OPINION: ‘The Vision of the Soon to be Vacated Promises’

Where there is no vision, the people perish ~Proverbs 29:18 

Part one of two

In October, four folks I know were shot walking down an alley 70 yards from my front door. One died that night; another, my friend Maddie’s daughter, hung on until mid-December, then her body finally shut down.

If you live in the suburbs, that would be a shocking paragraph to be able to type.

If you live in McKees Rocks or Stowe – or, especially in one of the Allegheny County Housing Authority (ACHA) housing projects – it’s not even especially shocking. Dozens of folks in my neighborhood have been shot in 20 years since we bought our house. Many have died. 

One neighbor, three doors from us, was tied to a chair by robbers, then shot and killed as they bolted out the door.

Another was shot multiple times behind the wheel of his car as he was leaving a friend’s house. 

Yet another was shot as he exited the neighborhood on foot. Both of his killers died by gunfire later that same summer, according to police.

That’s Meyers Ridge, but the same was true for Hays Manor, where several have died by gunfire and one of my friends was beaten to death, his body mutilated, over some deal gone sideways.

In Uansa Village, there’s been murder, too. A resident called me one day when a barrage of bullets killed a 19-year-old man in front of her house, one bullet crashing through the window behind her as she sat on her couch. It flew over her head and lodged in her kitchen. 

I know the feeling. A bullet meant for my neighbor, who later took eight rounds to his back on his porch, came through our house.

In Stowe’s Pleasant Ridge, there have been many, too. One poor soul was shot in the head by an errant bullet.

What’s my point? 

How’s “we gave at the office,” “we’ve had our share,” and “at some point, enough is enough.”

All of the aforementioned violent neighborhoods are housing developments built and managed by ACHA. This authority intends to put more of its dangerous mess in McKees Rocks, on the best land for development on the city line of Pittsburgh, as Hays Manor has been condemned and shuttered. 

If leaders in 2000 could have seen a vision of what would become of the new Meyers Ridge as it replaced the old McKees Rocks Terrace back then, it wouldn’t exist now.

Instead, they saw the vision ACHA promised: safety, adequate security, nice, well-kept facilities, great landscaping and playgrounds. 

Somehow that was never sustained. Ever-shifting substandard management, ratty roads, missing basketball hoops, trash all over, and a graffitied, unused toy lot playground with its missing safety fence serve as the tombstone for those promises.

Now, again, our leaders see the Vision of the Soon to be Vacated Promises, missing out on what hindsight has proven. When asked about the abandoned promises, ACHA responds, “we’ll do better this time.” They never offer to revisit the promises already abandoned and fix them.

Why? Because, as they told me and a former council member to our faces, building new low-income housing is how they get the money to pay their bills and make their payroll.

In that meeting, they plainly stated that they knew doing this again to the town with more government low-income housing in the whole state of Pennsylvania “isn’t good for the town, but we have to make our budget to pay our people.”

We need our elected officials to stand up and say “No!”

That takes guts – because they’ll promise legal action. Do it anyway. No sane judge would let them win.

It also takes vision casting. The forward-looking kind. We have cleared land from Presston to the Chartiers Creek after Hays Manor comes down, but for a dilapidated plaza and a few warehouse terminals. That’s the size of the Water Works development near Fox Chapel. Its nearly as big as Homestead’s Waterfront shopping development, both raking in tax money, both providing reasons for folks to visit those places – and on less naturally attractive river settings.

Someone suggested I’m not allowed my voice on this because I was put on the McKees Rocks Zoning Board. That’s OK. If you need me to step down, I’d rather do that than let more of this be dumped into our town.

I know, I know… some have called me racist for my stance. Yelling “Racism!” is often a confession that they have no reasonable argument to make for their own position, but if you want to prove this guy – married for nearly 34 years now to a Black woman, father of four Black children, living in a 95% Black neighborhood and pastoring a church that’s half Black – is racist, go ahead and make your case.

It’s time for the ACHA to take at least one knee off our neck and let us find some developers to start improving our town. 

And it’s time for our leaders to have the vision to make it happen.