City Needs Fund to Combat Blight

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Today’s cities are increasingly having to contend with blighted and substandard housing within their borders. And the problem only gets worse as these areas of housing stock age further and continue to deteriorate. The city of Canton is no exception. We have our areas of blight, and the current Canton City Council seems committed to doing what it can to combat this problem.

To its great credit, the Council has already taken the first necessary steps by (a) passing a clearer, stronger and more encompassing housing code, (b) adding a code enforcement officer to the budget, and (c) trying to find ways to identify and target the absentee, in some cases institutional, landlords of rental properties they clearly don’t want to spend money fixing up and improving. A logical next and important step, it seems to me, is to find a way to provide monies for whatever steps might be required to implement the solutions to code violations, including whatever the costs are of condemnation, should that drastic step be required in the most extreme circumstances.

At last week’s meeting, however, the Council voted to reject a proposal that would have created a fund that would be used for these expenses. I hope the Council will revisit the proposal and come to a different conclusion. The essence of the proposal was to divert $2 of the $16.50 we now pay each month for trash collection and put it into an escrow fund to be used for expenses needed to combat the kind of blight that is ever-growing in our city.

This relatively painless means of establishing such a fund would create a pool of money in the magnitude of something like $150,000 per year. The details of specifically what the money would be used for and under what circumstances it could be used would, under the proposal, have been hashed out by a committee made up of the city manager, the chief of police, and the city attorney.

Residential blight affects all of us. Certainly, it devalues the property that continues to deteriorate. And certainly, it affects the circumstances of the properties’ residents, mostly renters who lease from landlords who are not invested in our city’s quality of life. But it also affects the property values of the other homes in Canton. This is particularly true of the downtown area, where substandard housing is sometimes only a block or two away from some very nice and well-cared for homes. To the extent that substandard housing is viewable as one enters the city, blight affects how others view our city, particularly important if that outsider is someone thinking of moving to Canton to establish a home or business here.

So we all deserve and can benefit from the protections this new code provides. That code will require funding for what is necessary to bring its full force to bear on the problem. For those who are in agreement, I urge you contact the Council to express your desire that the proposal be brought up again for consideration, and for it to be implemented as expeditiously as possible.

BH5