Blight and abandoned properties are a "growing crisis," robbing this region of millions of dollars. So says a report just released by Sustainable Pittsburgh, the host of a summit on the topic last week.

Vacant and decrepit land is a regional liability in marketing and attracting investment, said John Kromer, a senior consultant at the Fels Institute at the University of Pennsylvania and the keynote speaker.

"If people actually knew how much money they are losing by not having these properties on the tax rolls it might spur them to action," said Ginette Walker Vinski, communications manager for Sustainable Pittsburgh. "If you make the economic case on a regional level, there's so much money we could be making."

Blighted lots are assets-in-waiting, she said, but many municipalities fail to make the connection. Bond-rating agencies see municipally owned properties as assets, and repossession for taxes is the easiest way for municipalities to get properties back to the tax rolls, said Kendall Pelling, real estate project manager for East Liberty Development Inc. and co-chair of the vacant properties task force of the Pittsburgh Community Reinvestment Group.

The incentive to show a bond-rating agency "that you are not worse and worse at collecting taxes every year" should be obvious, said Mr. Pelling.

Pittsburgh "is way ahead" on this score, having bought back its liens and contracted with Jordan Tax Service to get taxes owed, "and we have a system that deals with processing properties," he said. "The city's challenge is we are hopelessly behind in addressing the volume, but many places are at square one."

The report highlighted a problem facing many smaller towns: a lack of expertise in dealing with public policy issues such as blighted properties.

Mr. Pelling said this handicap is pervasive in the region and further hampered by small budgets and staffs.

This is where the state needs to rethink its role, he said.

"The state puts a lot of money into a lot of revitalization initiatives, but there are no state planning dollars [going] to municipalities to deal with this," he said.

A city official from a nearby county retorted at the summit that his job was "to collect taxes, not to take over and resell properties," said Mr. Pelling. "But with a big exclamation point, this is the problem.

"Local governments have land use roles but many do not recognize abandonment as their solution. In reality, it is something that only they can act on. That's the political will part of this. They have a special priority lien right" and they owe it to their citizenry.

"To consider properties as liabilities is twisted logic," he said. A city government that thinks their land is worthless is the worst kind of public relations, he said, yet municipalities want outside investment: "Would you buy property in a city that wouldn't even take title to abandoned properties?

"Every year, their assessed values decline and market values decline, but service costs do not decline, so the public has to raise millage rates to maintain properties, and this creates inequities" for home owners, he said. "It is a very good investment to foreclose on abandoned properties and deal with them."

The opportunity is ripe in this region because land is less expensive and more available, said Mr. Kromer.

Rather than the super-sized developments of the exurbs, he said, the trend is that small and medium industrial firms, particularly those involved in distribution services, are looking for space under 40,000 square feet and with lower land costs" in municipalities that already have infrastructure.

Cities are also benefitting from housing needs around academic and health care institutions, he said. "In Camden, N.J., one of the most disinvested cities anywhere, a university hospital did a survey of employees and interns and residents and asked about their interest in living in Camden." Contrary to what they might have thought, he said, "there was a lot of interest in housing right near the campus."

Sustainable Pittsburgh's report calls for creation of a regional roundtable to help small cities and towns build capacity to deal with this cumbersome problem.

Ultimately, said Mr. Kromer, the region cannot market what it does not present well. And it doesn't even have an inventory of land and property status.

"If we could have a regional property inventory," said Ms. Vinski, "we could know what kind of monster we are dealing with."

The incentive should be overwhelming, on a statewide and municipal level, to get control of blight, said Mr. Pelling.

Recycling abandoned properties, while not a traditional role of government, "is as fundamental a public service as police protection and street sweeping."

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