Update (12/18/20): The conservatorship case filed by M&M Realty Holdings, seeking control of a four-unit Wilkinsburg house owned by Kathleen Wilson, has been settled. Attorney Marc Taiani, of M&M, said terms of the settlement are confidential.
Attorney Weldianne Scales, representing Wilson, called the settlement “very reasonable and amicable.”
Following PublicSource’s story, a GoFundMe page set up to support Wilson’s efforts to improve the house raised $18,275. In light of the settlement, “Ms. Wilson is going to instruct the individual that’s over that to make sure that those funds go back to the donors,” said Scales.
Two state legislators who read the story suggested hearings and possibly amendments to the conservatorship law, while the chair of the House Urban Affairs Committee said the current law functions well.
“There probably need to be some changes to the law going forward,” said state Sen. Wayne Fontana, D-Brookline, a Realtor. He suggested hearings, adding that community groups and municipalities might be given more say in the process.
State Rep. Sue Helm, R-Dauphin County, who chairs the House Urban Affairs Committee, said that a judicial process with more participants may leave blighted properties sitting “for a heck of a lot longer time.”
Helm added: “We feel this law has worked pretty well for us.” It has “plenty of built-in due process,” she said, and every decision is overseen by elected judges.
State Rep. Sara Innamorato, D-Lawrenceville, said she and others are “already looking at what it would take to get [a hearing] scheduled,” adding that it would focus on “where [conservatorship is] exploited and what in the law allows it to be exploited or not necessarily used the way it was intended.”
On a sunny November day, attorney Marc Taiani and five other men walked into the stout brown house owned by 77-year-old Kathleen Wilson, intent on assembling the damning information they needed to seize control of it.
“An open sewer pipe. That’s something,” Taiani said as he toured the dusty basement of the four-unit house on Wilkinsburg’s Peebles Street. “Do you believe that’s asbestos right there?” he asked building inspector Bill Martin, pointing at the ceiling. (Martin said he couldn’t tell.) “They have locks on the windows,” Taiani mused later, noting a potential safety hazard. “They actually have key locks!”
Wilson, who is battling breast cancer and was accompanied by lawyer Weldianne Scales, could only watch as the team critiqued the house her family bought, in 1983, for $82,000. If Taiani could prove that it had not been recently occupied, marketed or substantially rehabilitated — and that it’s a public nuisance, unfit for human habitation or a fire hazard — then his firm could be named the building’s “conservator,” and might eventually become its owner.
Kathleen Wilson stands in front of a four-unit house, owned by her family since 1983, on Wilkinsburg’s Peebles Street. She is fighting a petition filed by a company run by attorney Marc Taiani, which hopes to take control of the house under the state’s conservatorship law. (Photo by Jay Manning/PublicSource)
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