Thanks to many, Y’town loses ‘arson capital’ stain

For many decades now, The Vindicator has lamented Youngs-town’s ignominious reputation as a hotbed of serious crime.

Take murder, for example. Its stain has been long-standing – from the label of “Murdertown USA” affixed to the city by the Saturday Evening Post in the early 1960s through the high-casualty gang wars of the 1990s and into the present, when Youngstown’s homicide rate, though stabilizing in recent years, still ranked about four times above the national average in 2018.

Similarly, Youngstown’s reputation as a leading breeding ground for destructive intentionally-set fires has long been common knowledge. In fact, in a report from 2016 on the decline of Rust Belt cities, the Washington Post called Youngstown “the nation’s arson capital.”

Fortunately, however, that shameful and despicable moniker no longer sticks.

As Vindicator Police Reporter Joe Gorman wrote this week in a Page 1 story, the number of arsons in Youngstown has dipped dramatically.

To wit, the number of intentionally-set fires in vacant structures throughout the city declined about 300 percent between 2015 and 2018 from 196 to 61, according to the city fire department’s recent annual report on arsons.

In vehicle arsons, the decline has been even more dizzying. In the one-year span from 2017 to 2018, the number of such arsons fell from 100 to 30, another amazing threefold fall.

Credit for these positive and promising trends goes to all individuals, entities and agencies working to lessen the city’s landscape of blighted properties. One major factor in the decline has been the intensified fervor in demolishing vacant buildings.

Thanks to the concerted efforts of the city’s blight remediation and street departments, the Mahoning County Land Bank, private contractors and others, about 1,750 houses have been razed in all four quadrants of the city over the past three years alone.

“The demolition people are ... getting the houses down pretty quick. The number [of vacant homes] is getting smaller and smaller,” said YFD Chief Barry Finley. His department, too, must share in the credit for the optimistic trend through its professional and rapid response to such fires during a time in which overall calls to the department skyrocketed from 3,113 in 2017 to 4,338 in 2018.

FEWER OPPORTUNITIES

As a result of these cooperative initiatives, firebugs have had fewer and fewer opportunities to ply their nefarious trade. In addition, successes by the land bank and the Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corp. in restoring scores of once unlivable homes and injecting new pride into many neighborhoods have made increasingly large tracts of the city far less susceptible to arson and other crimes.

Yet in spite of the rapid progress in reducing arson in Youngstown, more progress must be made. The 61 arsons last year in a city of fewer than 65,000 residents still soars far above the national average of 13.3 arsons per 100,000 residents, according to the FBI’s 2017 Uniform Crime Reports.

We’re confident, however, that with continued diligence, hard work and cooperation among key partners throughout 2019 and beyond, those encouraging numbers from this year’s report will fall even lower and Youngstown’s quality of life will rise even higher.