TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/010989/01098900.043

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 3.6 KB | 77 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 22

Building on Rock, Not Sand


"Crime is a subtle form of revolution. Every robbery is
somebody's personal riot"


    On May 17, 1980, all hell broke loose in Liberty City, Fla.
A Tampa jury acquitted four white policemen in the beating
death of a black insurance agent, and the heart of Miami's
black community burst into violence. Three days later, 18 people
were dead, 1,100 arrested,  and some $100 million in property
destroyed.

    The riots left Liberty City among the least redeemable
pieces of real estate in the nation. No private investor in his
right mind would risk opening a business on Seventh Avenue,
where a looted Pantry Pride grocery hulked on the corner, a
symbol of the destruction. Unless local officials did something
"very different and dramatic," warned Otis Pitts, Liberty City
would erupt again.

    In the end it was Pitts who led the way. A tall, warm
welcome of a man, Pitts, 46, knew the neighborhood as no
outsider could. He had grown up there, walked its streets as a
city cop and volunteered in a local youth service agency. Over
the years he had come to understand  that all too often the poor
in the inner cities live more like inmates than citizens.
Liberty City had health clinics and community centers and every
kind of social service agency. But it had no supermarket for
60,000 residents, and no new family housing had been built in
20 years.  Liberty City's needs were the needs of any
neighborhood: a decent place to live, a grocery store, a
barbershop. If young working families regained faith in the
neighborhood, Pitts believed, they would become part of its
healing.

    So in 1982, without the least background in business, he
founded the TACOLCY Economic Development Corp., Inc., now one
of the nation's most successful nonprofit community developers.
He did not simply want to build nicer ghetto housing; he wanted
to build an economy. "It was real new for us," he admits,
"because it was an economic approach to solving problems, as
opposed to social intervention."

    Pitts did not look for cheap victories. He picked as his
battleground the commercial strip along Seventh Avenue, already
partially abandoned before the riot and utterly ravaged after.
With the help of a Ford Foundation spin-off called the Local
Initiatives Support Corp., and some local and federal money to
secure the necessary loans, TEDC transformed the Pantry Pride
site into Edison Plaza, a $2.1 million shopping center with
thriving stores and offices, anchored by a Winn-Dixie
supermarket.

    There followed a McDonald's, the aptly named New Era
Pharmacy and New Beginning Shopping Center. Then a police
substation, a community college satellite and a tide of
renovations by local merchants. Pitts meanwhile cleared the way
for building the $5.7 million Edison Towers, new housing in the
heart of the riot area, and is now at work on another housing
initiative, Edison Gardens. The speed of the turnaround, says
LISC's Sandra Rosenblith, was dazzling. "This is the way
community development is supposed to work," she says, "but I've
never seen it happen so clearly, or so fast."

    Given the friends and victories he has won, Pitts these
days is surrounded by people wanting to help him. They want to
make him rich, or they want him to run for office. "One of the
things that happens in poor communities is that  there's a
tendency for competent people to get skimmed off," he says. "But
this area needs people who are willing to hang around for a
while." With so much left to do, Pitts is staying right where
he is.