Confidence Game - Christine Richard [83]
As steel mills across the region closed, Pittsburgh’s population declined. During the 1980s, the city was losing 50,000 residents a year, according to Allegheny Places, a report by the University Center for Social and Urban Research at the University of Pittsburgh. Between 1970 and 2000, 20 percent of the population vanished.
In Pittsburgh’s declining neighborhoods, many of the homes were seized by the city for nonpayment of taxes in the 1970s and 1980s after their once middle-class owners died or moved away. Batches of houses were sold by the city, sometimes for as little as $1 apiece, just to get people living in and looking after the properties. But someone who can afford to pay $1 for a house can’t necessarily cover the other costs that come with homeownership, Brose said. The condition of the houses declined, the taxes went unpaid again, and the slide continued.
The daughter of two union stewards, Brose is sentimental about Pittsburgh, particularly about Garfield, the neighborhood where she grew up and raised her own three children. “Aggie was always sweeping her stoop and sweeping all the way to the corner,” a former neighbor told the Pittsburgh Gazette. Even in her 60s, she exudes an energetic drive to get things cleaned up. The task is a daunting one.
Kendall Pelling, who worked across town at East Liberty Development, explained to me that numerous projects had been held up by Capital Asset refusing to accept less than it was owed on a property. On thousands of properties, the amount due was far higher than the market value of the property that secured the liens. Pelling was not sure why Capital Asset wouldn’t negotiate; there was no obvious benefit to letting the property sit. “I’ve always felt we don’t know enough about Caulis Negris’s motivations and how it works,” said Pelling.
When I told him that the name loosely translated means “black hole,” he replied: “It’s certainly appropriate.”
Pelling gave me a list of all the properties in Pittsburgh with Caulis Negris liens. I started my search several blocks away on Dinwiddie Street, which runs down a steep hill toward the abandoned Fifth Avenue School. The building, which was closed in 1976, was surrounded by a tall chain-link fence on which someone has posted a “For Sale” sign. In the 1960s, there were 80,000 students in the Pittsburgh public school system. By 2006, the number was closer to 25,000.
The Hill district, which rises just beyond downtown Pittsburgh, was cut off physically from the hub of the city by the construction of a civic arena in the late 1960s. Race riots, white flight, and the decline of the steel industry share the blame for the neighborhood’s demise. In the 1980s, the district became the inspiration for the television police drama Hill Street Blues.
My list showed Caulis Negris-controlled properties scattered up and down the street, though some were impossible to identify. A few houses stood like Roman ruins with roofs gone and vines creeping up the walls. No. 217, a three-story row house with $4,987.27 in back taxes, interest, and penalties owed to Caulis Negris, was still intact, though it looked as if it hadn’t been lived in for years. A crude porch, covered in green and black tar paper, created a sinister-looking shelter behind the tall weeds. A chain-link fence kept garbage tossed into the tiny yard from blowing away and had created a kind of wastebasket effect. A sign posted just outside the front porch warned that rat poison had been laid on the property.
“Don’t be so certain no one’s home,” Wilbert Washington said. He had come out of the house to the right of 217 Dinwiddie. “No one lives there,