‘One Property at a Time’: A City Tries to Revive Without Gentrifying
#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesSee Your Local RiskVaccine InformationWuhan, One Year LaterMarjorie Perry, a contractor, is one of the builders turning an abandoned bank into an apartment building and poets cafe.Credit…Bryan Anselm for The New York Times‘One Property at a Time’: A City Tries to Revive Without GentrifyingNeighborhoods in Newark are beginning to see a flurry of redevelopment, a decade after the city’s downtown gained vogue.Marjorie Perry, a contractor, is one of the builders turning an abandoned bank into an apartment building and poets cafe.Credit…Bryan Anselm for The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyFeb. 2, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETNEWARK — Construction workers in the South Ward of Newark, one of New Jersey’s most distressed areas, are busy converting a long-abandoned bank into an apartment building and poets cafe.A decrepit mansion in the Central Ward built by a Newark beer baron before the turn of the 20th century is being revamped as a “makerhood,” a first-of-its-kind co-working residential and retail space.Siree Morris, a developer, recently finished erecting six three-bedroom apartments on a formerly vacant lot. Next up: condos made from shipping containers and an affordable-housing complex named for his slain brother, Michael, on the street where they grew up.While the downtown corridors of Newark, a poor industrial city burdened by decades of disinvestment, have been on the rebound for years, much of the rest of the city had been largely left behind.But now even the city’s far-flung residential neighborhoods are in the midst of a slow recovery.The transformation, fueled largely by a push to expand affordable housing and homeownership in this city of renters, is part of a deliberate strategy with an ambitious goal: erasing Newark’s long legacy of blight without pushing out residents, 86 percent of whom are Black or Latino.“It’s coming up the hill, into the inner city,” Arnita Rivers, a Newark resident who runs a variety store and barbershop and also works as a housing contractor, said of redevelopment.Credit…Bryan Anselm for The New York TimesThe challenge of avoiding gentrification while revitalizing a city once synonymous with urban decay is steep.More than a quarter of Newark’s 282,000 residents live in poverty and only 22 percent own homes. Many neighborhoods are still reeling from the 2018 discovery of elevated levels of lead in tap water.Streets are pockmarked by an estimated 2,000 vacant lots, haunting reminders of the middle-class exodus that began before the city erupted in flames during five days of deadly unrest in 1967 and accelerated in the decades that followed.And Newark, New Jersey’s largest city, is now struggling under the catastrophic weight of the coronavirus: One in 342 residents has died from virus-related complications.But there are also signs of hope. Side streets are alive with forklifts and hard hats. Older men gather on corners, sharing stories of days gone by and expressing optimism for even the most overlooked swaths of the city. A breakfast for homegrown entrepreneurs — an extension of monthly “men’s meetings” initiated by Newark’s mayor, Ras J. Baraka — attracted 2,500 just before the start of the pandemic.“You take it one property at a time, one parcel at a time,” said Mr. Morris, 38, who has continued to build throughout the pandemic. “That’s the only way to rebuild a community.”Fifteen miles from the heart of Manhattan, Newark’s downtown commercial district has successfully lured housing developers, a Nike factory store, a Whole Foods Market and the corporate headquarters for Audible, Amazon’s audiobook and podcast service.But in the last five years, more than 3,500 units of affordable housing have also been built or are underway, much of it outside downtown, city records show. Newark sold almost double the number of abandoned parcels at auction in 2020 as it did in 2019, and the average price of land — none of it downtown — was about 30 percent higher. Between 2015 and 2020, major crime, including murder, robbery and assault, plummeted by 40 percent.“This right here is extremely personal to me,” said Siree Morris, a lifelong resident of Newark whose company recently finished construction of two new apartment buildings on a formerly vacant lot.Credit…Bryan Anselm for The New York TimesBig neighborhood projects, like a $100 million expansion of Beth Israel Medical Center, are moving forward alongside smaller ones, including a 51-unit housing complex for seniors and the renovation of three homes that will be sold to residents of public housing using Section 8 vouchers.Even the brutal economic fallout of the pandemic is not expected to erase Newark’s gains.“They took advantage of the growth in downtown, and the strength, and they put effort into all of the wards,” said Doug Goldmacher, an analyst with Moody’s Investors Service, a financial rating agency.The Coronavirus Outbreak More
