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Visual layout of the Phoenix Project

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By Doug Page, Staff Writer Updated 12:54 AM Monday, June 7, 2010

DAYTON — Myron Levine was drawn to Dayton because of its urban renewal plans.

“It is a good example of a national trend because of funding cuts,” said Levine, a Wright State University urban affairs professor. “Government must now work with community organizations in a bottom-up movement to create partnerships.”

Levine said he moved to the Dayton area, in part, because it mirrored that trend, including the partnerships between Miami Valley Hospital, the University of Dayton and the city in the Genesis Project that rebuilt the Fairgrounds neighborhood and the current Phoenix Project, a partnership between Good Samaritan Hospital and the city to reclaim the Fairview neighborhood.

Creating a neighborhood

The genesis of the Phoenix Project was the Ohio Department of Transportation’s plans to create the Trotwood Connector, moving traffic off Salem Avenue to U.S. 35 and the connector. Sister Carol Bauer, a Good Sam vice president, said she started by contacting localities along the Salem Avenue corridor to get ODOT to resurface Salem before it abandoned the road.

With that success, the communities started looking at what they could do to improve the appearance of the road connecting all of them. “All of that led to the Phoenix Project,” said Steven Budd, president of CityWide Development Corp., which brought together the financing for both Genesis and Phoenix projects.

Nuisance properties have been bought up, demolished and turned into green spaces. Local homeowners are getting support through a forgivable home-improvement loan program; new homeowners can get down payment assistance.

And 33 new homes are planned for the neighborhood. Eighteen are completed with 15 occupied under a lease for purchase program, according to Sister Carol. Plus Good Sam is offering incentives to staff to move to Fairview.

The new center of the neighborhood will be Fairview Commons, anchored on one end by the new pre-K through eighth-grade school and on the other by a city pool and splash park. In between will be playgrounds, basketball and tennis courts, and play fields.

The Dayton school district’s building program called for the demolition of the local elementary school and middle school, both at the edges of the neighborhood. Phoenix officials urged the school board to build the new school in the center of the neighborhood, but the board had no money for land.

So the project bought a four-block deep section, demolished the eyesore housing and donated the property to the school district in exchange for the old elementary and middle school properties.

Wright State’s Levine, who has written extensively on urban renewal, said the Phoenix Project is cited as an example of the new urban development in the field’s basic textbook, “Consensus Organizing: Building communities of mutual self interest.”

Neighborhood priorities

Sister Carol and others went door-to-door, surveying residents on needs.

The top priority, according to residents, was activities for children. That first summer, the project put up seed money for programs, including summer camps, Red Cross programs, a youth leadership program, employment skills training and family movie nights.

“We provided the seed money and expected them to become self-sustaining,” Sister Carol said.

Next on the neighborhood’s list was safety. To that end, Phoenix Project reimburses the city for two officers who are assigned to patrol an 8-block radius from the hospital.

“They get to know us,” Officer Brian Dedrick said. “They see us on a daily basis instead of rotating through. They know what we’re trying to do, and they call us.”

Self-interest

The goal of the Phoenix Project is to return the neighborhood to a working, sustainable community that can stand on its own, supported by affordable housing, safe streets and local businesses.

Along with public-spiritedness comes a healthy dose of self-interest.

Sister Carol doesn’t dispute that, but said it is her hospital’s moral commitment that drives the renewal.

“Our charge as a hospital is to create a healthier community, and that does not just mean physical health. We are the major entity in the neighborhood with 3,200 employees,” said Sister Carol, an 18-year resident of the neighborhood.

Finding the money

The role of community development corporations, such as CityWide, is to find the money and the people to make urban renewal happen. Like putting UD and Miami Valley together to make Genesis happen.

“CityWide is the best news in the last quarter century,” Wright State’s Levine said. “They can put together investment capital, especially for housing.”

The community development corporations make use of federal tax credits to lure investors, a critical part in the new urban renewal.

“Tax credits allow businesses to do what they need to,” Levine said. “The government is essentially a passive participant. The project is not run by a government agency, but by a bottom-up partnership” of local nonprofits, community groups and residents.

“When developers discovered the Genesis Project’s renewal, all of a sudden there was commercial development along Brown Street,” Budd said.

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