

That playground is the new Heidelberg park, opened last summer. It used to be an old junkyard. Sounds from the surrounding industrial sites permeate the otherwise tranquil atmosphere. On this hot, humid day, Donna Lonsego loops around the park on a walking trail.

Lonsego: Well if you look around, it's probably not the prettiest view, but it really made a pretty view between the industrial parks.

For The Allegheny Front, I'm Ethan Busis along with Mercedes Velasquez and Anna Koebley with the Heinz Endowments Youth Philanthropy Project and Sustainable Pittsburgh.