Revitalization without Gentrification

One of the greatest benefits of being self-employed is that I am in control of my time and I am able to spend time on missions that are the most important to me. And of the tasks that I’ve taken up, this is a huge one - that of leading the effort to make the Uptown neighborhood in Harrisburg PA a much better place to live.

This has been a mission that has been on the back burner for me by necessity, due to both a full time job and a part time job renovating houses, not to mention building a new career as a real estate sales agent. But in February 2019, I left corporate America behind and launched a career in real estate investing and real estate sales full time. Having the weekdays to devote to networking and relationship-building, to research and to study has been both productive and gratifying.

So, a little background on Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania and the county seat of Dauphin County. Like almost all early cities, it was a native American settlement - called ‘Peixtin’ - formed along a river, the Susquehanna, with that mode of transportation being conducive to moving people and goods through early America. Industry boomed for much of its history, and then contracted post World War II. The flooding brought in 1972 by Hurricane Agnes was nearly a death blow, accelerating middle class “white flight” directly after, leaving the city a shell of what it once was.

Currently with a much-diminished population of under 50,000, Harrisburg is 107 miles west of Philadelphia. 200 miles east of Pittsburgh and 120 north of Washington DC. All three of these large cities are undergoing rapid transformation as Americans rediscover the convenience of city living amenities and short commutes. And all three of these cities are examples of rising housing prices displacing poor people, disproportionately African-American.

It is only a matter of time before Harrisburg undergoes its own transformation, having recently just begun to emerge from crushing municipal debt, and in fact, the transformation has already begun, a sort of slow-moving tide that has downtown at its epicenter. Old office buildings are being transformed into high end luxury apartments, and the usual signallers of gentrification, coffee shops and bakeries, have emerged, and a familiar sequence of events has begun to repeat itself.

The city of Harrisburg has an African American population of about 52% according to the 2010 census. No different from any other city, the neighborhoods are greatly stratified into races, with the greatest concentration of black people living in Allison Hill, South and East Harrisburg on the southern end of the city and Uptown on the northern end of the city. Allison Hill, I believe, is showing signs of economic vitality, with small stores and restaurants and a concerted effort to build affordable housing, thanks to the efforts of several agencies collaborating on a project called MulDer Square.

Thus far, Uptown has yet to see the same kind of investment and attention, thus the need for a long overdue overhaul.

So, what exactly is ‘East Uptown’? East Uptown I define as Maclay to Division Streets and from N 3rd to N 7th Streets. And the reason is that this area is the most blighted and the most divested and neglected section of Uptown, and was created specifically to apply for the PA Elm Street Community designation. The area includes all of Camp Curtin, plus a large section north of it. The name is intended to be an overlay designation and not a replacement for any existing community names.

I am working on pulling together a coalition of residents, businesses, churches and nonprofits to gather data and apply in 2020 for designation as a PA Elm Street community. In doing so, we can tap into several million dollars worth of grant funding for economic development; launching businesses, renovating housing, facade improvements and beautifying the streets.

So, why me? Well, I think I’ve arrived here in Harrisburg at the right time to simply end up in the right place. I’ve been in Harrisburg for nine years, and I think I’ve gained the right sort of knowledge and perspective to be someone who is effective in organizing the community to get this done; I’ve got an academic interest in urban design and economic development.

In fact, I believe economic development really is the key to the success of the community. Uptown needs to be made whole. Building housing projects and calling it a day isn’t the answer; it never was. Creating a sustainable community, an economically healthy one - is. People need a way of making money and spending money. The rest follows - community pride, engagement and desirability to live there.

Housing projects - welfare - do not cure the disease; they only treat the symptoms of that disease, which ultimately is the same structural racism that this country was built on.

We human beings, all of us to some degree, are guilty of type casting, stereotyping. And I blame the amygdala for this - the innermost, most primitive segment of our brains that is responsible for ‘flight or fright’, the brain that allowed us to survive our violent prehistory, in which every day was do or die. But we are supposedly civilised now, and yet we still give to entirely too much credence to that part of our brains that says that too often sends inaccurate ‘snap judgements’ to our cerebral cortex.

So, what this leads to is this idea in our society that a black community is always poor, inferior, uneducated, and infested with crime - summed up by the word “ghetto” if you want to be crude about it and that the only way to improve the community is to “cleanse” the area of black folks.

We need to untangle this association in our minds - because it’s a false equivalency. The ailments of the ghetto have everything to do with economics and nothing to do with race.

The most troubling aspect of all is that I believe there is a perception that black people don’t mind living in slums and ghettos. That it is “good enough”. It isn’t. So the simple goal of the new initiative is to revitalize without displacing black people. Because we, and all human beings are entitled to live in beautiful, safe and productive, prosperous places. Because Black lives do matter.

The movement is called EURI - the East Uptown Revitalization Initiative and the coalition is called CREU, the Coalition for the Revitalization of East Uptown. The logo and symbol for the movement is a black phoenix - after the mythical bird that burns every 500 years and then rises from the ashes to be reborn again, as strong as ever.

The intention is to join together and use the power of ‘collective impact’ to improve the community. And it must be the community itself that does this. It cannot be driven by a government agency. So let’s join a coalition and make some real and lasting change. Let’s rise, Uptown - like the Phoenix - from the ashes.