TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/010989/01098900.043

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 4KB | 65 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.