DaytonDailyNews.com

It's mighty encouraging to see the Historic South Park Neighborhood Association getting national recognition. It's also disheartening that so many miss what makes neighborhoods like South Park click.

South Park's neighborhood association is a finalist for a 2008 Neighborhood of the Year Award by Neighborhoods, USA. It's in the running, in part, because of something that's lost on many of us: that a vibrant, caring, strong community is built on a foundation of diversity. Carried away by the automobile and our inability to work through our differences, Americans rushed to the suburbs built by developers and planners who catered to this shortsightedness.

As a consequence, South Park and myriad other neighborhoods slid downhill through the 1970s and early 1980s. South Park today is climbing back up.

The new residents of South Park are rebuilding an 1880s framework conceived by John H. Patterson, who thought National Cash Register would benefit if the area boys were engaged in more productive behavior than hurling rocks through his factory windows, and if his workers lived nearby. He put the kids to work on projects, and South Park became an attractive neighborhood for the NCR factory workers, who lived next door to the NCR executives, who lived next door to the NCR accountants.

Today's residents don't all work for the same company, but nurses live next to laborers who live next to professors who live next to musicians who live next to struggling single moms.

"South Park has a big house, next to a little house, next to a medium house, next to a teeny house, next to a big house," said Pam Miller Howard, a South Park resident and Dayton real-estate agent.

The community's original, more organic mix "may have been messy," Miller Howard said, "but it's a wonderful mess. There's something a little more human about it."

Aaron Sorrell, manager of Dayton's Division of Housing and Neighborhood Development, said every neighborhood is reflective of prevailing thought at the time of its origin.

"South Park represents that snapshot in time where there was a more egalitarian approach — where there wasn't a separation of classes by economics that you see in modern-day developments, where you have the development that's geared to the $500,000 bracket, or starter homes geared to the $120,000 bracket. Rarely in modern developments, other than in urban areas, do those two ever mix.

"By mixing it up, you're not pitting one class against the other. You are promoting the idea of shared values: that we're all in this together; that if one of us fails, we all fail. And so the alternative is we all succeed," Sorrell said.

South Park is refusing to fail.

Last year the neighborhood completed a four-month redesign project with the American Institute of Architects. Residents also have pushed the purchase of 30 declining properties to investors. Ten were restored and featured in a Rehabarama.

The neighborhood also hosted a jazz festival, an event it wants to hold annually.

These efforts are what caught the eye of Neighborhoods, USA, which will announce its awards Friday, May 23.

Karin Manovich, president of the Historic South Park Neighborhood Association, said residents put in 7,000 volunteer hours for the AIA project. More than 100 people routinely attended meetings over four months. Total investment in the 2007 initiatives came to $3.1 million. Only $100,000 was public money.

Left uncounted are the hours and dollars quietly given to neighbors who couldn't afford a doctor's visit or who needed help getting to work.

While Manovich knows to the dime the monetary investment, the true measure of South Park's success is its social capital.

"My best friends live in the neighborhood, and they're not necessarily people of the same age or at the same station of life. I like that I have single, 20-something friends who can tell me what's in fashion. I like having senior citizens who can give me sage advice on raising children and growing older. I like the fact there are gay couples. There are academicians. I really learn from my neighbors because none of them are like me."

Sorrell said there are two sides to neighborhood development.

"There's bricks and mortar, and, honestly, that's not really hard to do," he said. The tough part is "getting neighborhoods organized, getting people to trust each other, getting people to know each other."

Sorrell likens the diversity of a neighborhood's people and housing stock to an investment. "It's like your 401(k) being diversified. You don't want to put all your eggs in one type of investment."

The mistaken notion of building economically homogenous communities to "preserve property values" has left many Americans poorer.

Meanwhile, the residents of South Park say their lives are rich. That's their ultimate reward for their work.

Chris Stewart, a photographer for the Dayton Daily News, lives in Dayton's McPherson Town.

Open house

Three homes that were rehabbed as part of an effort with the American Institute of Architects, as well as others for sale in the neighborhood, will be open to the public Sunday, May 18, from 2 to 4 p.m.

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