This is about the experiences I had trying to pull all the systems together at a neighborhood level back in the seventies and eighties.
In order to help A neighborhood of 20,000 people that's already in a period of disinvestment where property values are beginning to decline.
You really have to engage all the stakeholders that are party to that decline and convince them that allowing the neighborhood to continue to decline isn't in their best interest and that there is a solution that is possible if only they would change some of their processes and systems and thinking.
The challenge was getting all those stakeholders at the same moment to sign off and contribute to a **Development Corporation** that would be in charge of putting all their contributions into an effective program that would in fact stop the decline of the neighborhood.
I got involved in this when my wife and I moved to the Blue Hills Neighborhood of Hartford which had been a largely Jewish and Irish community for most of its history kind of houses built back in the twenties and thirties, and those were the immigrants of the time. They wanted to be close to the jobs in downtown Hartford. There were bus lines, so it made sense.
By the time Sharon and I moved in, in 1971, a lot of that older population was frightened--too frightened to remain in that community. Once they saw that more than 15% of the population moving in was African American, 15% at the time seemed to be the tipping point for neighborhoods that tipped from white to black in the United States, and that was holding true in Hartford.
The **neighborhood boundaries** were well defined. It was at the edge of the city so it had a suburban boundary on one end. It had a major urban park as a boundary on the other, and a small boundary with an already existing ghetto that was closer to the inner city. It was everyone's opinion that ghetto would spread block by block through the neighborhood over time, because that's what had always happened in African American community.
Just about the time black people moved in **absentee landlords** would start to disinvest. They would no longer keep up the property. They would continue to rent. But their expectations were that the property would just deteriorate and there were **tax write-offs** that made an incentive to get all the money you can out of rents as long as you can, and then close down the building and take a loss.
That is the history of ghettos in the US and that's what would've happened. We moved in not knowing all of that. We knew it was an emerging black community. We knew people, black people who lived there. They encouraged us to move in because we were asking them how we could create a **multiracial community**. They said, move in with us. Don't expect us to move in with you because if blacks move into a suburban neighborhood where we were they have no **support** at all. There are no black teachers, no black police force, no black hairdressers or products, no social circles, no churches that they feel comfortable in. And so they've integrated, but they are all by themselves.
We can move into a black neighborhood and we would be surrounded by black residents, but we still had a preponderance of whites in the black schools, we still had whites in the police department predominantly. We would never be feeling quite so isolated as they would in the suburb, and that made sense.
And so we made that move. It was definitely an **anti-racist move** before we understood exactly what anti-racism was. And in the process encountered the **real estate industry** and the **banking industry**, which tried to get us to move into the suburbs, not move into the city, into the neighborhood. Some of them were out, out, racist about it, some kind of had other language, like it's not a good cultural fit, et cetera. But we saw that they were discouraging whites from coming in. When we got into the neighborhood.
We could see that housing values year over year were deteriorating by 1% or 2%. While the suburbs that we had not moved into, were going up 3% or 4%. So there's a 5% net wealth gap between living where we were, the advantage of living where we were versus the advantage of living in the suburbs.