PITTSBURGH — For Donald Walko Jr., the landmark law that he championed to fight the ravages of blight across the state began in one of Pittsburgh's legendary restaurants.
During lunch at Mitchell's, the century-old bar and eatery, Walko — then an unopposed Democratic candidate for the state House — met with a housing court judge in 1994 and talked about the devastating impact of empty, deteriorating homes on neighborhoods across the city.
As the former president of the Perry Hilltop Citizens Council, Walko had heard complaints from people about residents abandoning their homes, but the meeting with then-judge Irene McLaughlin Clark would impact his public life for years to follow.
"I looked upon it as solving that kind of problem," Walko recalled.
Fourteen years later, Walko led the legislation in Pennsylvania that would allow neighborhood advocates to take control of dangerous and dilapidated homes and lots from the owners and help salvage them for future generations.
Now, that same law is at the center of an unprecedented legal battle that pits community groups against the city of Pittsburgh over the control of properties that the groups say the city has poorly managed for decades.
The community groups say the Abandoned and Blighted Property Conservatorship Act gives them the weapon they need to take over homes and lots the city has held onto for years acquiring many of them for unpaid taxes — and try to find people willing to rebuild them.
In the absence of any comprehensive plan — such as a land bank with a proven track record — to save the properties, the community groups have turned to conservatorship to target at least 75 city-owned homes and lots.
During a Feb. 9 hearing in the Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas, Judge John McVay Jr. heard arguments from the city and lawyers for the groups about whether a stay should be issued while a higher court decides whether the government can be targeted.
Pittsburgh's lawyers have argued the city properties are protected under the state's Second-Class City Treasurer's Sale and Collection Act, a unique law that allows the city to conduct its own auctions for properties with unpaid taxes.
But Walko, who later became an Allegheny County Common Pleas judge, is firm: The owner of a property, whether an absentee landlord or neglectful government, is not protected from the law — at least how he envisioned it.
"The city's the owner, and these are blighted and abandoned properties," he told the Post-Gazette. "I know it's a burden on the taxpayers, but just imagine the burden if you live next to one of those rat holes."
In January, McVay agreed siding with the community groups and allowing conservatorship petitions against the city of Pittsburgh to move forward, prompting the city to now ask for the stay so that it can appeal.
"The Treasurer's Sale Act and the Conservatorship Act can be read together to the benefit of all parties and especially the taxpayer and creatively address the myriad of housing issues that the (city) faces," Judge McVay wrote in his January ruling.
The 2021 legal action against the city came seven years after the city launched a land bank that was created with the power to clear titles of properties, strip away liens and delinquent taxes, and ultimately get the homes and vacant lots back on the tax rolls more efficiently.
But the new entity failed to mount an aggressive sales plan and never raised the kind of money needed to meet its goals before it was eventually placed under the control of the Urban Redevelopment Agency.
When he introduced the law, Walko said he hoped it would usher in sweeping reforms — envisioning it as a mechanism to curb individual instances of blight.
One of the lasting images he remembers about the abandonment taking place in the city generations ago was a crumbling property that stood out among the row of neatly-kept homes on Upper Fisk Street in Lawrenceville.
One house made a crucial difference.
"It will provide a way to surgically strike when you have that one problem property on a street or in a block that is bringing down everyone's property value," Walko said on the House floor that June.
The idea of a conservatorship — a court-supervised process to appoint a manager for a blighted property — had been on the books in states like Ohio and New Jersey, which allowed the takeovers to help clean up urban decay that resulted from industrial decline.
But even then, a backlog of city-owned properties — with one in five hit with property and health code violations — was quickly growing, a Post-Gazette investigation found.
By 2008, the city had already acquired more than 750 vacant lots and structures that are part of its real estate portfolio to this day, property assessment records show.
When the law was amended in 2014 — at which point Walko was presiding over conservatorship cases as a judge — the city had already acquired over half of its current real estate holdings, which are now at about 5,000.
When a city has failed to clean up its properties, conservatorship "provides a new workaround" to clearing title because it puts the future of these homes to a judge, said Kendall Pelling, executive director of Rising Tide Partners.
To urban experts like Cindy Daley, the director of community redevelopment initiatives at Regional Housing Legal Services, the law provides a way to clear one of the largest legal hurdles to acquiring control of a property: clean title.
More than nine in 10 of city-owned lots and homes have active liens, with the average amount being over $4,000, a Post-Gazette analysis of county lien records shows.
One city-owned parcel has as many as 70 active liens, while another shows a whopping $70,000 in city, county, school district and water and sewer authority delinquencies, records show.
"In larger cities, there may be hundreds or even thousands of these properties, and getting to the one in your neighborhood may take a long time — or never happen," Daley said. "(Conservatorship is) a wonderful tool that communities can use without having to wait for the city government to take action."
Walko, who retired from the bench in 2020, said he's been stunned by the level of pushback from the city. A spokesperson from the mayor's office did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the city's position.
To this day, Walko maintains that the Conservatorship Act was never meant to completely address the city's blight problems — but in this case, it may be the only answer to the thousands of properties languishing under the city's watch.
"I always looked upon the Conservatorship Act as one small tool in a large toolbox, and really looked upon it as addressing that one house on one block," Walko said.
