Duplexes For Sale

Times In-Depth: Erie's endless fight against blight

The house next door to Melissa Kulick's residence draws a lot of visitors.

The green, two-story duplex at 756-758 E. Seventh St., near Wayne Street, attracts people looking to steal scrap metal or to discard old furniture and other junk.

The duplex's open windows lure animals inside, and the windows provided a neighbor with an easy spot for dumping a pot full of rubbish on a recent morning.

The city of Erie lists the place as "vacant." The city twice has cited the owner for failing to maintain the property, but he has not complied, said Tony Lombardi, a city code enforcement officer.

Kulick, who has lived immediately east of the duplex for four years, said she gained a measure of satisfaction in April 2010, when the city used an emergency demolition order to tear down another rundown duplex two houses west of her home.

That property is now a vacant lot where the neighborhood kids play football.

Kulick said she's waiting for similar action on the green duplex, with its sagging second-story front porch and its backyard full of trash.

"I hate it. It smells, and people keep dumping their garbage," Kulick said. "We clean it up every year during the city's cleanup, but I'm tired of picking it up. I can't even let my kids play in the backyard."

A solution to Kulick's headache won't come quickly, cheaply or easily.

City Hall has spent years trying to clean up Erie's most dilapidated, unsafe and unsightly empty houses through a blighted-properties program created in 1994.

The program identifies problem properties and attempts to get the owner to fix up the mess. If city officials can't find the owner, or the owner won't respond, the city attempts to obtain the property through eminent domain, with the hope of eventually getting the property razed or in the hands of a new owner who will repair it.

Of the 305 properties the city now classifies as blighted, 226 are about to be removed from the list. About half of those 226 properties have been torn down, while others have been sold and are being repaired, city officials said.

The city's blighted property review committee meets this week to pare the roster of blighted properties from 305 to 79. That number might seem low, but it doesn't tell the whole story.

There are hundreds of other empty, dilapidated houses in Erie, like 756-758 E. Seventh St., that are not yet classified as blighted but they need to be addressed for safety and aesthetic reasons, said Andy Zimmerman, the city's director of code enforcement.

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