It took all of a few steps down one block of Prescott Avenue in Scranton’s Hill Section on Friday to see the extremes of property maintenance in the city: tidy, well-kept homes interspersed with ramshackle eyesores.
“The 600 block of Prescott is a microcosm of everything good and bad” in the city’s housing landscape, Councilman Wayne Evans said during a walking tour with city inspectors, police and residents.
Mr. Evans organized the tour for a curb’s-eye view of property conditions and to brainstorm solutions to blight. He cited an Aug. 31 article in The Times-Tribune on how Scranton, Wilkes-Barre and Hazleton try to fight blight. That article noted Hazleton has had success with a quality-of-life ticketing ordinance that targets exterior eyesore-type code violations considered blighting influences — tall grass, litter, abandoned appliances. A quality-of-life ticket, an anti-blight equivalent of a parking ticket, is an alternative to a citation that has to go through a court and is more complicated and time-consuming. Quality-of-life ticketing is simpler and has fines or actions due immediately, Mr. Evans said.
He hopes Scranton can adopt a similar quality-of-life ticket and handed out copies of Hazleton’s ordinance to others on the walking tour. They included Scranton Police Chief Carl Graziano, Licensing, Inspections and Permits Director Patrick Hinton, housing inspector Brian McAndrew and Hill Neighborhood Association President Ozzie Quinn. They said the idea sounds good.
Mr. Quinn believes absentee landlords who don’t maintain properties are a root cause of most blight. Of the Hill Section’s 505 absentee landlords, 382 live outside the city, and many of those are from out of state, he said.
“That says to me we have people (landlords) out-of-state that don’t care (about the property). All they care about is collecting rent,” Mr. Quinn said.
Mr. Evans noted that tenants, not landlords, may cause some problems, such as using indoor couches on outside porches. Upholstered indoor furniture is not allowed outside on porches because such furniture could be a fire hazard, Mr. Evans said.
If Scranton had quality-of-life ticketing, housing inspectors could be more proactive and do periodic sweeps of city neighborhoods, Mr. Evans said. He believes that once word spreads of such tickets, violations would decline.
Under Scranton’s current system, enforcement of a couch-on-porch violation would be a citation issued to the property owner, who “might be in Timbuktu,” said Mr. Evans. A citation would have to go through court and would take at least a month to resolve, Mr. Hinton said.
The city’s rental registration rules also require a landlord to designate an agent for a property, but many don’t bother, and enforcement is lacking because of limited manpower, Mr. Hinton said. During Friday’s tour, Mr. Hinton and Mr. McAndrew identified several rental properties lacking registered agents. One porch had an upholstered reclining chair, while another porch had a gas grill under a roof.
One vacant home had a rear section of roof caved in, and Mr. Hinton and Mr. McAndrew condemned that structure on the spot. Next door to that blight, a neighbor’s meticulous porch, shrubs and hanging flower baskets brought to mind “Better Homes and Gardens.”
“One (eyesore) house can bring down the whole neighborhood,” Chief Graziano said.
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