Neighbors want city to do something about Knoxville home collapsing into their backyard
An entire section of a home in Pittsburgh's Knoxville neighborhood has folded, collapsing into the yard next door.
The home on Moore Avenue is just one of the countless condemned homes in the city, sitting dilapidated and abandoned. Neighbors say it's not fair for this to literally fall on them.
"Basically, you know, just being woken up, you know, it was raining, so I basically just thought it was thunder," said a next door neighbor.
They didn't want to show their faces, but said they'd speak up. They want the city to take action and fix this mess.
"This house has been called on for several years from various neighbors. Every time they say they're going to check into it, check into it, nothing's been done. I've been here almost 20 years," another neighbor said.
KDKA-TV's drone captured the extent of the deterioration, peering through the big hole in the roof. Now the weight of it all rests on their fence, porch and backyard.
"They said they'll have somebody come up and, you know, clean this off of my porch but the fact is that there's still a possibility of this collapsing during the night while we're sleeping yet again. The whole roof is gone on the house. It's scary, you know? It's very scary to me," one of the neighbors said.
KDKA Investigates asked Mayor Ed Gainey's spokesperson Olga George about this collapse at a housing press conference.
"Now that building was already condemned and we currently flagged it as a dead end property. We are sending — when I go back I'll find out for sure — but an inspector going to the site to document daylight conditions, and based on the findings, we will assess whether any additional actions are necessary, including potentially directing the owner of the property if they need to do demolition on that," George said.
George said she needed to check on the 311 call logs to verify neighbors claims it was reported to the city. The listed homeowners of the condemned property bought it in 2006 for $16,600. KDKA-TV attempted to get in touch with them but didn't hear back by airtime.
