[1] Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. (September 2008) “Issue Brief 2: Housing and Health.”

[2] Sampson, R.J., Morenoff, J.D., & Gannon-Rowley, T. (2002). Assessing "neighborhood effects": Social processes and new directions in research. Annual Review of Sociology, 28, 443-478.

Faces of Revitalization

By Zoe S. Erler

Ruth Shaw

Seventy-six-year-old Ruth Shaw and her husband Darrell bought their house on Eastern Street for $13,000 in 1975. She describes herself in those days as a “shy housewife” with eight children under toe. To her, she didn’t feel like a match for the rough-and-tumble neighborhood that St. Clair Place was in those days. “Everything that wasn’t fastened down was getting stolen,” she remembered, recalling that her husband, a contract painter, would empty his truck of its gas every night to make sure no one would steal it.

As the robberies continued, some of the Shaws’ neighbors began talking about stirring up a vigilante response. Not a proponent of violent action, Shaw read a blurb in the local paper that the Near Eastside Community Organization (NESCO) was looking for someone to start a neighborhood crime watch. That she could do.

The first meeting that Shaw hosted in her living room drew half a dozen neighbors, and they decided at the meeting to reconvene in two weeks. The next meeting attracted a houseful. Soon, even the police were attending. Eventually, the group realized that the thief lived two doors from the Shaws and was the grown son of the owners. The neighbors confronted him and told him they wouldn’t press charges this time, but if he ever stole from them again, they would take him to court immediately. “For years and years we didn’t have any [crime],” Shaw proudly declares.

Meanwhile Shaw and her neighbors also began fighting for all the vacant, abandoned, and damaged homes that were a result of uninterested landlords and housing foreclosures. Many of the houses had been neglected for so long that leaks, decay, and mold had made them almost uninhabitable. As a result, they were good for crime and not much else.

Around 2005, Shaw and other neighbors began reporting code violations on the worst houses to see if the city would respond. Then they began pushing to pass a bill that would prevent bad property owners from acquiring more property and shorten the time frame that sites could sit abandoned. It seemed like their efforts were going to pay off—the bill passed the Indiana State Senate unanimously and was passed along to the House.

But when neighbors learned that the bill had been removed unexplainably from the House agenda, Shaw and friends were devastated. Always the fighters, they organized a rally in front of the abandoned houses. At the rally, a couple of the state representatives the neighbors blamed for the legislative inaction showed up. Stacy Henle, another neighborhood leader recalls, “I’ll never forget Ruth standing in front of one these state representatives, waving her finger, saying, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself!’”

Eventually the bill was revisited and passed in 2006. “People think you can’t get anything done, like you can’t fight city hall,” said Shaw. “Well, yes, you can! You gotta let ’em know you know what you’re talking about, and you know this is the good that needs to be done, and don’t back down from it!”

A few years ago when her husband Darrell passed away, Shaw’s children tried to encourage her to sell her home. She wouldn’t budge: “This is my home! I’m not giving it up . . . I’m not afraid living here.” She’s glad she didn’t give up the house, because now she’s witnessing a huge transformation in St. Clair Place, the Near Eastside neighborhood most afflicted by housing foreclosures. As a part of the Near Eastside Legacy Project, St. Clair Place has been targeted for major renovations, including green alleys, new curbs and sidewalks, and bioswales. Housing initiatives include home repair programs for existing residents, new and renovated for-sale homes for new residents; and various affordable rental housing options for seniors, vulnerable families and those seeking to become homeowners. 

“I can go down the street and actually see physically that something is happening. That’s a feeling I can really put into words,” she said, getting choked up. “It’s just wonderful. It’s just great to see my community actually getting some help.” She continued, “We certainly wouldn’t even be where we are now . . . if our neighborhood hadn’t been chosen by the Legacy. It’s just wonderful that it’s happening in my lifetime.”

Valerie Davis

On May 7, 2010, a 50-something African-American woman opened the door of her very first home on East 10th Street.

Stainless steel appliances, granite countertops, a big-screen TV, and brand-new patio furniture greeted her. She ran through the house, almost hysterical with joy. After years of living on the edge, wrestling through a bout of homelessness, and sleeping on a couch in a tiny apartment, Valerie finally had acquired a place of her own.

Barely two years earlier, this same apartment building was in a derelict state. “I’d been staring across at this building outside my office, seeing drugs being sold out of there, prostitution happening, people shooting up, police raids, people [who] had no other choice for housing [who] are desperate, living in deplorable conditions,” said James Taylor, executive director of the John H. Boner Community Center.

But in March 2009, the John H. Boner Community Center in partnership with The Whitsett Group broke ground to begin turning the decrepit building into a “home ownership incubator”. Dubbed the Jefferson Apartments, the complex has been designed to prepare struggling Near Eastside residents for homeownership through what the Boner Center calls their “continuum of care.”

According to Taylor, it takes most people about seven years to take the steps to move from homelessness to home ownership. Boner staff along with Indianapolis Neighborhood Housing Partnership (INHP), works with residents, to help them  work towards homeownership.  . No renter pays more than 30%. For some, 20% is directed toward rent and the other 10% goes toward other expenses, such as paying off medical bills, building up a savings account or clearing up bad credit. After they live in the apartment for two to three years, INHP then works with clients to secure a loan through a bank. If a bank is unwilling to lend to a client, INHP will give them a loan themselves.

Working from the blueprint laid-out in the Quality of Life Plan, and with a boost from the Legacy Project, the Boner Center began renovating the 12,700-square-foot eyesore into an attractive collection of homeownership incubators. In January 2010, the building reopened. The 18 rental apartments filled up fast. And Valerie now owns one of the two condominium units.  In this way, she serves as a role model for the tenants of the building as she has overcome many if not all of the same challenges they may face in becoming a homeowner. 

For Valerie, it’s more than just the inside of the condo that feels like home. The same streets that used to cater to crime and loitering—the streets that Valerie looks down on from her third-story flat—are beginning to see some significant improvements. “It used to be that you would see homeless people outside at night,” Valerie says. “Now, people are not walking or hanging out. You don’t see it.” Going on Valerie insists, “We want quality of life over here. We don’t have a grocery store. We don’t have a drugstore . . . we have this one little gas station . . . they count us out because people don’t speak up. But we do want quality of life. We enjoy sitting on our porches, on patios. We enjoy walking our streets.”

Patrick Dubach

Twelve years ago, Patrick Dubach moved his family from the suburbs to the Near Eastside’s Holy Cross neighborhood. A 30-year veteran of the investment banking industry, Dubach felt compelled to use the gifts and skills he had developed in the corporate world to help a neighborhood in disrepair.

When he and his family first moved down there, “it was a fight—a fight to protect your property,” he says. The house he was building was broken into three times, so he would sleep on a cot with a baseball bat to ward off intruders. Things have improved since then. After successfully renovating his own home, he started the Re-Development Group and began improving the properties around him. He and his company have rehabbed 13 houses and built nine new homes in the Holy Cross neighborhood, as well as delivered their services to the Near Northside and Herron-Morton neighborhoods.

Today, Dubach is the president of Holy Cross Neighborhood Association and serves on the Board of Directors of the John H. Boner Community Center. His vision is to see a perfect blending of newcomers and old timers in Holy Cross. To him, newcomers bring passion, and old timers bring history and stability. “The people who have lived here for years and have kind of been victims of people moving out, they’re rock solid.” He continued, “So then you bring in people that might have a passion—a lot of the younger people—they want something different. We have a rich window of opprotunity with the awareness that diversity brings.” As a final note Dubach says, “I feel so much more alive since I’ve lived down here, because life is messy. But people here get involved. We roll up our sleeves and we work through issues.”