Originally posted at the Post and Courier (https://www.postandcourier.com/northaugusta/news/investing-in-the-disinvested-unlikely-partnerships-political-risk-help-revitalize-augusta-neighborhoods/article_cfc67e52-3ae2-11ed-8893-c740a1f068f4.html)

Editor’s note: This article is the second in a two-part series addressing a gap in affordable housing in the Central Savannah River Area and possible solutions.

Seven years of “blocking and tackling”; seven years of risky money and hard conversations.

But it paid off.

Seven acres of blighted property in Augusta’s Bethlehem/Laney-Walker neighborhood were redeveloped into a gleaming apartment complex of some 220 units right at the junction where one of the city’s most highly invested areas — its medical district — meets with one of its most highly disinvested areas, an area where more than 40% of its population lives below the federal poverty line.

The Beacon Station project was completed in 2019 and continues to fulfill its obligations to the city of Augusta, which had floated a $37.5 million General Obligation bond in what developer Jakob Von Trapp said might be the first of its kind master lease agreement between a municipality and a developer.

Beacon Station could serve as a case study for public-private collaboration in the revitalization of disinvested communities like Laney-Walker, or even just for public-private collaboration vis-à-vis housing more generally, industry experts are saying.

“It was a huge political risk,” said Von Trapp. But it was also “one big, courageous decision by the government, at scale, in a prominent location” that helped create more economic activity in the neighborhood.

Von Trapp was one of many industry professionals who attended the National Community Development Association’s (NCDA’s) Region IV conference in downtown Augusta earlier this month.

Michael German, a former representative to the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for Alabama, was another attendee, and he had much to say about the state of his own childhood neighborhood in Montgomery, recalling a street of boarded up homes.

“I think that’s a reality we see when we go through a lot of places,” he said. “How do we salvage these communities where people live?”

About a mile and a half north of Augusta’s Beacon Station is another public-private investment at another corner of the city’s medical district.

The $33.5 million HUB for Community Innovation opened at the corner of Chafee Avenue and Fenwick Street in June.

Its purveyors included such disparate groups as Augusta National, Augusta University, the Community Foundation for the CSRA and the Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Augusta. Its funding was a mix of corporate investment, federal grant dollars from the Choice Neighborhoods program and New Market Tax Credits.

The city of Augusta has been pushing to reverse years of disinvestment in the predominantly African American Laney-Walker neighborhood and the historic mill district of Harrisburg, which lost much of its economic power when the textile industry vacated the U.S. en masse during the late 1990s.

Data for the 30901 Zip Code, which includes Augusta University and the Laney-Walker neighborhood, show that 43% of the population lives below the federal poverty line. Median household incomes are $21,300 and the area has a housing vacancy rate of 21.4%.

A map of 30901 that shows the area’s level of distress is a stark image.

A Distressed Communities Index is a score given to an area by analyzing such demographic statistics as housing vacancy, joblessness and percent change in jobs available.

The map of the 30901 Zip Code is nearly all a bright orange, considered 99.7% distressed — except for a tiny white smudge in the middle: Augusta University.

The Medical College of Georgia, the Dental College, research buildings, a cancer center, “literally billions of dollars of investment,” said Ian Mercier, president and CEO of the MCG Foundation.

All of it can be seen from a pin drop on Google Maps. “And you can spin that [view] and look on the exact opposite side of the same street, and you’ll see 800-square-foot, thousand-square-foot houses that are falling apart. Bad lighting, bad streets, grass that’s this tall...a lot of the houses are boarded up. And it’s like that all around this institution.”

“Part of my responsibility is to get our institution to understand that the community right outside our front door is as important as any community we’re [already] serving and maybe more so,” said Mercier.

A second case study: HUB for Community Innovation

Mercier and the MCG Foundation are together one of the three groups involved in the HUB Augusta Collaborative that got the ground turning soon after Augusta National Chairman Fred Ridley announced in 2020 that the golf club and its corporate partners would be investing $10 million into the project.

Also part of that collaborative are Shell Berry, president and CEO of the Community Foundation for the CSRA; and Kim Evans, president and CEO of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Augusta.

Expanding beyond the Laney-Walker area to Augusta as a whole, the federal poverty rate is 23% or slightly higher than the state as a whole, but more than twice the U.S. average of 11.6%.

“Not only is 25% living below the poverty line, [but] we have a lot of economic growth happening in the Augusta area, and you simply cannot fill the jobs of all the companies that want to move here and be here if you eliminate 25% of your population in access to those jobs,” said Berry.

Access to those jobs might be found in basic transportation — a real pinch point for many in the area, said Berry — or good healthcare, something that many of us might take for granted but that is beyond reach for others, she said. What it comes down to, said Berry, is that “agency over their own lives is elusive.”

For those involved with the HUB, the project is meant to boost that personal agency by improving access to educational supports, healthcare and nutrition (both through food itself and through cooking classes). Augusta University Literacy Center and RISE Augusta each have space at the HUB. So do Harrisburg Family Healthcare, Augusta Locally Grown and the Boys and Girls Club.

Community development, said the Boys and Girls Club’s Evans, is more than greenspace and sidewalks and nice restaurants. For the Laney-Walker and Harrisburg neighborhoods, just a grocery store would be nice: Kroger left in 2017, and that void hasn’t yet been filled.

Community development is also about getting to the point where “historic residents are able to stay in our downtown core,” said Berry.

Revitalization: how to make it happen?

How does the reinvestment of a disinvested community happen? By taking a political risk and by making a courageous decision—at least that was the summary that Beacon Station’s Von Trapp gave.

It was also the summery given by those of the HUB Augusta Collaborative, along with the advice to “blur the lines” and eliminate those silos of business so as to forge unlikely partnerships.

“Any of us can sit in a position and have some authority, whether you deserve it or not, to make decisions about large swaths of land or communities or what have you… this becomes a great opportunity to royally screw up,” said Mercier.

The MCG Foundation that Mercier leads has one purpose: to create and maximize resources for Augusta University (and that’s a “sort of closed-type bubble,” said Mercier).

Right now, Mercier and the Foundation are looking at nearly $200 million worth of land still to develop around the 15th Street corridor.

“I still have a $200 million-plus commercial development to build for the institution,” he said. “We’ve got to be willing to blur the lines between ‘what does housing and community development and creating affordable housing for people have to do with medicine?’ It has a lot to do with it, if you blur those lines and really take a look at it.”

Part of the funding for the HUB came from a Choice Neighborhoods grant. That kind of funding not only helps cover costs but also, because it requires extensive community input, can be protection against gentrification.

“We know that the neighborhoods change and that the needs of the residents change, and we have to have enough flexibility built into the structure so that we can continue to evolve and adapt to the needs of our community,” said Berry.

For Mercier, Berry and Evans, investing the disinvested also takes a special kind of philanthropy. “Place-based” philanthropy, Berry called it.

It’s common to “spread ourselves across a lot of things and never really see an impact,” she said. But by defining an urban core as a place that “collectively wants to see change,” like Laney-Walker and Harrisburg, “you can get concentrated work done that’s this radical and this visionary.”