Last week, Springfield Intruder blogger Bill Dusty wrote (in his side gig at MassLive.com) about a perennial thorn in the side of his South End neighborhood: a long-neglected house at 58-60 Adams St., where crummy tenants and a disengaged landlord created a major headache for the rest of the block.
“For six-and-a-half agonizing years my neighbors and I have had to endure the lunacy that came from a duplex located across the street from my house,” Dusty wrote. “From all-night parties and curbside trash dumpings to daytime knife fights in the street, we’ve suffered through it all. And through it all, the landlord could care less as long as she got her cash payments each month.”
Finally, last year, Dusty and his neighbors received what appeared to be a stroke of good luck, for them at least: a fire that left the house uninhabitable. “And so, I thought, I was finally rid of the eyesore and the bother. The old bat landlord would pocket the insurance money, sell the property, and we could finally live in peace,” he wrote.
Not so fast. As it turns out, the boarded-up house has sat neglected for more than a year, while trash-fee avoiders have used its empty yard as a convenient, free trash dump. “And yes, the City knows of the property’s condition. I’ve witnessed them pulling up and checking it out during the course of the year,” noted Dusty, who wrote that it takes three players—inconsiderate renters, negligent property owners, and lax city officials—to turn a neighborhood into a “ghetto.”
Dusty’s story clearly struck a chord with readers, many of whom posted comments at the end of the article. Among them: Gerry McCafferty, the city’s acting director of housing. “Bill—You are about to get an answer to the problem of 58-60 Adams, as well as the property next door, 56 Adams,” wrote McCafferty, adding that the city has contracted with a nonprofit developer to demolish the houses and replace them with two single-family homes “which may only be sold to homeowners (not investor-owners).” Work, she wrote, should start in the next couple of weeks.
McCafferty also noted that City Hall has also taken the owners of a number of other buildings in Dusty’s neighborhood to court, where the owners will be ordered to fix their properties or see them demolished. This kind of work, she added, was funded by federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program money. Last week, the city conducted another “Operation Clean Sweep,” when it brings multiple negligent property owners to Housing Court.
Dusty reports at least one promising sign already: Two days after his MassLive story was published, in an email to me and Mike Dobbs of the Reminder, he wrote: “After weeks of my complaints about the property across the street from me falling on deaf ears (one City Councilor even quipped I was fighting a “losing battle”), all it took was a nifty story by yours truly on Masslive to get things going. I came home from school today and the rat-hole property was all picked up and mowed.”
In addition, Dusty noted, his story even prompted a sympathetic phone call from Mayor Domenic Sarno.
Now if only every Springfield resident whose neighborhood is plagued by a derelict house had his or her own blog…
