Sometimes work hits a little too close to home. Over the past six months I’ve been investigating vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated housing issues in Pittsburgh. While immersed in that reporting, we’ve been dealing with housing issues on our block. In 2025, we moved onto a street with three long-abandoned houses owned by a politically connected slumlord.

A house next door to us, we learned soon after moving here, has a long history of code violations and police calls and arrests for drugs (meth and crack), domestic violence, weapons charges, arrest warrants being served, and one hostage situation requiring an armed police response.

The owner has a long criminal history of felony drug arrests and at least one firearms possession arrest. Also, over the past decade, the owner has used the property as a flophouse for unhoused people.

In September, the city declared the house next door unfit for human habitation and the owner refused to vacate the premises. He artfully dodged process servers, code enforcement officers, and the police. Ultimately, last week the city went to court to get a temporary restraining order forcing him from the property.

Unable to serve him with the order and hamstrung by the law from removing him, city officials waited for him to leave and then padlocked the property. We (my family and our neighbors) had no other choice. Over the past 30 years, the city had failed to effectively deal with the situation — a confluence of mental health issues, substance use disorder, homelessness, unemployment, and food insecurity — and we were left with a terrible choice: move, like the folks who sold us the house we bought in 2025, or find a solution that ends the unhealthful and unsafe situation for the property owner and his boarders, and his neighbors, including ourselves.

The city, county, and state lack the resources to intervene effectively and now there’s another unhoused person in Covington and his house is on a slippery slope towards abandonment.

© 2026. D.S. Rotenstein