When my husband and I moved to Harrisburg in 2006, my father’s friend told us he admired our adventurous spirit.
“Where you’re moving, it’s like a frontier. You’re on the line. You know, what I mean? Wow, I admire you,” he said sincerely as he looked me square in the eye.
But I didn’t know what he meant.
Call me naive, but I didn’t know that soon our capital city investment and rehabilitation of a condemned house would be a battle of architecture, quality of life and principle.
When we first met the house—as we like to say—it was debased and had a bad reputation.
It was a house where illicit things happened as it rotted away neglected and unmanaged.
When we met it, it had been divided into five apartments, one even in the damp, 100-year-old basement.
The woodwork was gouged and chipped. The dining room floor had a large hole where rare hemlock floorboards were stripped. There were deadbolts on all of its bedroom doors, and plaster crumbled from the high ceilings.
Much of what was left behind was old and had to be repaired or replaced for safety and efficiency.
For its last lonely years, it had sat empty as other houses around it slowly began to wither away, too.
Drive around Harrisburg, through any of its neighborhoods in any district of the city from Midtown to South Allison Hill to Uptown to Southside, and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
Even though my house and neighborhood was once that bad, it improved with transformation and new investment. However, that’s not true of other places in the city.
There are once-handsome and grand buildings, let go, passed along, taken apart and uncared for. They’ve been like that for decades.
Too many sit and rot then become unsavory, attracting vagrants and drug deals. There are those that become unsafe havens for the homeless or playgrounds for curious children.
Some are owned by good-willed and well-intended entrepreneurs who feel they’re waiting for “the right time.”
Some others are owned by the aged, deceased or unknown, who—for varying obvious reasons—don’t take care of these residences, businesses and factories.
There are more than 600 properties owned by the Harrisburg Redevelopment Authority and the city. Too many of those are uninhabitable and trashed.
Then there are those owned by slumlords, inside which some people still live.
Some are bought condemned en masse by investors whose plan is to turn them over on the cheap. When that can’t or doesn’t happen, they sell them to the next hopeful buyer, en masse just as they bought them.
Drive around Harrisburg, and you’ll see the worst of the worst all over the place, no matter what the reason.
Yes, there are success stories where longtime patches of blight have been turned around, such as the Glass Factory, Hamilton Health Center and Habitat for Humanity’s homes on Jefferson Street.
And there are several other projects said to be on the horizon. Yet, until the time comes, buildings wait either to be torn down or redeemed.
Like so many urban cores across the state of Pennsylvania, this is the plight of cities.
Harrisburg has a grave problem, and it’s based in legalities, funds, political will, socioeconomics and culture. While it may not be alone in its problem, this capital city is an awful example of how bad the problem is.
We’ll never get rid of blight completely. That’s just a fact of the matter, but we can manage it better.
The Papenfuse administration has promised to make the fight against blight a priority, and there are developers who have plans to help the cause in some areas.
Yet, as we move from blight to renaissance, there is something to keep in mind even as we applaud the construction of new urban residences—there are people who have long lived next to the rotting buildings. Day in and day out, they’ve dealt with the dangerous, degenerate and dismal conditions. In the most pathetic cases, people have lived not just next to it, but within it.
It’s not enough to applaud the pockets of success because the dank still persists for too many of us who live in Harrisburg. Just because it’s not here anymore doesn’t mean it’s not there, even if we can’t see it.
A simple drive around our small city will prove that it’s still there.
So the question then becomes, what should we do about it? Not just for the newbies like me who moved in with a dream, but for those who have been here for a very long time, wondering when the nightmare will end.
Tara Leo Auchey is creator and editor of todays the day Harrisburg.
