Monessen Mayor John DeLuca has a plan to reinvigorate a section of the city.
All he needs is for the Westmoreland County Housing Authority to demolish 102 public housing units near the city's middle-class Seneca Heights neighborhood and find a developer willing to build upscale homes on the site.
The plan may have some support from the authority, which is considering razing of some of its properties to reduce a rising vacancy rate.
"All I want to do is to make some moves to make private property available for upscale homes to entice professional people to move into Monessen," DeLuca said Wednesday.
The mayor first approached housing authority officials earlier this month with his plan to tear down Park Manor, the authority's 46-year apartment complex that abuts Seneca Heights.
DeLuca proposed giving the authority land near another public housing development in the city - Highland Manor - to build housing that would replace the demolished facilities.
DeLuca said 20 to 25 upscale homes could be built on the Park Monor site. There is nowhere else in the city of about 8,500 people where higher-priced homes could be built and marketed, he said.
"That would be a great place to continue building those kind of houses, but this may be just some goofy idea in my head. I don't have a developer," DeLuca said.
DeLuca's timing couldn't be better.
The authority is devising a plan to reduce its rising vacancy rate for its more than 1,900 public housing units.
About 18 percent of the authority's units are vacant, which is an increase over last year's rate of 15 percent.
"The timing (of DeLuca's proposal) was a coincidence," said Mike Washowich, executive director of the authority. "We're studying our statistics and long-term vacancy rates and devising a strategy to deal with it. Demolition is one of those strategies."
Authority officials have targeted four public housing facilities as candidates for partial demolition as a means to thin out excess housing.
Park Manor, along with St. Clair Manor, Arnold Townhouses and East Ken Manor II in New Kensington, were identified in an authority study as having high enough vacancy rates to consider demolition.
Park Manor has a 25 percent vacancy rate. Washowich said no plan calls for the complete razing of the 10-building complex.
DeLuca said he is not looking to eliminate public housing in Monessen, and in fact suggested replacing Park Manor with a new development for subsidized housing on city-owned land near Highland Manor.
Cholodofsky is a reporter for the Tribune-Review.
