What's being done to combat blighted properties in City of Erie?

Yahoo

20-02-2025

There are currently 276 addresses on the City of Erie's blighted property list.
And for 85% of those properties, city officials said there's no opportunity for reuse of the structure standing there, and demolition is the only option.
'We have people who are responsible each for a section of the city. Anytime we get a complaint about a problem in a neighborhood, they go and look at it and if they see the house is in disrepair, they'll declare that and will start a process where it has to be either fixed up or torn down,' said City of Erie Mayor Joe Schember.
On average, it takes about a year and a half for the city to get to some of these properties and take action on them. However, they do have a scoring system of sorts that prioritizes them based on situational conditions.
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'If it's a stable block of housing and there's one blight of property in it, that gets a higher score than potentially where we're trying to get an assemblage of properties. Maybe we've had a lot of interventions in that area in the last two or three years so we're going to continue that level of intervention to help raise that neighborhood up,' said Aaron Snippert, executive director of the Redevelopment Authority of the City of Erie.
While the property may be declared blighted, they don't immediately assume ownership.
'The common misconception is when we blight a property that it's instantly the redevelopment authorities and it's not. We want to work with that property owner to rehabilitate that property,' said Snippert. 'We're working with them, we're managing them, we're keeping up to date with them and making sure that they're continuously moving forward to improve those properties.'
About 100 of the 276 on the blight list fall under some level of intervention by the current owner.
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Once either remediation or demolition is finished, it not only becomes a possible source of tax revenue for the city again, but it could enhance the value of neighboring properties. And prompts owners to invest.
'We have this investment of money from Erie Land Bank and through the City of Erie and the American Rescue Plan to mitigate blight with the redevelopment authority and so we're working to acquire those properties and ultimately try to improve neighborhoods and improve property values associated with that,' said Snippert.
As of Wednesday, February 16, there are currently 16 addresses on the blighted property list right now that are scheduled for demolition.
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