Make an old home yours and everyone can benefit

By Brian O'Neill, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
I have a decidedly old-fashioned view of cities, one that wouldn't be out of place in a Frank Capra movie, and it is that neighborhoods come back -- or slide -- one home at a time.
I thought about that one evening last week as I sat in the kitchen of the new home of my friend Steve Hansen. He and his wife, Linda, bought a big, old abandoned house in Manchester from the city for $3,900 in February 2010.
It took no small amount of sweat or money to bring this three-story house back. Steve pulled so many mattresses out of the place he believes a woman who told him it was once a brothel, and that chore was one of the easiest ones.

It was worth it. The Hansen home is spectacular. The tall Victorian was part of the annual Manchester house tour this past August, and it's probably no coincidence that four or five homes just around the corner have been repainted or repointed in the past year or so, or that another friend of ours is poised to buy another long-abandoned home just down the street, or that Manchester was one of the places where neighbors joined with the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy and TreeVitalize to plant dozens of street trees this year.
When people see a neighbor investing a little time and money on the street, they're more likely to do the same. The Hansens were by no means the first to bet big on Manchester. This neighborhood with some of the region's finest Victorian architecture has been inching back from neglect for decades. Steve's lived down the street from his new place since 1984, and he credits renovations done by more recent arrivals with restoring his faith in his own block.
That's how old, established communities come back or slide, be it Lawrenceville or Homewood, Friendship or East Liberty, Bellevue or Wilkinsburg, Clairton or Zelienople. It's not a big bang theory; it's a baby step approach.
I've long joked that the North Side, my home for 21 years, is like soccer: It's the sport of the future, and it always will be. But if my family hadn't seen countless small steps in the right direction over many years, we wouldn't have just added a porch to the side of our 140-year-old house, a porch like one we saw there in a photo from the 1930s.
All that is a very long prologue to this pie-in-the-sky, never-gonna-happen idea. The seven-county Pittsburgh metro area has more than 100,000 vacant houses, according to the U.S. Census, and the percentage of vacant homes in both Allegheny County and the region is around 9 percent.
We also have a righteously angry populace in this region and nation, manifesting itself in an Occupy movement in solidarity with "the 99 percent." That would be everybody outside the 1 percent of this nation who control so much of America's wealth.
OK, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that most of these abandoned homes aren't where the 1 percent live. I still think they should be occupied -- methodically and legally.
Crazy, I know, but these houses are the inanimate version of many of the protesters: They, and many of the neighborhoods they're in, can make a strong case for being shafted by the system.
The city advertises vacant properties, largely taken through tax foreclosures, at www.buyintheburgh.com. I didn't find the website easy to navigate, and it's also clear the city is recycling fewer properties since farming out delinquent tax collection to Jordan Tax Service a couple of years ago. Still, prices are as low as $2,500.
Maybe there are some matches to be made here, though it's hardly a simple or risk-free process. People should go to the site thinking more eMoneyPit than eHarmony. It can take an enormous amount of time, money and patience to restore an abandoned home, God and Home Depot knows, and then there can be the neighborhood to worry about.
When done right, though, restoring an old house is enormously satisfying and a tremendous investment. More than that, it can be a great home.
The default position of an advanced civilization should not be to demolish. Directing a little righteous energy to neighborhoods that have slipped might even restore some balance to this world.