Since just after WWII, McKees Rocks has been a dumping ground for ACHA’s housing projects, accumulating more government-imposed poverty than any town in the state of Pennsylvania. Not coincidentally, over time, the town went downhill.
The lack of taxes from large swaths of land resulted in shrinking resources, including police. Now the town has the highest crime rate in Pennsylvania.
The dearth of taxes also contributed to the local school district becoming one of the worst in PA, a diploma mill handing completion credits to uneducated “graduates,” some of whom hadn’t attended school in several months.
Longtime residents moved to safer climes, as did businesses. The town now has no all day restaurants, no pharmacy, no supermarket, and the retail area has whitewashed windows, check cashing places, and dollar stores.
So, now ACHA – although they’ve admitted that it’s not good for the town – wants to bring in more poverty. Hays Manor, our own decades old Cabrini Green, can not be refurbished anymore. Its filthy, needle-laden, dangerous buildings must be torn down.
This presents the town an opportunity to reclaim the land, connect it to the McKees Rocks Plaza (Chartiers Crossing) and the long former P&LE brown field, which sits ready to build upon, larger than Fox Chapel’s Waterfront, and make an attractive development opportunity for retail and open space only three minutes from downtown Pittsburgh. Literally the best potential in the county.
Allowing it to continue to be low income housing while 97% of the county’s communities carry none of that load is insane. It would sentence the town to another 50 years of dilapidation and crime, bad schools and no tax base.
Residents don’t want it (but for the low income folks who will get nice new units for a season), and many have spoken up – but more need to.
The borough has been promised a new municipal building in exchange for going along with this. Focus On Renewal and the McKees Rocks Community Development Corporation have the wispy carrot of millions of dollars in “implementation help” money for their organizations support.
It’s wispy because it will never happen. ACHA makes promises and breaks them, and this one isn’t even a promise. It goes something like this… “Sign on for more low income housing, and once it’s approved and being built, we’ll apply for a grant that one town in America will be awarded. IF we get that, both non-profits will get 15% of the award.”
The “We’re sorry, Passaic, NJ got the grant” phone call won’t come until the Rocks is buried under more poverty, and our best land devalued.
Housing and Urban Development, the federal folks who fund ACHA, say the point of their low income housing efforts is to put impoverished folks in safe communities with good school districts. This place is neither safe nor served by a good school district, but it is run by visionless folks and populated by residents ACHA is counting on having beaten any resistance out of with their years of destroying the town.
I hope they’ve misread that.
I hope the people will demand better, will have enough vision to see that large swath of land as potentially housing a cineplex, restaurants, retail and specialty shoppes, all bringing in taxes to fund increasing police presence, dealing with crime, improving the schools and paying to clear more land of some of the hundreds of abandoned houses and buildings to attract more growth.
If the people don’t demand better, McKees Rocks will be “progressed” and “developed” right out of existence, having wasted the one true shot it had to heal and thrive.
J. Hogan
Be First to Comment