Inside the monumental effort in Wilmington to ‘Resurrect Riverside’

Markevis Gideon lived in Riverside as a child in the 1980s.

“It was a lot of crime, a lot of violence for me,” Gideon recalled recently. “For me, when I got punished, I had to sit on the front steps to try to be acclimated with the environment. But it was something I just thoroughly didn’t enjoy. I hated it.”

Wenona Sutton of REACH Riverside grew up in the Bronx, which is perhaps New York City’s roughest borough, but was stunned by life in this part of Wilmington when she arrived a few years ago.

“One of the saddest things I saw when I came in this area was the Riverside housing community,” Sutton recalled. “There are boarded-up homes, living conditions that are a norm for community members that should not have been a norm.”

“And then when you hear the stories of how long this community has been sitting and how long help has not come, it just really makes you wonder how and why something like that could happen.”

City leaders embrace ‘Purpose Built’ model

Two decades ago, though, developers tore down and rebuilt Eastlake, across the boulevard from Riverside.

Although no comprehensive project to revitalize the entire area took place, Eastlake’s transformation did become somewhat of a delayed catalyst for Riverside’s rebirth in recent years.

“What we saw in Eastlake was that it’s possible, right?” Herring said recently. “A mixed income community in a community that used to be notorious for crime and poverty. And so the work that we’re doing right across the boulevard, we believe, is going to highly complement what was done in Eastlake.”

The other seeds of rebirth were planted around the turn of the 21st century when EastSide Charter School opened on the site of a long-mothballed public school that borders Riverside.

When the students at EastSide struggled, school leaders sought ways to improve their performance.

They studied a housing- and education-focused initiative that had dramatically revitalized one impoverished area in Atlanta and was being replicated in New Orleans, Tulsa, Birmingham, Omaha and other cities.

Known as Purpose Built Communities, the redevelopments are funded with a mix of tax credits and public and private investment, plus unrelenting will.

Among Purpose Built’s financial backers is billionaire Omaha resident Warren Buffett. During a 2017 Purpose Built forum, the CEO of the Berkshire Hathaway investment company raved about the Atlanta project, which revitalized an area where barely 1 in 10 people had a job.

“There hadn’t been a building permit issued in 30 years,” Buffett told the audience. “The fifth graders — 5% were reading at grade level. It was just a disaster.”

But after several years of investment, planning, construction, and collaboration, Buffett said, “there’s full employment. There’s a mixture of incomes. There’s a mixture of races. The school scores in the top 10 of that area.”

In 2014, Mike Purzycki joined a contingent from Wilmington that visited Atlanta to see that city’s revitalized area, also known as East Lake. At the time Purzycki headed the public-private group redeveloping Wilmington’s riverfront, where the new Blue Rocks stadium is an anchor. Purzycki was elected mayor in 2016 and is finishing up his second term.

“We came back pretty enthralled by this whole concept of building a project, but building supports and community centers and schools and the works,’’ Purzycki said while standing on Bowers Street, where the old Riverside ends and the new Imani Village begins.

“It’s a magnificent example of what happens when people have this indomitable will that says we are going to do this project. And all you gotta do is look around here and if you are not impressed, you just don’t have a pulse.”

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