Hi View Gardens, purchased by PNC in 2018, suffered years of decline before its low-income tenants rallied to demand improvements. Now they have management’s ear — but the bank plans to sell.
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“I didn’t expect it to go this far,” Tanya Brown said as she stood outside of the Eat’n Park in McKeesport, wearing a black T-shirt with the words, “Treat yourself like a queen and you’ll attract a king.”
The restaurant is down the hill from Hi View Gardens, where residents last year elected Brown — a full-time babysitter for her great-granddaughter — as the leader of a new tenant council. She didn’t know it at the time, but that election put her across the table from PNC Bank, the nation’s sixth-largest commercial financial institution and — via a holding company — her landlord.
The Hi View Gardens Tenant Council began because tenants grew tired of winters without heat, pest infestations and disorder. They took their concerns to county and local officials, a nonprofit law firm and the media before getting to the table with the half-trillion-dollar bank.
Days earlier, PNC told the tenants’ attorney that it would compensate them via what the bank is calling “a tenant appreciation fund.”
The catch: The payment will come from the proceeds of the bank’s intended sale of the five-building Hi View complex to an as-yet-undetermined buyer. The residents had benefited — at least since publication of stories about their plight last year by PublicSource and WESA — from the goodwill and deep resources of the Pittsburgh-based bank that owns their complex. Now that relationship appears to be approaching its end.
As cars whizzed down Lysle Boulevard, Brown said the tenants just hope that “whoever comes to manage this property and takes over this property, I want them to be a good management; don’t come in with no bullcrap.
“By it coming this far,” she said, “we’ve got to finish it.”
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