Residents in Troy's North Central neighborhood are calling on the city for help in the demolition of older abandoned infrastructure.
This comes one week after a body was found in an abandoned building on 8th street.
"We're working with the city; the mayor's office has been very receptive and hopefully since this tragedy happened, we can get this accomplished,” said resident Michael Karam.
Residents like Karam say the city’s abandoned buildings are not only eyesores, but also come with safety concerns.
Frank Mayben is a property manager of several of these buildings.
"We're thinking about the residents that are here that have to live around this thing. the owners who are making good faith efforts to get these things done. we just can't have this,” said Mayben. “There's enough desolation, destruction, and demise in our community already. we're making every effort to change the culture of the streets."
Mayben says keeping people experiencing homeless out of their properties has been a challenge for decades. Right now, many of these abandoned buildings are waiting to be demolished by owners who need financial support to get the job done.
"The owner of this property and owners of other properties, they all came to terms and embraced the opportunity with this ARPA, $2 million came in to do this, get rid of these buildings of sorts,” Maybe adds. “Especially these with the red ‘X’ on it, they're a disaster, we want to get them out of our communities."
Two years ago, the Troy city council allocated $2 millions of federal ARPA funds to support these efforts. So far, city council president Carmella Mantello says roughly $100,000 of that $2 million have been used.
"It would make it a lot easier; it would go a lot faster if everybody involved private citizens and the government come together,” said Karam. “It would move much faster."
Now residents like Karam are hoping that last week's incident where a body was found in one of the abandoned buildings puts more pressure on city leaders to start fully addressing the ongoing problem.
CBS6 reached out to the mayor's office last week regarding the issue, we were told the city is working on addressing the abandoned buildings and referred us to the vacant building registry.
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