The Riverside Community Revitalization Plan

Executive Summary

In January of 2008, the Riverside community located on the East Side of Wilmington, Delaware received the honor of being identified as a Blueprint Community. Since that time, the Riverside Initiative, consisting of a core team of eight professionals and more than 60 community stakeholders has worked towards developing an initial proposal that will ultimately lead to the development of a comprehensive community revitalization plan. The core team consists of professionals from housing, academia, the faith-based community, local government, and banking and has as its primary goal the development of a flexible process designed to promote sustainable community transformation for the Riverside community. The core team’s binding principle is that integrated and cooperative relationships among all of the stakeholders will provide long-term improvements that will persist after direct private and public investment ends.

The eight members of the core team have received more than nine months of comprehensive technical assistance and training in the area of community development from Blueprint Communities in partnership with the University of Delaware and funded by the Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB) of Pittsburgh.

The Riverside community, which is also identified as Census Tract 7 by the City of Wilmington, has a total population of a little over 4,000 people with approximately 772 total households. Of the total number of households in Riverside, 534 are owned and managed by the Wilmington Housing Authority (WHA).

The unemployment rate in the Riverside community stands at 9.3% (The national average is just over 6%) and the percentage of the total number of households in Riverside living below the poverty level is 32.7% with 93.7% of families with children under 18 years old living below the poverty level and 34.8% of families with children younger than five years old suffering the same fate.

One of the more telling statistics regarding Riverside is that 32.7% of all households in the Riverside community spend more than 35% of their total income on housing.

In addition to these startling demographics 92.2% of families with children under 18 years old and 34.4% of families with children less than five years old are headed by a single female.

It has been a primary goal from the very beginning of this effort to not only encourage WHA residents to return to the newly revitalized Riverside community, but that residents begin now, to proactively prepare themselves to return to Riverside as citizens who would contribute to the permanent sustainability of the community’s ultimate revitalization. This means making decisions about acquiring viable workforce skills and subsequent employment while simultaneously accepting the responsibility to change behaviors that in the past may have been considered to be counter-productive to the overall health and well being of the Riverside community.

On June 5, 2008, the Riverside Initiative held its first Community Stakeholder meeting with more
than 25 community residents in attendance. In addition, six Riverside business owners and operators joined the meeting, bringing the total attendance to 31.

This first stakeholder meeting was successful from a number of perspectives. First, it provided a forum in which the participants were able to ascertain the values, issues and challenges of the Riverside community.

Second, the core team was able to begin to utilize some of what it had learned in its Blueprint training, particularly information regarding the importance of ensuring that community residents are engaged, even to the point where they assume leadership roles.

Third, the core team had set some specific goals for the first meeting and we were able to accomplish those goals with what we felt was a high level of success. Those goals were to:

Create stakeholder awareness of the Riverside initiative itself, and to gain consensus for the need for revitalization

Create a process that would ensure ongoing stakeholder awareness of the revitalization concept as it changed and was re-shaped by time and involvement

Incorporate stakeholder issues into each phase of the development of the revitalization concept that had the full support and input of the overall community

Assist stakeholders in their developing understanding of the results of the overall revitalization planning effort and to understand and contribute to the development of specific next steps in the ongoing transformation strategy

The second Community Stakeholder meeting was held on June 26, 2008 and the entire meeting was dedicated to the task of developing a vision statement. After four drafts, the stakeholders, numbering more than 50 people at this second meeting, agreed to a final version.

On June 24th, two days prior to this second stakeholder meeting, core team members Eugene Rudder and Irmina Williams had traveled to a community--planning workshop in Philadelphia facilitated by the Wachovia Regional Foundation. During that workshop, the concept of action teams driven by specific issues was shared and both Eugene and Irmina brought that lesson back to Riverside. Consequently, the discussion, early in the process of developing our own vision statement had focused on a series of “community-driven strategic action plans” and ultimately led to the decision by the entire group of stakeholders to create one action team for each issue deemed critical by the community. Those action teams are:

* Housing
* Public Safety
* Senior Issues
* Youth Issues
* Workforce Development
* Business and Economic Development
* Education
* Civic Responsibilities

Each core team member assumed leadership over an action team, and each action team has met several times to discuss the issues surrounding their respective action team. The individual discussion from these meetings is ongoing and will ultimately help to craft the language of the final version of our community revitalization plan.

While the focus of this proposal will be the Housing component of our plan, we will share with you some limited information on the progress of the remaining seven action teams.

Throughout this process, the core team has committed itself to create an environment in which all stakeholders cooperatively develop and implement a transformation strategy and within that process, be explicit about desired outcomes. Our initiative also pointedly requires the engagement of broad resident participation to ensure the success of this overall community change effort.

Stakeholders in Riverside include any institution or individual that has a latent or expressed interest in the community accomplishing its mission and goals. In this Initiative, we recognize the value of stakeholders and everything that we do is driven by the reality of developing the capacity of our stakeholders to act as stewards of their community.

This Initiative is also committed to serving all those who make their home in Riverside and consider residents the most important stakeholders of all. Engaging all of Riverside’s residents and neighbors is a critical way to ensure accountability and legitimacy

Without a doubt, the most valuable lesson gained from the core team’s Blueprint Community training is the reality that the engagement of the citizens of Riverside is the most credible method of recognizing voices that possess important information on how the community revitalization process should proceed.

We have also worked hard to harness the support and participation of outside organizations whose skills and capacity can help our initiative. These entities include the City of Wilmington’s Offices of Planning and Business and Economic and Development, the Kingswood Community Center, the NE Alliance and we have begun exploratory discussions with both a local developer and architect and Christiana Care—a Wilmington based Hospital Corporation.

There are no generic transformation strategies. Revolutionary change in the physical and human revitalization of any community can stem from technological breakthroughs such as green technology, from broad societal, political, social and economic change, or from institutional innovation.

The Community Development Plan ultimately developed by the Riverside Blueprint Communities core team, in collaboration with Riverside residents, businesses and organizational stakeholders has led to the development of a comprehensive HOPE VI application that will be submitted to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on or before November 22, 2010. This application, seeking a $22 million grant will be part of a larger project of more than $86 million and will result in the construction of a new community center and more than 350 single and multi-family homes that will be a mixture of affordable and market rate homeownership and rental housing. All this began with eight people, brought together under the auspices of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Pittsburgh’s Blueprint Communities initiative.

That is really something!