Hope that Sustainable Change is Possible

Neighborhood leaders say The Charlotte Observer helped spark many of the changes with its “Taking Back our Neighborhoods” series, a civic journalism project designed to explore the problems — and potential for change — in 10 of the city’s most crime-scarred neighborhoods.

As Seversville leaders can attest, The Observer didn’t sugar-coat the situation. In extensive 1994 coverage, the newspaper showed readers the utility workers who refused to enter the neighborhood at night without a police escort. The drug peddlers who painted dollar signs on the street to lure buyers. The scantily clad prostitutes who flagged down customers on Rozzelles Ferry Road.

But The Observer also told of the law-abiding citizens who sheltered their children from trouble and searched for ways to recapture their community. The Observer and media partners WSOC-TV and WPEG radio sponsored town meetings, giving neighborhood residents a chance to talk to key city officials about crime, blighted housing and other community problems. The newspaper also publicized different ways Charlotte residents could help, for instance, printing lists of things Seversville residents said their neighborhoods needed.

More than 175 individuals, groups and businesses in the community responded. One woman donated money to send 30 kids to summer camp. Others helped buy uniforms for a neighborhood drill team. First Union bank put up the temporary recreation center. Now neighborhood children flock to the double-wide trailer to learn African dance and get help with schoolwork.

The non-profit Charlotte-Mecklenburg Housing Partnership renovated more than a dozen dilapidated mill homes on Katonah Avenue, once one of Charlotte’s meanest streets. It has already sold most of them to first-time home buyers earning less than 80 percent of Charlotte’s median income. The partnership hopes for a home-ownership rate of 65 percent in the heart of Seversville.

After the intense media scrutiny, government officials razed abandoned houses that had been magnets for drug users and prostitutes. And it began improving the streets and planting trees.

Police got busy too. Equipped with binoculars, they took to the woods and spied on drug dealers. Posing as johns, they clamped down on the prostitution trade. Wielding arrest records, they pressured landlords to evict tenants who flouted the law.

Gradually, more and more residents joined the crime-fighting campaign — people like Barbara Blackmon, who until last year rarely called police. Now she dials 911 at the hint of trouble.

“Before, if you called the police, people would say, ‘You’re dipping into my business. You need to stay out of it,’ ” Blackmon said. “Now they’re glad if you call the police.”Don Waters, a community police officer who patrols Seversville, has a theory about what changed. “Maybe the residents realized there were more people than they thought on their side — that the good people were the majority,” he says.

Dozens are responsible for the community’s revival. But Wallace Pruitt, who heads the Seversville neighborhood association, says the media put much of it in motion. “With the news [media] coming in and calling it the way they saw it, I think that was a huge plus,” Pruitt said.

Pruitt and his neighbors know their work isn’t done. Crack and money still exchange hands in a few homes. And armed robbers still haunt the neighborhood’s commercial strip.

But the law-abiding residents are calling police, attending neighborhood meetings and cooperating on projects that will make a difference — from installing peep holes in the front doors of elderly residents to planting a community garden.

Odds are, Charlotte officials will be hearing more from Seversville, Pruitt says. “They found out we’re not a neighborhood that’s going to take ‘no’ for an answer.”