No one group contributes more to the economic decline of Homewood's struggling business district than the one charged with saving it.
On Homewood Avenue, where deserted storefronts mar the main commercial strip, the Homewood Brushton Revitalization and Development Corp. owns four abandoned stores, three weed-choked lots and an empty apartment building. A $1 million Rite Aid pharmacy that the agency brokered sits vacant at the top of the hill, shuttered by plywood and heavy locks on the doors.
The ruins are the legacy of a once-ambitious community development organization that eventually collapsed under the weight of its many projects. The agency, decimated by mounting debt, financial mismanagement and weak leadership, owes more than $90,000 in back taxes and liens on 21 of its 23 properties.
In a neighborhood already riddled with poverty, empty storefronts and block after block of abandoned buildings, residents say, the organization's failures worsen the blight.
In the agency's properties, residents rent or live next to crumbling rattraps owned by the agency that receive little or no maintenance, while crack addicts break into the boarded-up houses to get high.
"Nothing, nothing, nothing," Gwendolyn Ward, 55, said of the lack of work done on the unit she rents from the corporation on Bennett Street. "We pay our money, but no money comes out here."
The agency's failure illustrates one of the reasons Mayor Tom Murphy and the Urban Redevelopment Authority say they have soured on working with some community development groups. The city, the URA and other foundations stopped funding the Homewood CDC at least four years ago, when the agency's finances were in such disarray it was difficult to track how it spent its money.
The agency "has lost quite a bit of credibility in terms of its ability to do development," said Valerie McDonald Roberts, the Allegheny County recorder of deeds and a former city councilwoman representing Homewood. She served on the agency's board in the early 1990s.
"The accounting was not up to snuff," she said. "As a result, funding decreased dramatically. The problem is that if something is not done right it muddies up the whole organization."
At one time, the agency was the biggest game in town.
In the early 1990s, it built new town houses, owned a radio station, published a community newspaper and even hoped to replace the Hill District as the city's African-American cultural district. Those were the days when Mulugetta Birru, the URA's current director, led the group.
But in the 10 years since his departure, the corporation has become a drain on the neighborhood it was created to help.
On North Homewood Avenue, it owns nine properties — more than any other owner on the commercial strip, according to Allegheny County tax assessment records. Only two of its storefronts have tenants, and both are nonprofit organizations: an after-school program and a youth baseball league.
Its office on Homewood Avenue is locked and the phone disconnected.
The group has not filed an income tax return in at least three years. Even though nonprofit groups are exempt from paying taxes, those that make more than $25,000 a year file returns to declare their financial positions.
Sarah Campbell, a longtime community activist and member of the corporation's board, said the organization remains active. She picks up its mail and represents the group on various committees, including Murphy's task force studying the city's finances.
But visited at her home in Homewood, she refused to discuss her agency's predicament.
"There are things we need to work out," she said. "We do not have staff. That's why the door to the office is shut. That's why there's no phone."
Wilford Payne, another board member, said after Birru left, the agency stopped keeping good financial records and could not generate enough income to maintain its properties. It went through at least four executive directors.
"When we went back over a period of three to four years, the auditors couldn't put it together," Payne said. "There was no way to find anything."
The nine board members who keep the corporation alive meet once a month to work on getting rid of the buildings. But Payne said they are having trouble selling them because of the debts.
He said he did not know how much the agency owes in taxes and utility bills. Lavelle Real Estate Inc. in the Hill District collects rent on the properties, maintains the rentals and is supposed to pay property taxes and other debts, he said.
The real estate agent, Phyllis Lavelle, declined to comment. A report Lavelle gave the board shows the group paid $98,000 in taxes for 2001. It also paid its creditors more than $65,000.
Among the agency's liabilities, none is more glaring than the empty Rite Aid building on Homewood Avenue.
With its rose-colored walls and a glass-block portico, the store opened to civic fanfare in the early 1990s. Today its locked doors and dark interior symbolize the community's continuing economic spiral.
McDonald Roberts said the 1995 murder of a store manager in a robbery and theft by customers and employees contributed to Rite Aid's decision to close the store.
A Rite Aid spokeswoman said the company closed the underperforming store in February, 2001, but continues to honor its lease, which expires in July, 2003. The Lavelle report showed Rite Aid paid $56,000 in rent last year.
Some Homewood residents say the discount store was doomed from the start because the neighborhood did not need another retailer offering few minimum-wage jobs and taking money out of the community.
"We need jobs. That's what's missing," said the Rev. Milton Joyner, who grew up in Homewood and runs the Armageddon Storehouse Ministries. "Out of all the development, I have not seen anything that provides jobs."
Not far from the business district sit 19 rental units that the CDC bought for $100,000 in 1990. The corporation received more than $500,000 in public money over eight years to rehabilitate the two-story Bennett Street row houses "to quality-of-living standards."
Yet residents live in apartments with holes in the walls so big that stray cats crawl through them. Water damage decays walls that haven't been painted in years, windows remain broken and screen doors and appliances are never replaced.
Residents say they have to become their own exterminators because of the cockroaches and mice that scurry through the units — a third of which are empty, boarded up or vandalized.
"They all need to be torn down," said Jim Luckey, who has lived in one of the row houses for more than five years. "It's still not worth no damn $450. Everything needs to be done."
Melvin Jones, 28, who owns a home on Felicia Way next to an abandoned house owned by the CDC, said he's battling vermin of the two-legged variety. He's had his pit bulls chase drug addicts who break into the empty house.
Jones wants to buy the house, fix it up and rent it out. In fact, he tried contacting the group at its office but found the phone disconnected and the door locked.
"It's a nuisance," said Jones, a hair stylist. "In the wintertime, I get mice out of control. I'd like to clean it up. It's really not in bad condition."
Residents and politicians say there is still hope in Homewood, despite the CDC's failure.
Agencies, such as Operation Better Block, a community development group that focuses on housing projects, continue to work in the area.
Meanwhile, another group is trying to take over the development reins in the neighborhood, completing a plan it believes will serve as a blueprint for revitalization.
City officials welcomed the efforts but said they want to see the plan to determine whether the new group can pull it off.
T. Rashad Byrdsong, a community activist who belongs to the group — the Homewood Brushton Comprehensive Community Organization — said neighborhood efforts still face the skeletons left by the development agency.
He said the new organization has to prove it can be accountable and responsible.
"I think we need to quit running organizations like mom-and-pop stores," he said. "We need to run them like a business. I think it's all part of the evolutionary development of our community. For the time that they were doing what they were doing, it was needed. But this is new times with new people."
