The house at 1929 Chestnut Street has been vacant in Allison Hill for about 15 years.
Neighbors have watched it gradually deteriorate and crumble as trash increasingly piled up, drawing unwanted pests and animals.
Stephen Evans, a long time resident of Allison Hill, has lived directly behind the home for 20 years and witnessed its demise.
“The whole house has a lot of exterior damage to it... the balcony is literally just hanging there,” said Evans. “The front of the house is also a problem and inside the house, if you can see through the window, inside of the house is full with trash.”
The destruction, trash, and damage could pose dangers for neighbors and visitors, especially young people, he said.
“We have a lot of kids in our neighborhood. They like to play like any other children like to play but this home across over here... the awning is falling and there’s overgrowth,” said Evans. “There’s rodents in there! I mean I’ve seen cats, raccoons, and definitely mice. So it’s full of trash but my concern is that somebody’s going to get hurt or something’s going to happen and then who do we blame?”
Residents on some other blocks in Harrisburg probably can relate. Vacant, blighted homes have been a scourge on the city for decades. City officials previously have shared the obstacles they face trying to enforce codes violations on abandoned properties or by absentee owners.
Evans sat silent for years. But this year, it got to be too much. Taxpaying residents who keep up their homes should not have to look at abandoned properties like this, he said. So he started posting about it on Facebook, hoping to bring attention to the situation.
And it paid off. At least in the short-term.
He noted in his posts and videos that prior complaints to the city had not resulted in any changes
“We’ve filed complaints and complaints to the city, you know city codes and we went down to put it in or they say put it online and we put it online, or send it to city council... we did all this! Even though we signed papers my neighbors on this side of Bellevue, it’s still the same thing year after year... it gets frustrating,” said Evans. “It’s a shame that we as a people have to look at things like this here in our neighborhoods.”
The city would respond about the same every time, according to Evans.
“We always hear the same thing, ‘we’re going to come out and investigate it,’ or ‘we can’t do nothing, because it’s the property owner’s responsibility,’ but nobody lives there! Then we get the runaround, just plain and simple, we get the runaround about everything.”
He tried other methods. He spoke to pretty much anyone who passed through the neighborhood, from the local trash workers to police officers asking for help. Evans knows that this problem house is just one of many in the city and that the city faces other challenges.
But when young people see these sort of abandoned homes and trash-infested areas, it reinforces a loss of hope and sends a message that owners don’t care, which can contribute to increased crime, he said.
“Now, one thing about people in our neighborhoods, nobody wants to live around a slum,” he said. “Nobody wants to live in a place where you’re putting money into it and on the outside, there is nothing getting done.”
Locals have even added to the mess on the Chestnut Street property, according to Evans. Many have gotten rid of their trash by driving through the alley, where they dump unwanted items behind the house, like car tires and crates.
But on September 22, after PennLive reached out to the city about the property, Evans noticed someone had cleaned up all the exterior trash. He later found out the city codes director had hired contractors to do the work.
He was thrilled. But he remains concerned for the future.
While the area looks much better without the trash, the home remains vacant and damaged with no owner being cited. There’s nothing to prevent trash from accumulating again.
Complaints against this particular house are considered structural. Last year alone, the city received and processed 686 structural complaints about city properties, indicating the magnitude of the problem. City officials recommend that neighbors who file complaints appear in court to help keep those cases going.
In this situation, however, like many others, there is no case. City officials say they could not reach the owner, Gerald Brown. They sent three notices to a post office box registered with the county under property records and believe the owner had died.
But PennLive tracked a Gerald Brown through mortgage records for 1929 Chestnut to an apartment at 5075 Stacey Drive in Swatara Township. The man who answered the apartment door denied being Gerald Brown when PennLive knocked on the door and did not respond to a note left on the door explaining why reporters had stopped by.
Harrisburg City Codes Administrator David Patton said the city doesn’t have the ability to investigate birth, death, family lineage, heirs or financial status of each case where there is a problem owner.
That’s one of the obstacles many of neighbors of such properties face: absentee property owners can be hard to track. They might live out of state, out of the country, or may have died. They could be indigent, bankrupt or the property could be registered to a dissolved corporation.
When property owners can’t be immediately reached, the local magisterial district judge sends a notice to respond in 10 days with a plea of guilty or not guilty. If the owner pleads not guilty, a hearing before the judge will be scheduled. If the owner pleads guilty, they will pay their fine by mail.
If the citation is ignored, a warrant is issued for the owner.
Other legal remedies, depending on the specific issues at hand, include a criminal charge for a Public Nuisance, which is a second-degree misdemeanor.
When the owner can’t be located, Patton says there is not much the city can do to the property other than send contractors to remove the trash. The city has a limited budget for such cleanups.
“It becomes enormously frustrating for us that we can’t address many of the issues that come to us with the alacrity citizens deserve,” said Patton. “Sadly it’s very easy to simply walk away from properties in the state, but that is the case in cities across the nation.”
Evans would like to see a change in the law to authorize officials to confiscate a damaged, vacant property after the owner has been cited two or three times.
“Let’s take and seize that property,” he said. “If it can be repairable, let’s be repair it, and put somebody in a home that needs a home. I mean, what’s the use of you having a home that sits there and nobody to uses it?”
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