From the highway, Springfield looked OK. The highway construction that seems a permanent condition on this stretch of Interstate 91 notwithstanding, the city seemed to doing its best to put a good foot forward: the Basketball Hall of Fame gleamed bright against the blue water and green distant shoreline of the Connecticut River. Across the highway, downtown Springfield's tallest buildings were decked out with light displays for the holidays. If one didn't know better, Springfield might seem a fairly prosperous place.
Only as we snaked our way along surface streets did we see the reality. The City of Homes was littered with foreclosure signs; plywood gleamed from boarded-up windows and doors; trash overflowed from dumpsters that appeared to have been used in some rehab project started long ago but never finished.
"Looks worse than it did last year," I muttered. "Is that possible?"
My companion, Advocate managing editor Mark Roessler, grunted his agreement, then laughed when the irony occurred to him that this photo shoot of ours was apparently becoming an annual event. It was our annual blight tour.
Indeed, we'd been down in this neighborhood off of Sumner Avenue almost exactly one year ago, to get some photos of a few recently foreclosed homes for a piece Maureen Turner was writing. Now we were at it again. Roessler had received a list of some recent foreclosures from Turner, who was working on a piece about a new program in Springfield that city officials hope will compel landlords, including banks that have foreclosed on properties, to do a better job maintaining their buildings, keeping them up to code and reporting any criminal activities that might be taking place on the premises. (See Turner's story this issue.) We hardly needed a list. Blight was easy to spot: rundown, boarded-up buildings scarring otherwise tidy little neighborhoods, as glaring as a stand of dead hemlock amid a healthy forest.
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It's hard not to get a little cynical about the politics that surround an issue like urban blight.
I've been doing stories about absentee landlords, real estate speculators and the damage they do to communities since I started working as a reporter in the 1980s. Invariably the stories had two basic parts: a description of the problem, optimally trying to quantify the increase in abandoned and neglected property and its impact on surrounding property values; and a discussion of what, if anything, the municipal government was doing about it. In almost every case, the properties in question, those responsible for blighting neighborhoods, were owned by landlords who were not only absent from the property itself but absent from any direct communication or involvement with the surrounding community or municipal government. In many cases, the owners were, at best, reluctant landlords who'd bought the property not for its potential rental income but as speculative investments that they hoped to flip for an easy profit if and when the market drove prices up.
Yet, as Turner reports this week, initiatives by city officials to hold absentee landlords to even the barest of legal requirements are not only hard to implement effectively, but frequently meet with objections from various segments of the business community. As much as people want to battle blight, they are warned that further regulation by government can be an unfair impediment even to the most conscientious landlord.
Year after year, you can see city officials in Boston and Springfield, North Adams and Brockton, wringing their hands over urban blight and middle class flight, intoning the best of intentions to turn things around. And year after year, you can drive through the same cities and see the blight, an apparently intractable problem despite the regular amounts of attention it receives.
It is hard to believe that any effort by city government could produce results as unfair as those we saw last week in Springfield, where rows of nicely maintained homes, owned by people who are willing to invest time and money to be good neighbors, are being driven down in value by the proximity of neglected and abandoned properties owned by people who might be willing to be good neighbors, just not in Springfield.
