PITTSBURGH – In the heart of the Pittsburgh District lies a realty office working quietly behind the scenes to support the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ mission.
This is where blueprints and digital maps of federal lands meet the real needs of construction projects and determine decisions on the front lines of property lines.
While Pittsburgh may be known for its rivers and bridges, much of its surrounding landscape would be vastly different today without the reservoirs that hold back rain and prevent catastrophic flooding in the region.
The Pittsburgh District owns and operates 16 reservoirs and 23 locks and dams, but none of those lakes or navigation facilities would be possible without the land needed to create them.
“One of the things that makes my job meaningful is that everything starts and ends with real estate,” said Nakita Smith, a team lead realty specialist for the Pittsburgh District. “It means that no project can begin without first acquiring the necessary lands to build the project.”
Even though the Pittsburgh District belongs to the U.S. Army, its mission deals with mostly civil works, not military construction. The district builds and maintains dams to form reservoirs, locks and dams to support river navigation, and local-protection projects to reduce river flooding in places like Johnstown and Punxsutawney.
In the case of a reservoir, adding a dam means transforming a portion of a river into a lake, flooding a valley to hold more water in place. The Pittsburgh District handles more than 13,000 parcels of land associated with flood mitigation.
“Our real estate office serves as the executive agent for the land and waters associated with our mission,” said Ken Lieu, the chief of the Real Estate office for the Pittsburgh District.
His office operates in two branches, the Realty Services Branch and the Management & Disposal Branch, each with distinct functions. The former handles technical aspects like acquisitions, appraisals and certifications, while the latter oversees property disposal when it no longer serves the corps' mission. Their work also includes appraisals, land condemnation, mapping, legal descriptions, title work, licenses, permits, boundary disputes, compliance reviews and more.
Beyond its federal mission, the district leases some of its land for recreation purposes. The team manages more than 1,900 land leases known as “outgrants.” Local and state partners use the outgrants to offer camping, hunting, and outdoor sports to the public. The district had more than 5 million visitors in 2022. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is one of the nation's leading federal providers of outdoor recreation, welcoming 260 million visitors annually across 43 states.
“We make land available to state agencies like the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission, Pennsylvania Game Commission, Ohio Department of Natural Resources and other agencies for outdoor purposes, environmental stewardship , such as manage and protect wildlife and their habitats and many other missions,” said Jason Caldwell, a lead realty specialist.
The team of 20 includes a diverse group of specialists such as appraisers, surveyors, GIS professionals, and cartographers, united by their real estate expertise.
"We focus on hiring people with experience rather than with a particular education," said Jeff Horneman, the deputy chief of Real Estate and chief of Realty Services.
That is why park rangers often become great candidates to work in realty. They come with years of knowledge from working at the district’s reservoirs, becoming very familiar with their lands, boundaries and local land issues.
“They have a great knowledge of what goes on at our projects, and they understand how to coordinate with local landowners, which is key to the whole real estate office,” Smith said.
Knowing and defending the property boundaries is a major aspect of the job. The district often faces encroachment problems from property owners who build beyond their property lines. Sometimes the encroachment is due to an honest mistake, such as relying on outdated or insufficient public data.
Many land surveys are done based on a records search that goes back only 30 years, but the district built most of its dams 60 to 100 years ago. It can be costly for a property owner to acquire titles that go back that far in history. Additionally, many geospatial tax maps do not show easements, which is the buffer zone of land extending from an estate where building restrictions apply.
To help property owners avoid encroachments, the realty office spent thousands of hours consolidating data into an accurate multi-layered online map. The geographic information system map, known as the Civil Works Land Data Migration, shows all USA lands owned in the Pittsburgh District and across the country.
“If someone buys or already owns land adjoining our corps property, and if they decide to build a structure, they can use the CWLDM tool to see where existing USA easements are,” Horneman said.
Viewers can use the map to reference layers such as parcel lines, regulatory boundaries, reservoirs, channel lines and more. It took five years for Horneman and fellow team members to map every inch of their Pittsburgh territory.
"It was a huge accomplishment, a feat we're incredibly proud of," Horneman said.
They organized and uploaded thousands of data points, all to serve the public. The office continuously keeps the database consistent and accurate.
“Each of our projects might have 400 paper maps. It would take days to match up maps with one another to make a project decision,” said Horneman. “Now they are all digitized and overlayed to the same scale, combining old records and deeds.”
Their work extends beyond technical triumphs and real estate transactions. They support the public, elected officials, commercial property owners and stakeholders at all levels of government to use land to serve and benefit people.
“We spent hours upon hours, even nights and weekends, trying to pull thousands of pieces of properties together into one place,” Smith said.
Those hours of work are meaningful for the team because of their lasting effect, Smith said. Her name, and the names of her fellow realty specialists, appear on documents stored in courthouses records across the region. She finds satisfaction in knowing those documents will serve as references and help determine major land decisions in communities for decades to come.
"We're not just about land; we're about enhancing communities," Smith said.
Members of the public who want to access the Civil Works Land Data Migration can visit it online: USACE Civil Works Viewer (army.mil)
“Headwaters Highlights” is part of a story series to highlight every one of the facilities or teams that make the Pittsburgh District’s mission possible. Pittsburgh District’s 26,000 square miles include portions of western Pennsylvania, northern West Virginia, eastern Ohio, western Maryland, and southwestern New York. It has more than 328 miles of navigable waterways, 23 navigation locks and dams, 16 multi-purpose flood-control reservoirs, 42 local flood-protection projects, and other projects to protect and enhance the nation’s water resources, infrastructure and environment.