andreatta column 6.8.14 keep walking gantt

A Sunday, June 8, 2014 DemocratandChronicle. com R OC News As a homeowner, there are days I want to throw in the towel just like David Gantt, the long- time Democratic state assemblyman from Rochester. One of them was last week, when I returned from a vacation to a smattering of knee-high dandelions on an over- grown lawn and a village of Fairport tax bill in the mail. I wante d to tell Moth - er Nature and the tax- man to stuff it, like Gantt did at a house of his in his legislative district. In- stead, I fired up the lawn mower , filed the tax bill where I wouldn’t forget it and daydreamed of walking away from it all. By the looks of it, Gantt walked away from 489 Central Park some- time around his ninth term in office. Seven elections later, to call the house an eyesore would be an insult to the broken light fixtures over my garage that my wife tells me are eyesores. The house is a full- blown blight, with graffi- ti, busted windows, boarded-up doors and a lawn like a cornfield. No one has lived there for years, but a Keystone drinker appears to fre- quent the porch. It’s a disgrace to a neighborhood that has more than its fair share of blight and whose resi- dents have helped keep Gantt employed in Alba- ny for 31 years. How did it get so bad? T o hear Gantt and the homeowner next door tell it, he couldn’t stay ahead of the vandals. “Every time I’d do work on the home, they’d break in,” Gantt told me, estimating he sank up- ward of $20,000 into the house. “You want to keep losing money?” That new furnace? Gone. New plumbing? They tore the copper pipes right out of the walls. They even took the water meter. The driveway he resealed was a catwalk to ruin. Selling the place wasn’t an option, he said, because he couldn’t even give it away. “I said to the city, ‘Take the house. I’ll give it to you ,’ ” Gantt re - called. “They didn’t want it.” Eventually, Gantt did what deadbeat landlords who want to get rid of their bad investments do. He stopped paying the property taxes. Two weeks ago, the city that didn’t want the house took it through a tax foreclosure. “It’s sad because I know he worked hard at it,” said Maxsene Hanks, the homeowner next door. “You don’t give up on your kids, but this is a property that’s sucking you dry. What are you going to do?” I don’t kn ow . But I have to believe the an- swer lies somewhere between throwing good money after bad and throwing your hands up and walking away. Taking care of what belongs to you, and to your neighbor when need be, is how communities keep from falling apart. Enough people walk away like Gantt and there goes the neighborhood. Maybe it’s easy for me to say stay and fight because the worst vandal on my street is a Westie whose owner follows her around with a baggie. After snowstorms, one of my neighbors snow blows her driveway then chugs her way to the next. When a guy hired to fell an old locust tree out front of the house across the street walked away from the job, neighbors showed up with chain- saws and wheelbarrows. They do these things because they recognize that not only is their property their problem, but so too is the health of their neighbor’s property . Now that Gantt dumped his carcass of a house on the city, his mess is our problem. I say “our problem” because a healthy city is vital to all of us. Overburdened city taxpayers will pay for whatever the city does with the house — refur- bish it, sell it or, more likely, demolish it. In the meantime, since our problem is my problem, I figured I’d do my part and relieve Gantt’s constituents on Central Park of some of the blight he left behind. So, on Thursday, I fired up my lawn mower for the second time last week and cut his cornfield of a lawn. And all the while, I daydreamed of walking away from it all. Keep walking, Assemblyman Gantt, I mowed your lawn [email protected] Dave Andreatta COLUMNIST Democrat and Chronicle columnist Dave Andreatta mows the front lawn of a house at 489 Central Park that used to be owned by State Assemblyman David Gantt and now belongs to the city of Rochester on Thursday. CARLOS ORTIZ/@CFORTIZ_DANDC/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER GO DEEPER ON DIGITAL Go to DemocratandChronicle .com to see a video of David Andreatta mowing the lawn. D & C GARAGE DOORS UNLIMITED SINCE ’92 458-8050 FREE Estimates on New Garage Doors or Repairs In what appears to be a true Cinderella story, Rochester has overcome larger, more glamorous cities to “win” the her- alded 2014 Parking Mad- ness title. The winning designa- tion — which was reached by the submission of on- line votes at the Streets Blog USA webs ite — indi- cates the Flower City has the worst downtown parking “crater” in the coun- try. Parking craters are areas where the prolifera- tion of parking lots “make downtown look like a lu- nar landscape.” Rochester routed Jack- sonville, Fla., 61 1 to 165 in the finals of the college basketball-style single- elimination tournament. Rochester advanced to the finals after outlasting Miami (447 to 47), then Detroi t (30 1 to 25 1) and Kansas City (328 to 271) to triumph over 15 of the were Atlanta, Calgary, Al- berta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, El Cerrito, Calif., Grand Rapids, Mich., Newark, N.J., Portland, Ore., Salt Lake City, and St. Louis. It appears a local on- line uprising led to Roch- ester’s win. “It used to be a real neighborhood. It used to be a downtown,” wrote Matthew Denker, about Rochester’s downtown parking. “There was a beautiful park there that got cut in half by a highway. There’s nothing to even drive to anymore. There’s a four point intersection (at Pleasant and Franklin A dubio us aw ard for Rochester: Parking crater ‘champion’ Gary McLendon Staff writer

andreatta column 6.8.14 keep walking gantt

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