More than five years after St. Petersburg police fatally shot black teenager Tyron Lewis, igniting riots, the south side area where blacks took to the streets has changed, according to Deputy Mayor Goliath Davis, the former police chief.
Abandoned houses have been replaced with vacant lots and new trees. Median strips line some of the area's streets.
'We're not where we need to be by any means, but we're not where we were," the south side's native son is fond of saying.
Davis' job is to help revitalize south St. Petersburg, now with the more PR-friendly name 'Midtown," which after generations of neglect has the city's lowest property values and highest rate of crime. While the rest of the city has become more inviting — downtown's no longer empty and BayWalk is raking in the dough — the south side still remains an area tourists and citizens from the rest of the city avoid in droves.
From the beginning, south St. Petersburg was never meant to prosper. It wasn't even meant to be seen.
The African-Americans who moved there in the 1880s were essential to keeping the tourist town's coffers filled with Yankee cash — somebody had to feed the tourists, clean their rooms and wash their clothes — but it wasn't necessary for them to share in the prosperity.
What the city wanted from south side residents, said University of South Florida-St. Petersburg professor Ray Arsenault, was to stay out of sight and out of mind. 'The image was so important to the powers-that-be that they wanted to sanitize the area," he said.
Residential segregation was ingrained in public policy.
Barred from white society, blacks built their own community and it prospered. Black residents owned and operated cultural venues, restaurants and local businesses.
Then history marched on and eventually desegregation and development came.
Desegregation gave African-Americans access to other areas of the city where they could spend their wages, live and send their kids to school. Development gave them a community divided by highways, with portions razed for the city's pet projects, which usually offered little benefit to residents. The area decayed, and only election years and riots brought the promise of renewal. The promises usually proved empty and the plans soon failed.
When current St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Baker took office and appointed Davis deputy mayor, the 26th plan to rebuild south St. Petersburg was born. The question now is, can it survive?
City governments can create an environment where social services, community groups and private investors can do the work of uplifting residents and local business. However, cities often do what comes naturally to administrations beholden to wealthier inhabitants — they seek to increase the tax base by creating situations where newer, richer people gentrify a blighted area while the original residents take their poverty elsewhere.
With an estimated $90.5-million funneled into the south side since 1996, according to city officials, some residents say they can't see any real improvement beyond some slick new lampposts and flowering trees. The lights still shine on empty buildings where businesses used to be, and the trees provide shade for drug dealers.
Residents in south St. Pete still haven't reaped the benefits of the city's redevelopment prowess.
Community Is KeyRoland Anglin, a public policy professor at Rutgers University, focuses on workforce and economic development and building partnerships for community development. According to Anglin, the most important part of any economic or community development plan is the cooperation of the community. 'You really want buy-in from the community," said Anglin.
In other words, without a community working in tandem with local government, the likelihood that the city will increase its tax base — without increasing the actual quality of life for poor residents — skyrockets.
Anglin isn't talking about community participation that consists of a comparative handful of the area's residents. A good plan flows from community vision, he said. In order to assess that vision and guide it toward goals that are feasible, planners have to spend months reaching out to every resident that they can.
Davis says that he understands the concept of community involvement. Prior to establishing his initial plan, Davis and his staff held three meetings with community group representatives and religious leaders. The meeting held last October drew 70 people. About 20 were from the city fire department, police department, sanitation, city planning and so on. There were also representatives present for federal programs like Weed and Seed, a program that's supposed to pluck drug dealers from street corners then plant the seeds of prosperity.
Not counting people like activist Omali Yeshitela, who doesn't need fliers to tell him what's going on, and people who are concerned about south St. Pete but don't live there, fewer than 40 just plain folks were in attendance. Subsequent meetings drew similar numbers.
That's not quite the level of community involvement Anglin had in mind.
The city used the usual means of getting citizens to the meetings. They advertised in newspapers, on government access television, on fliers, and in mass mailings. Still, some residents say that wasn't enough. It takes a little more creativity to reach people who may not read the paper, watch government access or be on the mailing list, some residents say.
When informed that the city had put up fliers to get residents to the meetings, John Green had one question: 'Where?"
According to Green, a barber at Sports Cuts in south St. Petersburg, there are so many fliers pasted up around the city that the really important ones don't stand out.
The city should have left fliers at local businesses like Sports Cuts for customers to pick up, he said, adding that barbershops and hair salons are a good way to reach people because they offer a service that many people in the area use. Green also said that the city should have made a larger effort to get churches involved. 'Everybody here goes to church," he said.
The city did send out mailings to churches, according to city planner Shrimatee Ojah-Maharaj. But churchgoers with less politically active leadership were left out of the loop.
'What meetings?" asked Karen Akins, when approached at a local coin-operated laundry about the city's most recent effort at economic development.
Akins attends church on a regular basis, she said. While reaching out to churches and community groups is a good way to reach people, it often isn't enough. While reaching out to such groups and holding a handful of meetings might be efficient, said Anglin, the results might be marginal. Getting to know the community's wants and needs can take months, he said. Knowing the community means going to social events and knocking on doors. It means being creative, said Anglin.
Not Just Plan 26Go Davis doesn't seem to put much faith in the idea of creativity.
'You'd have had to be living in a cave not to know about those meetings," he said of those who were critical of the city's outreach. Separate meetings were held for community and church groups, he said, and they should be spreading the word.
The limited community involvement was one of the things that most bothers Maria Scruggs-Weston. She was born in south St. Petersburg and currently lives in the home where she grew up. Scruggs-Weston has run for mayor, submitted plans to redevelop the old Mercy Hospital site and responded to a request-for-proposals for someone to outline a plan for south St. Pete.
In spite of not being chosen to do the work, she said, it was still important for her to stay involved. What she encountered at the meetings was a joke, she said.
'There were people there who had no idea what was going on," Scruggs-Weston said.
And the city didn't make any effort to educate them, she claims.
No data from economic viability studies were presented and explained. So residents had no idea if any of their ideas were ones that can be supported by the community.
For example, the desire for a chain restaurant was listed in the plan. It's reasonable for some residents to want it, said Scruggs-Weston. But with an average income of about $15,000 per year, it's not reasonable to think that the area could support it.
These are just the sorts of expectations the city should refrain from building, said Anglin. 'It's a setup for disappointment because they're not making informed choices," he said.
However, the city is in a difficult situation. With so many failed attempts to revitalize south St. Petersburg, the traditional route of commissioning studies to assess the sort of businesses the community can support didn't make much sense, according to Davis. The first order of business had to be taking a look at what had already been done.
'We didn't just want this to just be Plan No. 26," said Davis.
What the city wants this time is a plan that will work. That means taking inventory of what's been done in the past and getting the community's vision of what should be done, he said. When the city develops one-, three- and five-year plans for economic development, things like economic viability studies will likely be in them.
That's all well and good, but what about the here and now?
Scruggs-Weston says the city has not exactly bent over backwards to ensure that the residents have a stake in new developments in their neighborhood. Scruggs-Weston was born at Mercy Hospital, as were many south St. Petersburg residents. However, when considering proposals to reinvent the historic site, the community wasn't given any extra consideration.
Scruggs-Weston had teamed up with a local doctor to create a plan to build a health institute on the site that the community would own. The institute would work on such issues as making healthy lifestyle changes to lower diseases that traditionally kill more African-Americans than any other group, such as diabetes and high blood pressure. In addition, the institute would offer access to health care and programs for local restaurants to learn to cook in ways that promote good health.
It sounds like a good plan but it was lacking one thing — money.
Scruggs-Weston's plan and one from Bayfront Medical Center were presented to City Council for consideration. 'Maria had an $11-million plan and not a penny of the money," Davis said. Bayfront had $3.5-million in hand.
Scruggs-Weston concedes that point. However, she claims that Mayor Baker helped secure the federal funds that comprise Bayfront's $3.5-million and he could have done the same on behalf of the community.
Trees Instead of Real AidScruggs-Weston isn't the only one having difficulty getting her community ideas to bear fruit. The Tampa Bay Action Group (TBAG) also went to Davis for help with its vision of opening a community market, a grocery cooperative that would yield 15 living-wage jobs and money to reinvest in the community. Although arranging meetings with Davis and other city officials has been easy, said Eric Rubin of TBAG, getting tangible assistance hasn't been.
Davis has spoken with TBAG, and he said the city's business development staffers would do whatever they can to assist. The city will do the same for any other community group or individual that comes up with a plan.
But is that assistance enough to get businesses off the ground?
Not according to John Green. The south St. Pete barber has gone so far as to look into getting city assistance for help starting a business. But he hasn't actually followed through. The hoops that the city has residents jump through are just too difficult, he said.
'If they're going to have these programs, they have to make them feasible to the people," he said. 'The real problem is they'd rather plant a tree than help."
To lift a community up from poverty takes more than a new grocery store and nice landscaping. There's rampant unemployment to deal with, youth that are not being educated and guided through high school, housing codes to enforce (but not too harshly so that the poor don't lose their homes), new housing to be built and old housing to be refurbished.
And then there are the problems created by other problems.
'With chronic unemployment, there are a host of attendant issues," said Roland Anglin. 'There's drug abuse, broken families and depression."
Then there's the crime factor, he said. Young men commit crimes like drug dealing and get a felony on their record. It's difficult for these men to find jobs even when their commitment to finding work and turning their lives around is strong.
In order to promote the sort of change necessary in south St. Petersburg, residents, community groups, churches and the city will all have to work hand in hand. So far there has been no effort to consolidate these groups into an umbrella organization to work toward the same goals, said Davis. Although it has been suggested, he doesn't plan to do so.
New Names, Same SegregationRevitalizing south St. Pete shouldn't be a concern of only Davis and the residents who live there. Although it hasn't always been treated that way, the south side is a part of St. Petersburg, and all city residents should have an interest in seeing the area prosper, just as they did in seeing downtown prosper.
The fact that the south side gets a new name from every administration doesn't help. Under former Mayor David Fischer, it was the Challenge Area; under Baker, it's Midtown. It's like south St. Petersburg is its own little city within the city, said Scruggs-Weston; the residents even have their own 'mayor" in Davis.
The perception is that residential segregation is still in effect and the more prosperous residents who don't live in the area needn't be concerned about it.
That perception could prove fatal, said Arsenault. With both the country and the state under the rule of the Bush brothers, he said, there's little talk about rebuilding inner cities and eradicating poverty. In this political climate, forget about revitalizing. 'I'd be surprised if they can stay where they are," said Arsenault.
That is unless the city bands together to make it happen.
That means encouraging local corporations to move businesses into south St. Petersburg in much the same way Florida Power Corp. was lured downtown, said Arsenault. 'It would have a tremendous impact if Tech Data moved in, for example," he said. 'They just have to do it and do it in a major way."
Of course, that would require everyone in the city to be on the same page, and historically that hasn't been the case, even for the residents of the south side who presumably want the same thing. Scruggs-Weston has some choice words for Omali Yeshitela, and none of them is good. NAACP President Daryl Rouson has his own ideas about what economic development should look like in south St. Pete, and they bear little resemblance to Scruggs-Weston's or Yeshitela's.
Some residents, including Davis, think that building small businesses is a way to revitalize the area. But others, like members of the Tampa Bay Action Group, think cooperatives are the way to go because small businesses tend to do poorly in the area.
Then there's politics. Mayor Baker has other constituents to appease if he wants to stay in office, and Davis' future is likely tied to Baker's.
Davis said he isn't worried about the criticism. He's just focused on the job at hand. He'll continue working with the community to develop his plan and then move forward with their vision.
'If it's something that we can't do, I'll say that we can't do it," Davis said of the community's suggestions. 'If it's something that we can do, then we will."
But without citywide commitment, Davis may be saying, 'we can't" a whole lot more than 'we can."
Contact Staff Writer Rochelle Renford at 813-248-8888, ext. 163, or e-mail her at rochelle.renford@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Jul 10-16, 2002.