Rotting houses demolished after years in north St. Louis County
ST. LOUIS COUNTY, Mo. – A north St. Louis County neighborhood is seeing dramatic changes after being in danger, as shown in a FOX Files report last summer. The danger wasn’t from crime, but from rotting houses.
Things are suddenly much different.
Even last week, residents on Reichman Avenue in the City of Pine Lawn feared they might get hit by falling bricks in their own yards and driveways.
One resident, Yolanda James, said her mother-in-law would not park in her own carport because pieces of the collapsing house next door kept falling onto her property.
“Oh no, she wouldn’t (park in her carport). She said every day she would come out and there’d be something out here…more bricks, some type of debris from the house,” James said.
In the 10 months that passed since our first report, the issues had only gotten worse, neighbors said. Then, a few days ago, they heard rumbling.
“I heard trucks. I looked out, and I go, ‘Oh my God,’” James said. “I’m like, ‘Okay, it’s happening. It’s happening.’”
A demolition crew was taking down two crumbling houses on her block.
“Yeah, we got a two-fer. We got 2 for 1,” she beamed.
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The house next to her mother-in-law was demolished along with another, which had a tree growing inside of it through a collapsed bedroom wall.
The buildings had been rotting like this for years.
“Every month, it looks a little worse,” Alonzo Simmons told FOX Files last summer.
His mother still lived in the family home of 50 years. It sat right between the two rotting houses, with debris from them falling onto his mother’s property from both sides. We found out those two houses were among more than 20 properties acquired by the City of Pine Lawn.
The city administrator tells FOX 2 that a grant program is covering the cost of clearing them and that the city will maintain them with the goal of selling them to home builders for just $5,000 each.
“(Even if) it will just be like a lot or whatever…it will just be much better. It makes me feel much better that my neighborhood is just not full of condemned houses, safer,” James said.
Neighbors just never really believed this could happen when they contacted FOX 2 back in July.
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