when Landlords Walk Away

THE U.S. is stumbling into a rapidly worsening housing shortage. Soaring costs and shrinking credit have crippled new construction even though vacancy rates have fallen to a 20-year low. Yet in many of the nation's troubled central cities, the most visible housing difficulty is of an entirely different order --a lack not of buildings but of neighborhoods deemed fit to live in, even by the poor. As a consequence, acres of houses and apartment buildings have been abandoned by their owners and tenants to decay.

No one knows exactly how many abandoned dwellings there are in the U.S., since the paradoxical problem has been only recently recognized and little studied. The phenomenon is most prominent in the aging industrial cities of the East and Midwest. By the best estimates available, 130,000 apartments and houses have been left to rot in New York City during the past four years--enough to house the population of El Paso. There are 950 vacant buildings in Chicago, 20,000 abandoned buildings in Philadelphia, 5,000 in Baltimore, at least 1,500 in Detroit, and around 1,000 in Boston and Washington. The trend is also evident in some Southern cities with large minority populations. For example, there are some 900 abandoned residential buildings in New Orleans.

In ghost neighborhoods, the symptoms are depressingly the same. Brooklyn's wastelands in Bedford-Stuyvesant resemble those along Penn Avenue in Pittsburgh and 14th Street in Washington. Each of the half-forgotten neighborhoods has a bombed-out, end-of-a-war appearance; about all of them lingers the stale odor of moldering plaster and rotting wood. Peeling paint is everywhere; streets glisten with shards of glass from broken windows. Front doors have been ripped from their hinges, and human excrement often litters the stairwells. Interior partitions are punched through, floors broken up and obscene pictures scrawled on the walls. Yet in their essential structure, the hulks are often solid and no more unattractively designed than the millions of other elderly buildings that form the bulk of the nation's inner-city housing stock.

The abandonments are caused by a convergence of urban ills: crime, shifting populations, economic squeeze and the American propensity to waste. Nearly all of today's abandoned houses are in ghettos or neighborhoods in transition as the white population departs. But it is far too simplistic to blame only the influx of black families for the decay and abandonments. Most slum neighborhoods were near-slums long before their white residents moved away.

The houses are left empty partly because the role of slum landlord has become less and less profitable. New York City landlords cite the abandoned buildings as proof of a financial squeeze, and reason enough for the city to repeal its rent-control law, which has frozen rents at below-market levels since 1943.

Rent control greatly aggravates the abandonment problem in New York City, but it does not explain why houses are abandoned in other cities that have no controls. The reasons are complex. Many landlords took their profits years ago without maintaining their buildings, and the massive repairs needed now are beyond their means. As tenants become more militant and prod city authorities into stricter enforcement of housing codes, landlords see their profits dwindling and their properties tied up in red tape. Says former Slumlord Murray Talenfeld, who now lectures on real estate at the University of Pittsburgh: "Pretty soon the slumlord has the feeling he is controlled like a public utility, so he just walks away from his properties and says to hell with it."

Midnight Plumbers. When that happens, destruction is swift. Word immediately spreads among vandals, and "midnight plumbers" move in to tear out everything that can be sold. A Baltimore housing official describes the process: "On the first night, the building is looted. With the plumbing gone, the building is no longer habitable. The next night, or soon, the kids on dope slide in. Then the neighborhood's apprentice arsonist pays a visit." Such social disorder is infectious and it is often the prime factor that impels law-abiding ghetto dwellers to flight.

Private developers, even if they want to renovate the buildings, find the forces of blight overpowering. When Baltimore Builder Allen Quille, himself a black, set out to rehabilitate one area in order to sell it to black tenants, neighborhood gangs broke in nightly to steal the fixtures, then sold them back to him the next day. He built a fence and bought a watchdog; they stole the dog. Quille put the ringleader on his payroll, and the youth demanded huge raises.

Community Loss. A few local governments have been more effective in rehabilitating abandoned homes, but their piecemeal approaches come nowhere near coping with the dimensions of the problem. Pittsburgh's Urban Redevelopment Authority has plans to clear 170 acres for 500 new row houses and apartments and to rehabilitate another 1,000 homes, with $25 million in city, state and federal funds. Baltimore's Housing and Community Development Agency has bought 400 houses to rehabilitate and either sell, or rent as public housing. Philadelphia has the most ambitious program of all. With the help of $70 million in federal funds over the past three years, the city has rehabilitated 4,800 homes for rental to low-income families. The trouble is that as fast as houses can be renovated, others are abandoned.

Some of the houses deserve to be junked, but the abandonment of others is a loss to the community because they could be salvaged. Cities complain that they lack the resources to cope with the problem. Frank S. Kristof, director of the housing-programs division for the New York State Urban Development Corporation, argues that a huge infusion of federal funds is needed, both to rehabilitate the houses and to maintain them. Any such federal program would have to be directed at whole neighborhoods. Instead of building new subsidized public housing --which often "locks people into the cities," as Kristof puts it--federal housing and aid might better be used to make neighborhoods attractive to middle-class families that cities are struggling in vain to retain.

Encouraging private builders to put up luxury apartments would lead to a natural upgrading of housing all along the line. Manhattan's West Side, for instance, once a decaying area dotted with abandoned buildings, has been renovated in this fashion and is becoming a popular residential area--though it took 15 years, a costly federal urban-renewal project and the Lincoln Center to lure private capital back. At a time when the Nixon Administration has declared that for every new demand on the federal Treasury some old claim must be reduced, the chances for a massive infusion of funds seem meager. If that is so, U.S. cities can expect the abandonment problem to increase.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.