SCHEER: Sad houses with tall grass, a sure sign of summer in the Falls

Jun. 25—Someone used to live there.

A man with a dog as I recall.

Not sure what happened to him.

For whatever reason, he doesn't seem to be around anymore.

You can tell by the grass out front of the house.

It's knee-high or better now.

It wasn't like that last year.

I mention it because while many Niagara Falls residents won't recognize this particular house, many will recognize one just like it because it's there now — as lawn mowing season sets in — right there on their street, on their block and in their neighborhood.

A reader called last week to complain about one on his street.

He said it's been there for weeks, the lawn uncut and unkempt.

He said he called city hall four times to no avail.

He suggested the newspaper should take a picture of the property and put it in the paper. He thought it might get the powers-that-be moving if they saw a similar property in the paper every day. He reasoned, perhaps correctly, that there'd be enough houses in similar condition across the city to cover front pages through at least September.

It's not a new phenomenon.

It remains a highly frustrating one.

To be fair, the city has a lot of grass to cut. Hyde Park — the second largest municipal park in New York outside Central Park — poses a challenge to keep tidy on its own.

Not all the houses with overgrown lots are owned by the city.

Because their private owners aren't taking care of them, if residents don't want to have to keep looking at them, the city eventually has to get around to cutting the grass and sending a bill for the services.

Ideally, everyone would just have their own sense of personal responsibility and the homeowners and landlords would all cut the grass as needed all the time.

Obviously, this Utopian world of manicured lawns can only be the stuff of dreams.

In reality, uncut grass, not unlike streets that aren't plowed in the winter, deals a psychological blow to a community that can ill afford to keep taking them.

Having one or two or five overgrown parcels promotes the idea that Niagara Falls can't get important jobs done, and can't pay attention to the details.

For a place that's supposed to be working on being one of the great tourist destinations in all the world, that's a problem.

For residents and business owners, having to see the same stuff over and over, year after year, is disheartening, troublesome, aggravating even.

I am consistently amazed at just how often we fail to discuss such important things.

No, it's not public safety, not police officers rushing into emergency situations or firefighters battling dangerous blazes.

They are still — lawn mowing and snow plowing both — keenly important municipal tasks that, along with road and sidewalk repair, rank at the very top of the needs lists identified by most constituents every time.

You'd think, on the snowplowing front at least, Western New York — home to Lake Effect Buffalo — would lead the league in tending to the task safely, efficiently and effectively.

From a purely economic standpoint, there are potential jobs here for people.

Driving a riding lawnmower or running a snowplow for the city should not be second-class citizen work done for low wages.

Maybe increasing the compensation for both jobs would get them done better and sooner.

Maybe the answer is just more — more employees and more equipment needed to do all the work.

Whatever has to happen has to happen, otherwise, the city will continue to get what it almost always gets this time of year: Too many places where the grass is too high for the neighbors' liking.

The sad house with the tall grass at the end of my block is not an outlier in the Falls.

It's a symptom of a larger sickness, the diseases known as complacency, failure to plan, failure to innovate and failure to prioritize important jobs people — regular people who pay tax bills — need to be done not someday but today in the best ways possible.