Beechview residents say city must address vacant home on Shadycrest Road

PITTSBURGH (KDKA) — Beechview residents say the city must clean up an eyesore on the street. 

Helen DeCarlo sees it every day.

“To me, it’s horrific,” DeCarlo said. “If I want to sell my house, how could I sell my house with this there?”

Overgrown grass and piles of trash line the vacant home on Shadycrest Road. The home’s gutters are falling off, and there is an abandoned vehicle in the driveway.

DeCarlo and other residents are furious.

“It’s a great neighborhood,” resident Amanda Jones said. “It’s a great location, and it’s just a waste.”

DeCarlo said she has called multiple city officials but no results so far.

“Since 5-5-2022, I’ve been told, ‘We’ll send an inspector out. We will do this. We will do that.’ No results,” she said.

KDKA-TV invited Councilman Anthony Coghill to see the issue firsthand on Tuesday.

“We can go onto the property. We can clean it up a little bit,” he said. “Make it a little more presentable, but it still doesn’t solve the ultimate problem here, which is what are we going to do with this house, meaning who is going to claim it?”

A spokesperson for Mayor Ed Gainey’s office said there are 1,800 recorded condemned buildings in the city and 600 are identified by Permits, Licenses and Inspections as dead-end properties, which means the private owners are dead and no one has a claim on it.

In February, the city put the home on a clean-up list, but there is no date for when the Department of Public Works will clean it up.

“They are going to get on it sooner than later,” Coghill said. “Maybe that’s prompted by you or not, doesn’t matter to me as long as it gets clean.”

Coghill added that he is going to look into the issue because he believes property taxes have not been paid.