A female body was found in an abandoned house on Cleveland’s east side, Sunday evening. The discovery brings to the forefront the issue of blighted homes in our community and the array of problems they cause.
For years, we’ve talked with people in neighborhoods plagued by abandoned homes. Again and again they say they want to see them gone, but the problem persists.
Right now, according to the Cuyahoga Land Bank, there are roughly 7,000 vacant and blighted homes in Cuyahoga County and 5,509 of them are located within Cleveland city limits.
In Cleveland’s Union-Miles neighborhood, where police discovered the body on Sunday, there are currently 670 abandoned or blighted homes. Although it’s not his ward, Cleveland City Councilman Anthony Brancatelli lives a short distance from there.
“We need to be more aggressive, take those down, create an opportunity for people to live in their neighborhoods peacefully,” said Brancatelli.
He says ridding neighborhoods of abandoned houses is the number one issue of his constituents in Ward 12.
In 2016, there was demolition activity on 1,309 parcels county-wide, but that’s less than 20 percent of current vacant and blighted structures.
“We really need to step up the demolition of houses that can’t be saved,” Brancatelli said when we asked him if that was an acceptable number of demos.
The numbers are headed in the right direction. According to information from the postal service, all vacancies (not just abandoned and blighted homes) have declined steadily in Cuyahoga County over the past five years.
Brancatelli says they’ve drawn down the $50 million demo fund by about half. He knows it’s not all about crime. Each unsalvageable house that comes down means other property values go up.
“Having these blighted homes out on the market really depreciates the value across the entire city,” he said.
Generally it’s either the city or the Cuyahoga Land Bank that demolishes these structures. The Land Bank says on average it costs $13,000 to demolish a normal single-family home. To put that into perspective, it would cost $91 million to level all of the 7,000 homes currently abandoned and blighted across Cuyahoga County.