The work starts in the classroom and in the end the city of Johnstown will see the results as students from Pitt Johnstown help to decrease blighted properties.

 

It’s part of a coordinated effort with the Vision 2025 project.  An urban planning class at UPJ is exploring land banking in the city.  Land banking helps to take blighted properties and makes them productive again.

 

“The problem is often you have issues with title, and who owns a particular lot.  So the land bank basically takes a lot of properties, purchases them, and clears the title,” Dr. Ola Johansson explains.

 

When Dr. Johansson teaches this course, he likes to get the students involved in the community and get real world experience, “This is a learning experience for the students.  They get to investigate a real world project.”

 

The goal is for the students to identify the properties so that the land can later be sold to other developers. 

The students at UPJ broke Johnstown’s Moxham neighborhood up into four different areas for their project.

 

“We drove around or we walked around and looked at the areas.  We were given an excel sheet that had all the areas the city also thought were condemned,” student Lewis Pell tells us.

 

They then decided the severity of the area, “What are we going to do with these areas?  How do you change it?  How are we going to make them better?”

 

At the end of the semester the students will write a report of recommendations for the Vision 2025 team. They say they have hope for the region.

 

“There were definitely some decent places in the area.  It wasn’t like everything was condemned and ruined,” Pell says.