Contrarian: Digging More Holes

In City Hall’s defense, work has often been stalled because fear of gentrification has prompted activists in some devastated communities, specifically Strawberry Mansion and Mantua, to protest neighborhood improvements. When neighborhoods get gentrified, the working poor get shoved aside, because property values increase and they can no longer afford to live in their own homes. This was averted in Northern Liberties because the properties went up in value very slowly, having first been rented to what real estate agents call “artists” before becoming fully gentrified. (“Artists,” apparently, is a generic real estate term for white people who don’t mind having black neighbors. If there were really that many artists, we’d have a gallery opening every nine hours.) Small developers rebuild by fixing up one building at a time; after a few years, there’s a thriving mix of all income levels.

One such small developer is Stephanie Singer, of Wise Acre Real Estate, who has been quietly buying dilapidated houses in Strawberry mansion, and renovating and renting them. When I meet with her, she has just come from the Housing Authority, where she was sent away after a three-hour wait because she didn’t have the right paperwork. She doesn’t seem as furious as I would be. Dealing with city government must require a certain inner peace.

Singer doesn’t “flip” houses. Rather, she invests in them, and the run-down neighborhoods, long-term. With the housing market going soft, flipping no longer really makes sense, she explains:     “Most real estate investors and developers work on short timelines. They want to get their money — or tax credits, or tax losses — back in a year or two.” The bigger developers can’t afford to take the time to allow gradual neighborhood change.

And the big developers downtown get huge tax breaks. For small developers, it’s pay-to-play. “For a developer to get access to a property, he must get the consent of elected politicians, which is not always straightforward,” Singer says, mastering understatement.

I believe that city government really wants to clean up bad neighborhoods; it just gets distracted. It knocks down an abandoned building here, puts up a wooden fence there, then starts daydreaming about all the profit that will flow in from the Comcast Center and a revitalized downtown. Watching city government solve the problem of urban blight is like watching a recalcitrant teenager forced to tidy up the garage; he keeps throwing down his work tools and running off with his friends.

There is only one way to improve our blighted neighborhoods. Not with ambitious programs from City Hall that inevitably end in squabbling, bungling or outright greed, but with a slew of small investors, who build the city back one house at a time.

As the Democratic primary approaches, the mayoral candidates should be looking at the track record of impotence of the last five administrations and debating the serious changes that need to be made. Rather than announcing grandiose, Mao-like Five-Year Plans, the city needs to encourage small companies like Wise Acre Real Estate. Reducing the byzantine bureaucracy that creates three-hour waits, and offering tax incentives to people other than millionaires — that would be a good start. It’s time to recognize that small investors who are willing to take chances are the only ones who will ever make a difference. On his first day in office, the next mayor should appoint a red-tape-busting czar whose sole responsibility is to do nothing but actually help developers get their projects rolling. Now that would be doing something.