TTTA
Fighting the Blight When abandoned properties infect a community, the only cure is a lot of hard work.
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WRITTEN AND PHOTOGRAPHED BY ZACK HAROLD
im Browning knows exactly what visitors think when they drive down her town's main drag. “At first glance it looks like the town needs to be dozered,” she says. There are a few businesses along Coal River Road in Whitesville, but many of the properties are vacant, slowly collapsing in disrepair. You can see what the abandoned buildings once were— a department store here, a funeral home there, a gym back there. You can see their wasted potential reflected in the darkened windows. Derelict properties are a cancer: Just one cell can destroy lots of otherwise healthy tissue. When a property sits abandoned, it often attracts homeless people, crime,
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Focus September/October 2015
and drug activity, says Luke Elser, coordinator of the Brownfields, Abandoned, Dilapidated (BAD) Buildings Program for the Northern West Virginia Brownfields Center. Surrounding property values decline, so those buildings don’t sell and also become abandoned. That leads to even more drops in property values, more crime, and more run-down buildings. “Abandoned properties hurt people in very physical ways,” Elser says. So earlier this year Browning and some fellow volunteers decided to do something about it. In addition to being selected as one of 2015’s Turn This Town Around communities by West Virginia Focus, the West Virginia Community Development Hub, and West Virginia Public Broadcasting,
Whitesville also was selected to participate in the BAD Buildings Program. Elser says the program, now in its second year, aims to give communities the tools to tackle blight. Communities build “redevelopment plans” with prioritized inventories of abandoned properties—where the buildings are, what condition they are in, whether they are occupied, and who owns them. The BAD Buildings Program then helps its partners figure out new uses for the properties. It’s not all about bulldozing. “We don’t want just a flat piece of land. We want something that would be beneficial to the community,” Elser says. The program also helps municipalities with legal tools to fight blight. In conjunction with West Virginia University’s Land Use and Sustainable Development Law Clinic, Elser and company work with communities to beef up municipal codes that combat derelict properties and make sure those codes are enforced by certified building inspectors. Elser says it’s much more difficult for communities to win revitalization grants if they do not have legal tools in place to go after deadbeat landlords. But even though the BAD Buildings Program can provide tools for dealing with