David Andreatta

@david_andreatta

As a homeowner, there are days I want to throw in the towel just like David Gantt, the longtime Democratic state assemblyman from Rochester.

One of them was this week, when I returned from a vacation to a smattering of knee-high dandelions on an overgrown lawn and a village of Fairport tax bill in the mail.

I wanted to tell Mother Nature and the taxman to stuff it, like Gantt did at a house of his in his legislative district. Instead, I fired up the lawnmower, filed the tax bill where I wouldn't forget it and daydreamed of walking away from it all.

By the looks of it, Gantt walked away from 489 Central Park sometime around his ninth term in office. Seven elections later, to call the house an eyesore would be an insult to the broken light fixtures over my garage that my wife tells me are eyesores.

The house is a full-blown blight, with graffiti, busted windows, boarded up doors and a lawn like a cornfield. No one has lived there for years, but a Keystone drinker appears to frequent the porch.

It's a disgrace to a neighborhood that has more than its fair share of blight and whose residents have helped keep Gantt employed in Albany for 31 years.

How did it get so bad? To hear Gantt and the homeowner next door tell it, he couldn't stay ahead of the vandals.

"Every time I'd do work on the home, they'd break in," Gantt told me, estimating he sank upward of $20,000 into the house. "You want to keep losing money?"

That new furnace? Gone. New plumbing? They tore the copper pipes right out of the walls. They even took the water meter. The driveway he resealed was a catwalk to ruin.

Selling the place wasn't an option, he said, because he couldn't even give it away.

"I said to the city, 'Take the house. I'll give it to you,' " Gantt recalled. "They didn't want it."

Eventually, Gantt did what deadbeat landlords who want to get rid of their bad investments do. He stopped paying the property taxes.

Last week, the city that didn't want the house took it through a tax foreclosure.

"It's sad because I know he worked hard at it," said Maxsene Hanks, the homeowner next door. "You don't give up on your kids, but this is a property that's sucking you dry. What are you going to do?"

I don't know. But I have to believe the answer lies somewhere between throwing good money after bad and throwing your hands up and walking away.

Taking care of what belongs to you, and to your neighbor when need be, is how communities keep from falling apart. Enough people walk away like Gantt and there goes the neighborhood.

Maybe it's easy for me to say stay and fight because the worst vandal on my street is a Westie whose owner follows her around with a baggie.

After snowstorms, one of my neighbors snow blows her driveway then chugs her way to the next. When a guy hired to fell an old locust tree out front of the house across the street walked away from the job, neighbors showed up with chainsaws and wheelbarrows.

They do these things because they recognize that not only is their property their problem, but so too is the health of their neighbor's property.

Now that Gantt dumped his carcass of a house on the city, his mess is our problem. I say "our problem" because a healthy city is vital to all of us.

Overburdened city taxpayers will pay for whatever the city does with the house — refurbish it, sell it, or, more likely, demolish it.

In the meantime, since our problem is my problem, I figured I'd do my part and relieve Gantt's constituents on Central Park of some of the blight he left behind.

So, on Thursday, I fired up my lawnmower for the second time in a week and cut his cornfield of a lawn.

And all the while, I daydreamed of walking away from it all.

DANDREATTA@Gannett.com

Twitter.com/david_andreatta