Can Anything Good Come out of ’Hood?

What a unique coalition of Atlanta churches and civic leaders is doing to resurrect a community.

“Rebuilding the Ghetto Doesn’t Work,” declared the cover of a recent New York Times Magazine. The article’s author, Nicholas Lemann, goes on to offer a compelling history of the ambitious failures of government-initiated community and economic development in the crime- and poverty-stricken inner cities of the U.S. Indeed, from President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty to the Empowerment Zones of the Clinton administration, federal legislation seems unable to provide solutions to our nation’s urban crisis. But Christians cannot content themselves with despair. A coalition of churches, businesses, and city leaders in the Atlanta community of Summerhill have found reasons for hope. This dynamic venture in urban (and spiritual) renewal could well be a model for other U.S. cities.

At dawn on September 18, 1990, thousands of enthusiastic Atlantans crammed into downtown Atlanta’s underground plaza. There they gathered around a huge screen to await the live, satellite broadcast of Olympic Games president Antonio Samaranch’s naming of the host city for the 1996 summer games. Atlanta was one of six cities in the running. As Samaranch announced Atlanta’s selection, the crowd exploded in celebration, filling the plaza with deafening cheers and upraised arms.

Meanwhile, just a few miles south in an inner-city neighborhood called Summerhill, residents were quietly gearing up for the usual daily grind of their menial jobs or settling in for another laconic day of unemployment. Few had the slightest idea about how the announcement would affect their lives. Little did they realize that the land next to the Atlanta Braves’ baseball stadium on the western edge of Summerhill had been targeted by the Atlanta Olympic Committee as the site for the new 85,000-seat Olympic stadium. That plan would require demolishing dozens of houses to make room for more stadium parking.

Only 30 years ago Summerhill had been a bustling, integrated, middle-class neighborhood. But major construction projects in the sixties—two new highways that bisected the one-square-mile community and the baseball stadium, which required leveling over 2,000 homes to turn a large percentage of the neighborhood into a parking lot—had driven many families, institutions, and businesses away. As the majority of Summerhill’s middle-class families left, the vacuum was filled by social predators such as drug dealers, thieves, and slumlords. Now, with the approach of the Olympic Games, Summerhill was confronted with a potential reenactment of what had decimated it in the first place.

But unbeknownst to Atlanta’s businesses, politicians, and city planners, who were all bathing in the glory of the Olympics announcement, a grassroots coalition of urban and suburban churches, local businesses, and a white evangelical social-services organization had plans of their own: plans to save the dying community of Summerhill from further disintegration.

As part of an ambitious, holistic plan that included the rehabbing of several hundred homes, mixed-income housing, tutoring services, community policing, new parks, a business district, and even new street signs and mailboxes, a fresh development map of Summerhill was drawn up.

The Summerhill coalition knew that the Olympic committee’s plans would be the coup de grace to an already wounded neighborhood. They were determined not to let it die.

Life from death

Ironically, the Summerhill coalition was birthed at the funerals of long-time residents. Though many had left Summerhill during the flight years, the emotional ties to the neighborhood remained strong. The deaths of well-known figures in Summerhill would inevitably bring home its diaspora. And each time the alumni drove up the familiar streets, they were shocked by Summerhill’s devastation. From a population of 39,000 in 1968, only 2,700 were left. And those residents took in an average annual income of $6, 500, with 70 percent receiving public assistance. The boarded-up, ramshackle homes, interspersed among 720 vacant lots, were the physical evidence of total economic and social deterioration.

As the pastors of Summerhill’s churches preached at the funerals and met together at several ministers’ prayer breakfasts, they began to ask if God could rescue them from their plight. “We had hope that if we made ourselves available through faith, God would restore our community,” says Edmond Kemp, pastor of Summerhill’s Alexander Memorial African Methodist Episcopal Church.

To help the neighborhood regain a historic sense of what it used to be, in 1988 several of the area’s churches participated in a plan to bring back as many of the African-American former residents as possible for a reunion. Invitations to the reunion were sent out across the country for a party to celebrate Summerhill’s heritage. But as the more than 5,000 people showed up, the focus shifted to the future.

Challenged by the preaching of some of the neighborhood’s pastors, “we felt we had to give something back,” says Douglas Dean, former state assemblyman in the Georgia legislature and a Summerhill native son. With the $600 left over from the reunion fund, the black grassroots organization, Summerhill Neighborhood, Inc. (SNI), was created with the stated mission to “revitalize Summerhill into a vibrant, growing, and self-sustaining community.”

While SNI is not an explicitly Christian organization, all of its founders were leaders or members of Summerhill’s churches. And it was the churches that gave SNI its mandate.

Dean, who was named SNI president, talks about the little old ladies left behind in Summerhill who, as they witnessed their community’s decay, began at their respective churches to pray for its restoration. Says one coalition member, “Summerhill’s residents were saying, ‘White politicians can’t save us, and they’ve proved it. Black politicians can’t save us, and they’ve proved it. No one can save us but ourselves by the power of God.’ ”

Those faithful senior citizens would soon begin to see the fruits of their prayers.

A risk of faith

SNI quickly partnered with FCS Urban Ministries (FCS), a mostly white evangelical social-services ministry based in the neighboring community of Grant Park. Bob Lupton, FCS’s founder and president, is one of the few white members of Summerhill’s Southwest Christian Center, a middle-class black church that intentionally relocated from the suburbs to Summerhill. Lupton had also moved from suburban Atlanta to mostly black Grant Park a decade before. After several years of building up a comprehensive social-services and economic-development ministry in Grant Park, Lupton set his sights on Summerhill.

During its five years of working in Summerhill, FCS has established a medical center, a low-cost clothing store, a daycare center for the children of poor working parents, and a housing-rehabilitation program.

SNI was aware of FCS’s work and, though it was encouraged by the resources Lupton could muster, was concerned about the unintended consequences their housing rehab would have on the overall community. “The neighborhood needed to have a voice in those efforts,” says Dean. He and others were especially worried about the concentration of the new low-income homes on a single street, which could potentially become a ghetto within a ghetto. “We wanted a mixed-income redevelopment effort—where rich, middle-class, and poor families live side by side—because you cannot rebuild a community on the backs of the poor.”

Once SNI approached FCS, the organizations realized that theirs were common visions. Soon they developed a working partnership where FCS’s housing development efforts in Summerhill would be under the direction of the black SNI. It was agreed that all development work had to be approved by the neighborhood’s residents, which were represented by SNI.

FCS’s and SNI’s arrangement was bracketed by the participation of several churches within and outside of Summerhill. Mostly through Lupton’s connections, several affluent suburban churches, including North Avenue Presbyterian and Second Ponce de Leon Baptist Church, joined the effort. With these congregations came CEOs and business entrepreneurs eager to see how their business acumen could be married to their faith. This interaction between the suburban and inner-city churches is also creating many opportunities for racial reconciliation, including regular pulpit, choir, and congregational exchanges (see CT, Oct. 4, 1993, p. 22).

SNI’s vision and the momentum of its work stimulated Summerhill’s churches to proceed boldly with many plans of their own. For instance, Martin Street Church of God, Summerhill’s oldest church, embarked on a program to build a much larger, modern sanctuary to replace its 104-year-old building. Alexander Memorial began after-school programs for latchkey kids, a youth basketball team, and is working toward establishing a full-service senior citizens center. “Community development needs to be people centered,” explains Southwest Christian Center pastor Richard Berry. “And this can only be rooted in the church. While programs come and go, the church is always there to focus on people and needs.”

As the churches moved into action, SNI lobbied some of Atlanta’s most successful black businesspeople to donate their time, money, and expertise. Through these connections the coalition recruited Germán Cruz, a Colombian-born architect and urban planner, to formalize its multifaceted plan for Summerhill’s revitalization.

Cruz gave up a $65,000-a-year job as vice president of a large Atlanta engineering company to dedicate himself to Summerhill’s development. Though his résumé included working on the design of such high-profile projects as Chicago’s Grant Park, he felt empty. “I was a man without Christ,” recalls Cruz. “But then I came to believe in him, and out of that came the conviction that a Christian has to be a Christian not just on Sunday, but on Monday through Saturday as well. This was the kind of opportunity to serve I had been seeking,” Cruz says as he sits in his cramped home office. A sign hangs prominently over his desk. It says simply, “Faith involves risk.”

Let the games begin

When the city of Atlanta, the Olympic Games Committee, and the Atlanta Braves unveiled their plan for the new Olympic stadium, which required the razing of numerous Summerhill homes to create 15,000 parking spaces, the obscure Summerhill coalition stepped forward, saying, “No way.” The Olympic organizers were incredulous. The most prestigious sporting event in the world was coming to town, and a bunch of poor black people were telling them what to do?

To work out their differences, the Olympic planners met with Summerhill’s representatives. In those meetings, the Summerhill coalition presented their master plan—complete with drawings, development philosophies, and blueprints. To the surprise of the Olympic planners, they faced a group convinced it was doing God’s work with a plan rooted in the belief that people are more important than money. But just as surprising to the planners was the sophistication of the group’s plan and its sound business logic.

Four concurrent development efforts lie at the heart of the Summerhill plan. The first effort calls for an intentional mixed-income development to be implemented throughout the 70-block neighborhood of Summerhill. This effort’s estimated 300 new homes would be built by a combination of volunteer labor, financial donations, low-interest loans, and traditional bank financing.

To provide incentive for suburban families to move into the inner city, Second Ponce de Leon Baptist and North Avenue Presbyterian churches are offering low-interest mortgages for homes in Summerhill. So far, 20 families have signed up.

The second effort, on which much of the master plan hinges, is to lobby the Atlanta Housing Authority and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to make an unprecedented decision—revert Summerhill’s public housing, the 60-unit Martin Street Plaza, to tenant ownership. With at least four children killed there in the past two years in mostly drug- and gang-related incidents, the Summerhill coalition is convinced ownership would empower Martin Street tenants to flush out the housing project’s drug dealers and rehab its seriously deteriorating units.

The coalition has already raised more than $500,000 for improvements on the properties after they are given to the tenants, including $150,000 in pledges from major businesses such as Amoco and Home Depot.

The Summerhill coalition’s unique request for tenant-owned public housing is showing promise. It has already caught the attention of the Clinton administration. And HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros, who visited Summerhill twice, has vowed to make it a top priority. The coalition still awaits a final word on the matter.

The third effort involves the redevelopment of Summerhill’s old business district, which faces what will be the Olympic Stadium and the current Braves baseball stadium with a commercial/residential zone several blocks long. Already the coalition has secured a $750,000 contract from Coca-Cola to place murals advertising Coke on a large, SNI-owned apartment building that faces what will be the new Olympic stadium.

Reweaving a community

The fourth development effort specifically addresses quality-of-life issues such as good schools, job opportunities, attractive parks, community security, spiritual development, and a neighborhood identity. This is the key to what the Summerhill coalition refers to as the “reweaving of a community.” Says Lupton, “A rewoven community is an economically viable area where people can raise healthy families.” This concern for a cohesive community has motivated Cruz to design everything from landscaping to mailboxes to give Summerhill a community identity system other than graffiti.

As part of this reweaving, the Summerhill coalition is working intensely with neighborhood schools to improve their curriculum. And suburban churches are offering volunteer tutors for the children and raising funds to augment the schools’ meager resources. Developing job skills is also a high priority, with a special focus on the needs of Summerhill’s many single-parent households. The coalition has already conducted a community-skills inventory and secured a good amount of money from different sources for vocational training.

Selling their plan to the city and the Olympic committee required much negotiation. But after much haggling, the Summerhill coalition was able to convince the Olympic organizers to alter their parking lot plans dramatically so that they were congruent with Summerhill’s master plan. They also obtained a commitment that the Atlanta Braves’ old stadium would be razed after the Olympics to create a public park in its stead, got a community member on the Atlanta Olympic Games Committee board, and secured a guarantee for a fixed percentage of parking revenue from sporting events.

Despite the working relationship the coalition has established with the city, the Olympic committee, and the Braves, the different parties’ priorities and values still continue to clash. Each week presents another series of battles for Summerhill’s residents that will go on even after the Olympic Games. But the coalition is hopeful. “We have seen one miracle after another,” says Ellen Jean Hailey, chair of SNI’s 17-member board. “It is clear to us that this is in God’s hands.”

To date the coalition has built 100 homes in the neighborhood. And using a $3 million line of credit offered by Amoco, they are pressing hard to buy every abandoned and neglected property in Summerhill. Interestingly, an increasingly difficult challenge is coming not from the city or its Olympic planners but from absentee landowners who become more reluctant to sell their abandoned property as they see its value going up because of neighborhood renovations. In an odd way, the Summerhill coalition would probably like to see more and more of this type of problem.

Faith enterprise zone

Beyond all the talk of acquisitions, title companies, and mortgage points, the Summerhill coalition’s leaders invariably come around to talking about the spiritual values that undergird their whole enterprise.

“The reason we can bring all these different groups together,” says an excited Douglas Dean, “is that we built the plan around the community’s values, which are rooted in Christianity. We’re not just talking about changing people’s physical environment; we’re talking about spiritual change, changing people’s hearts. We have to revitalize the community on the same basis it was started, where churches set the moral principles that made this a place people wanted to live.”

Adds Martin Street Church of God pastor Manuel Holston, “Even if we meet all of Summerhill’s physical needs, if we don’t address the spiritual needs, people will not be whole.”

Bob Lupton insists that the plan could not work without people of faith at its core. “Successful blacks and whites relocating intentionally in the community with the desire of being reconciled to each other is clearly a spiritual issue,” he says. “Of all the usual reasons why people select their homes, absent is proximity to racial diversity and where they’re needed most. Our motivations clearly grow out of a belief system that says I need to be rightly related to my neighbor.” This is something that Lupton refers to as a “theology of community,” which he says is rooted in Jesus’ answer to the question “Who is my neighbor?”

SNI chair Hailey likes to remind her board members that “we’re not here by choice. We have been commissioned to do God’s will.”

For this reason, coalition members often remember how one of SNI’s founders, the late Pete Greenlea, always wore a huge, colorful button on his coat lapel intended to keep them focused on the basics. It said, “Prayer is the answer.” It is something that Summerhill’s little old ladies never forgot.

Paul Brand is a world-renowned hand surgeon and leprosy specialist. Now in semiretirement, he serves as clinical professor emeritus, Department of Orthopedics, at the University of Washington and consults for the World Health Organization. His years of pioneering work among leprosy patients earned him many awards and honors.

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