Creating Clean and Safe Neighborhoods

Creating Safe and Clean Neighborhoods:

Mayor Luke Ravenstahl recognizes that Pittsburgh’s strength lies in its unique neighborhoods and that they must be kept safe and clean in order to grow the City’s population. Under Luke, Pittsburgh’s crime rate hit its lowest level in more than forty years. He is making sure that residents continue to enjoy a high quality of life by creating laws that hold the worst quality of life offenders accountable. Luke understands that residents need to be heard and want to take an active role in improving their neighborhoods. New programs are nurturing community pride and transforming blighted lots into community gardens, sprucing up neighborhood business district and fostering a climate for development in our communities.

Under Luke, Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods are safer. Mayor Ravenstahl is investing in 21^st-Century technology to improve public safety so that officers, building inspectors, paramedics and firefighters can respond better and faster when problems arise. He is putting high-tech cameras in neighborhoods to help prevent and solve crimes.

To make sure that the community is connected with the officers who keep them safe, he is going “back to basics” with beat officers, bicycle patrols, and a neighborhood detective squad.

Luke believes that you have to understand the problems that plague communities in order to solve them. Too often, property owners are not taking care of their properties and disrupting neighbors. The Mayor launched a new ordinance that charges property owners for public safety services that continue to affect their neighbors’ quality of life.

City neighborhoods are cleaner and greener. Luke is aggressively fighting blight to improve the quality of life for all residents. He has more than doubled the City’s demolition budget to aggressively take down the most deplorable vacant structures and challenged employees’ to improve the demo strategy. As a result, the City has adopted more efficient demo practices, which is reducing the cost of demo and leaving behind a plan for vacant lots.

The Mayor sees land as a valuable asset which has the ability to transform neighborhoods. Luke created the Green Up Program to encourage residents to take vacant, trash-strewn lots and turn them into urban gardens and green spaces. More than 60 neighborhood lots are stabilizing and improving communities with the help of the Mayor’s “Green Team.”

Luke is taking care of neighborhoods business districts and listening to residents. The Mayor believes that catching up on past-neglect requires that all City resources are mobilized efficiently. He built upon the success of his neighborhood “sweeps,” which deploy all City clean up and safety crews in an area so that they can resolve maintenance issues fast, and created his Taking Care of Business Districts Program.

Now, City crews are responding to the clean-up and safety needs of the business districts in one fell-swoop, rather than the piece-meal approach of the past. The districts are receiving new items like garbage and recycling cans, street trees and bike racks, to make their shopping centers more desirable for investment.

Luke understands that citizens who know their streets best need to be able to communicate easily with government to solve problems fast. He created 311 because Pittsburgher’s deserve easy access to their government. Since its inception, Pittsburghers have called 311 more than 100,000 times and the calls are increasing by the day. Luke is committed to tracking each and every call to make sure that residents’ needs are being met. The 311 line has contributed to the success of the Mayor’s Redd Up efforts and improved customer service. In 2007-2008 there were more than 2,200 completed requests for graffiti removal, boarding-up vacant lots, and clearing City-owned property.

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