Here's a Pennsylvania town where a Republican doesn't stand a chance

The political signs grow like weeds in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, as much as they do in Latrobe, just 30 miles away.

The difference is the presidential candidate they advertise.

While Republicans have made strides in some parts of southwestern Pennsylvania, Democrats dominate Allegheny County, home to Pittsburgh and its tiny neighbor, Wilkinsburg. If there is a Donald Trump sign in this town, it’s lost in a sea of Joe Biden endorsements.

“There were about 70 people who voted for Trump in the last election,” said Ruth Kittner, executive director of the Wilkinsburg Community Ministry. “When Obama won, there were people dancing in the streets.”

The residents of Wilkinsburg have less to celebrate than their big-city neighbors.

While Pittsburgh has been rising and reimagining itself for the past decade, Wilkinsburg, a town of 15,000, primarily Black, residents, has slipped into a hole so deep that more than 15% of its housing is either blighted or abandoned, and 21% of its residents live below the poverty level, according to the town’s mayor.

That’s part of the reason local residents here want a change of leadership in this country, and the other reason is closely tied to it.

“We need to get him (Trump) out because we are going crazy. We are tired,” said Wilkinsburg Mayor Marita Garrett. Each day that her residents manage the trauma of poverty and blight, the daily hammer of national politics is adding to their exhaustion.

"Two months ago, we had RBG (Ruth Bader Ginsburg); now we have the anti-RBG," Garrett said. "It's too much."

The town is also still reeling from the police-involved shooting of a Black man nearly one year ago, bringing home to Wilkinsburg the civil unrest that has plagued other American towns. 

“Removing Trump won’t necessarily make Wilkinsburg better, but there will be a greater sense of peace,” she said.

The value of a home

Andre Perry’s childhood home is boarded up, condemned like several of the other houses on Hill Avenue in Wilkinsburg.

He doesn’t live here anymore, but he’s still connected to it, gripped by the story of this town and so many others like it across the country.

That single-family home is where his story unfolded, where he went from an untraditional childhood with a single mother to become a nationally recognized commentator and writer of race, education and housing. He tucked that home, neighborhood, and community under his PhD microscope and studied them along with many others to explore how the value of a home intersects with race and poverty.

He wanted to disprove a theory he'd read many years earlier. It was a report written by former politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan who, in the 1960s, blamed the plight of Black Americans on a "highly unstable" family structure, primarily single women.

Perry felt stung by that summary because the woman who raised him was a single Black woman. Unrelated to Perry, she took him in - without a formal adoption or foster care arrangement - when he was an infant, raising him along with a number of other children. 

"Remember, so many policies assumed that Black women, because they were heading households, created unstable and dangerous conditions for children. And I always remind people that, no, those women are saving our lives, in spite of a government that devalues Black people," he said.

Perry's research actually led him right back to that home on Hill Avenue in Wilkinsburg; his home in a Black neighborhood wasn't valued at the same rate as a similar home in a white neighborhood. He's found it all over this country. The devaluation of homes, property and businesses in predominantly Black communities creates an economic disparity that affects education and opportunities.

"People demonize Black culture for not being high achieving, but I don’t know a single Black family that doesn’t hear: You have to work twice as hard to get half as much. That kind of unrealistic expectation that we have to be twice as good, it kind of pans out in the research," he said.

Homes in Black neighborhoods, his research has found, are worth 23 percent more than they're priced.

"We don’t get the benefits from the same effort, so the theory is right. At some point, you have to address the structural inequality. You can’t continue to ask people to work within unjust systems," he said.

Biden has cited Perry's research on housing and business devaluation, and it's part of his "Lift Every Voice" plan for Black America. Perry, author of the book, "Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America’s Black Cities," is a fellow at the Brookings Institution and a scholar-in-residence at American University.

"There is a recognition that structural inequality manifests itself in an enormous wealth gap, a black-white wealth gap, that sees white median wealth at $170,000 compared to black median wealth at $17,000, which is 10 times," he said.

While Mayor Garrett doesn't believe voters in her community see the correlation between the presidential candidates and a better Wilkinsburg, Perry does. In order to fix the wealth gap and the devaluation of homes, federal policies need to evolve to make it easier for Black residents to buy a home and for those homes to be valued similarly to those in white neighborhoods.

"You gotta invest your way toward progress," he said.

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'A safe place'

Neither presidential candidate will change the chronic burdens facing Black Americans, Damon Young believes.

"If a person in Wilkinsburg or Homestead or McKeesport or any predominantly Black communities were to say that, regardless if Trump or Biden wins, 'I don’t see it affecting my community, I don’t see if affecting my schools' … I don’t have a response to that," said Young, a Pittsburgh-based writer, author and humorist. A former teacher in Wilkinsburg, he wrote the book, "What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker."

"So much of our politics, on a national level, are all about harm reduction. We want to get Trump out of office because he’s causing so much harm. I'd like to see what it would be like if we weren’t doing that," he said. "What does it look like for this country to be a safe place for Black Americans?"

That includes, for him, the greatest issue facing Americans today: COVID-19. Predominantly reaching Black Americans, it's a virus that Young believes Biden and Kamala Harris would handle better than Trump has. 

"The party in power has an adversarial relationship with science and scientists," he said. "As much as I can fault Biden for crime policies, I’m certain that both of them would listen to the scientists and wouldn’t have pretended like masks won’t work. They would have had a plan."

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The Wilkinsburg disparity

Ruth Kittner stood in the middle of a street Wednesday, high in the hills of Allegheny County, pointing to the great divide - between the City of Pittsburgh and Wilkinsburg Borough.

The disparity between the two communities plays out in the homes, the roads and the sidewalks, the visible impact of a town that can barely maintain its infrastructure.

As Mayor Garrett said, "We are very much an urban city on a suburban budget."

Kittner sees the poverty here firsthand in her role with the Wilkinsburg Community Ministry, giving out food to the impoverished, and she's desperate to end it. 

The retired history professor from Carnegie Mellon University drives through the neighborhoods, pointing out the abandoned homes, the green space that will be donated to her organization, the inadequate choices for groceries, the spot where a movie was filmed.

Churches dominated Wilkinsburg at one time, so much so that it was called The Holy City; even those are being abandoned. Residents leave the town at a rate of about four people per week, Garrett said.

Driving through her own neighborhood, Kittner described the disparity in home prices between this - a white neighborhood - and the rest of Wilkinsburg. The price of a home in Perry's former neighborhood on Hill Avenue can be as low as $30,000; the homes in Kittner's area go for about $150,000 and higher. She pointed to one grand home that's worth a half-million dollars.

Her property taxes are $7,000 a year. For Garrett, half of her mortgage payments go toward taxes. 

"We have some of the highest taxes in the county," the mayor said.

The lack of money dovetails with an old and fragile infrastructure, all placed onto the backs of the residents still remaining. In response, the community began to partner with the City of Pittsburgh to ease the burden, consolidating waste management and fire service. Middle and high school students now attend a city school as well.

"It's really government that has yet to consolidate," Garrett said. That discussion has begun though, and "both sides seem to be receptive to it."

The residents will need to make the final decision, deciding by referendum on an election ballot.

That's in the future, though. Tuesday, it's a national election.

"VOTE" signs are tacked to poles throughout town. One church has voting signs throughout its yard, one saying, "We have the voice. We have the power. We can make a change. ... We are the change."

Kim Strong can be reached at kstrong@gannett.com.