From their home on Charleston’s West Side, Tina and Matt Glaspey watched a once-occupied house at First Avenue and Fitzgerald Street deteriorate rapidly into a boarded, unsafe property, with police responding as people broke in. The Glaspeys said the structure went from occupied to condemned in about two years, leaving their neighborhood without power and water and repeatedly facing intrusion by squatters.
Tina Glaspey said she noticed an orange sticker on the door indicating the building was not safe for habitation, adding that it shows how quickly conditions can change when nothing is done to address vacant properties. Charleston officials said the house followed a pattern seen across the city: as vacant buildings deteriorate, they are eventually added to the city’s priority demolition list, which typically includes about 30 buildings at a time.
The wider problem, officials and advocates say, is that West Virginia’s statewide demolition support is running out. Until this year, a state program helped communities tear down abandoned buildings that were becoming safety hazards, reducing risks for neighborhoods and limiting harm to property values.
The Demolition Landfill Assistance Program was established in 2021 and was funded a year later with $30 million in federal pandemic relief funds to reimburse local governments for demolitions they could not afford on their own. A statewide survey conducted about four years ago estimated that nearly 8,000 structures required demolition at an approximate cost of $150 million, and the program began with that survey as a way to determine the scope of the need and assess local government capacity.
According to the report, the survey was distributed to all 55 counties and more than 180 municipalities. In the two years after the effort began, about 1,800 structures were demolished, and the report said about 240 demolitions were still ongoing; however, the last of the state’s funding had been dispersed. With no replacement funding and no new legislation proposed to keep the statewide demolition program running, municipalities are left to absorb costs themselves or to leave vacant buildings standing.
The report said that statewide need is far greater than what local governments can manage independently. Carrie Staton, director of the West Virginia Brownfields Assistance Center, said most counties do not have the resources, funding, or staffing to address dilapidated housing without outside help, and she pointed to the state’s rural character and longer timelines for doing the work.
Charleston, as the state’s largest city, has had more tools than many local governments, including access to federal funds that smaller communities may not have. The report said Charleston has spent more than $12 million over the past seven years demolishing over 700 unsafe and dilapidated structures, but it still relied on state demolition support to help cover costs that averaged about $10,000 per property, including environmental cleanup.
The city received $500,000 from the state program during its last round of funding, the report said, to help tear down properties that drew repeated complaints from neighbors. One example described in the report involved a vacant home on Grant Street that fell into disrepair before being demolished in May of last year; the property was later donated and transferred to Habitat for Humanity as part of its home-building work, with crews already building the foundation, porch and frame.
Andrew Blackwood, executive director of Habitat for Humanity of Kanawha and Putnam counties, said the property had stood for at least five years and was completely unsalvageable, citing signs of vandalism and water damage. He also said that of the 190 homes the organization has built in the two counties, nearly 90% were complete rebuilds after the previous structure was demolished.
Officials said lawmakers recognize the scale of the problem, but the report said no other statewide approach has been proposed for tearing down dangerous structures. In Fayette County, officials said the state program was used to tear down 75 dilapidated structures, and the county continued tracking demolition progress through a county system for other properties.
Fayette County leaders hoped to expand demolition work on their own this year, but those plans were put on hold, the report said, after the county had to take over operations of a local humane society following closure—an added budget pressure that Commission President John Breneman described. Former Sen. Chandler Swope, R-Mercer, said he pushed for state involvement in demolition funding and described how the need arose in places where population loss left empty homes that local governments had no way to tear down.
Staton said West Virginia’s lack of a statewide plan leaves communities stuck, with abandoned buildings present in every community and legislators facing constituents dealing with the issue. Back on the West Side, the Glaspeys said they remain surrounded by boarded windows and overgrown yards, with Matt Glaspey saying fixing up a home can feel pointless if nearby properties continue collapsing.
This story was originally published by Mountain State Spotlight and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.