A neighborhood spirals downward, and residents feel powerless to change it. One man starts a journey to figure out how to make a difference.
Several years ago, a tall, older African American gentleman, Joseph, stopped by our office. I was engaged soon in conversation with this soft-spoken, gentle giant. This strong-looking man looked defeated and started to tear up as he recounted his story to me.
Joseph led his civic association for a poor, neglected neighborhood in the central city of a community where I lived and worked. He recounted problems in his neighborhood that had become insurmountable, and more were coming.
Unscrupulous investors had bought properties cheaply and used code enforcement and fines to harass other property owners into selling. Sadly, most of those homeowners pushed out were poor African Americans. The city rezoned this single-family home neighborhood for duplexes under pressure from land investors. Once single-family homes were divided into two houses and rented. A downward spiral of negative gentrification was occurring, tearing the fabric of a once modest but proud, historic neighborhood.
The local Housing Authority had received federal money to tear down several public housing projects throughout the city and replace them with a mix of income housing. That meant many people could not return to where they had lived for so much of their lives, and the Housing Authority gave them housing vouchers to find a place to live elsewhere. Many of those people crammed into Joseph's neighborhood into the increasing stock of low-income rental housing. Absentee landlords owned much of that housing stock and did minimal work to maintain their properties. Along with this new influx of people came an explosion in the number of children who needed more neighborhood parks, playgrounds, recreation centers, sidewalks, and programs to support them.
Joseph had written many letters to City Council and the Mayor asking for help, often receiving no response or one that was the equivalent of telling the residents to live with it, there is nothing we can do. Joseph loved his neighborhood but now watched helplessly as the problems slowly mounted, pulling their small, marginalized community into oblivion.
I agreed to bring some of my colleagues out and meet with Joseph and the neighborhood in a few listening sessions to understand the situation better. First, we did some background research on this inner-city neighborhood. The facts astounded my team and me. A poverty rate almost three times the national poverty level. 40% of the population was under the age of 18. And here was an unexpected shocker, the highest concentration of sexual predators in the county living in an area with so many kids. The neighborhood was predominantly rental housing owned primarily by people outside the city. There were significant drug and crime problems. The list of social issues was exceedingly long and troubling.
We set up the first meeting at the local recreation center. We went on a reconnaissance mission to the neighborhood a week prior. The stats and stories confirmed my worst fears—a neighborhood debilitated by poverty, crime, lack of services, and deteriorated infrastructure.
I scanned the recreation center, the space we chose for the community meeting. My first impression was a large number of kids, primarily African American. The facility was small, making it appear overcrowded and lacking many standard features in wealthier, suburban communities.
We met with the staff, and their observations verified much of what the statistics told us. Immediately painful was hearing that many of the kids were hungry, and the staff struggled to provide nutritious snacks. They had a small budget and often supplemented it with their own money.
My team regrouped back at the office. We all agreed we had to find a way to help but how. Where would we even begin? We did not have any money to spend, and it was not likely the city would give us any money either. Like Joseph, we wondered if the problems were insurmountable. Still, we had to do something.
This story was originally published on April 29, 2021.
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Next week - Part 2, Facing Forward, in this month-long series, The Little Neighborhood That Could.
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