Forging a Consistent Vision: The People Who Shaped Manchester's Renewal, 1964–2014

ABSTRACT

This article examines how Pittsburgh's Manchester neighborhood, a historic African American community located on the city's North Side, fought against macroeconomic forces and internal challenges to stabilize its population, improve its physical environment, and stimulate private investment over the course of fifty years, from 1964 through 2014. Manchester's transformation was the product of three key factors: (1) capacity in the form of strong, sustained leadership; (2) fealty to a long-term vision of the neighborhood as a stable and upwardly mobile African American community; and (3) control over land and resources, especially the involvement of the private sector, to bring the vision to life. These elements—leadership, vision, and resources—separated Manchester from other black neighborhoods as it became a national model for community revitalization over the course of fifty years.

It is a cold, sunny day on January 14, 2010. A crowd gathers on an abandoned lot in Pittsburgh's Manchester neighborhood for a groundbreaking. A host of dignitaries assembles and, with shovels in hand, take the ceremonial “first dig” of the project's construction. Thirty-one houses will be built atop a 4.3-acre remediated brownfield, formerly an industrial site known as the American Electric Company and now renamed Columbus Square, by the Manchester Citizens Corporation (MCC). New homes will be constructed by Fourth River Development Company. Local banks, the city's Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA), and state agencies financed the project. The new development is the crowning achievement for a neighborhood that fought for more than fifty years to beat back urban renewal plans, shut down nuisance bars, restore its Victorian rowhouses, and construct new homes to become an attractive historical African American neighborhood.

Fifty years ago, such an image was unthinkable. Long before Pittsburgh's Manchester neighborhood became a model for historic preservation, it was a “blighted slum” slated to be demolished. The URA, the same city agency that now underwrites Manchester's new future, sought to demolish the badly ruined neighborhood in the 1950s. Banks, which stood shoulder-to-shoulder with neighborhood leaders in 2010, redlined the neighborhood as recently as the 1990s (redlining is a process where banks refuse to lend to a neighborhood based on its racial or income characteristics). Also, government officials who today tout the success of historic preservation were complicit in the neighborhood's blight designation in the 1950s and 1960s.¹

Several interlocking themes in this article tell the story of how an historic African American community, Pittsburgh's Manchester neighborhood located on the city's North Side, fought against macroeconomic forces and internal challenges to stabilize the population, improve its physical environment, and stimulate private investment from 1964 through 2014. Manchester's transformation was the product of a combination of factors that include: (1) capacity in the form of strong, sustained leadership; (2) fealty to a long-term vision of the neighborhood as a stable and upwardly mobile African American community; and (3) control over land and resources, especially the involvement of the private sector, to bring the vision to life. These elements—leadership, vision, and resources—separated Manchester from other black neighborhoods as it became a national model for community revitalization. In the process of this transition, Manchester adapted to the changing federal policy environment and contributed to the national conversation about public and private support for neighborhood self-sufficiency.

The transformation did not happen by itself. Determined leaders, dozens of board members, and resilient neighborhood residents developed and implemented a vision for Manchester's revitalization. The cast of characters include Betty Jane Ralph, the longtime MCC board chairwoman, who fought mightily on behalf of the community from the early 1960s until her death in 2010; Arthur Ziegler, founder and the president of Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation, who helped pioneer Manchester's historic preservation in the 1960s and 1970s; and Manchester's native son, Stanley Lowe, who was the first director and driving force of MCC in the 1970s and 1980s (MCC was first known as the United Manchester Redevelopment Committee in the 1960s). Another driving force, Tom Cox, spearheaded innovative housing development programs in the 1960s. He was Lowe's director of housing at MCC in the 1970s, and later served as the deputy mayor under Tom Murphy. Finally, Tom Murphy himself, who first worked as an organizer on the North Side and, as mayor in the 1990s, brought vast city and federal resources to benefit the neighborhood's renewal in the 1990s and early 2000s. Their vision, interactions, and accomplishments drove the renaissance of one of Pittsburgh's most neglected neighborhoods.

The Manchester political and social environment was far different in the 1950s. During this time, the city's URA threatened to demolish much of Manchester's Victorian-era houses to construct a highway through it and build a utopian housing plan of block-style high-rises, similar to the fate experienced by Pittsburgh's Hill District. Residents who lined up behind Betty Jane Ralph not only stopped the demolition of the neighborhood's core but also crafted their own ideas for how the community should look and function.

In order to implement their vision, neighborhood residents formed their own community-based development group, the Manchester Community Development Corporation, in 1965. It eventually became the United Manchester Redevelopment Committee in 1967 funded by various Johnson-era Great Society funds from Washington, DC (the name was changed to the Manchester Citizens Corporation [MCC] in 1978). Under the direction of Stanley Lowe as MCC's first director in 1972, the organization gained control over key parcels of real estate. This control over residential properties enabled MCC to market and sell to upwardly mobile African Americans and whites to help repopulate the neighborhood.²

To sustain their vision, MCC transformed foes into allies and neutralized voices of opposition. At the institutional level, the knowledge that Manchester residents had a comprehensive vision for their community's improvement reduced the perception of investment risk. The community demonstrated to area banks that lending to low-income black homeowners was no riskier than lending to upper-income whites. This move from conflict to cooperation and the ability to craft a positive race-based image for the neighborhood enabled Manchester to attract outside investment.

Finally, Manchester leaders have been, since the 1970s, adept at marshaling private-sector support for community development, an aspect rare for the time. MCC's efforts in the 1970s and 1980s to involve the private sector in redevelopment efforts played a major role in the sustainability of Manchester's, and more broadly Pittsburgh's, urban real estate growth in the 1990s and 2000s. Due to the organizing efforts of MCC in the late-1980s, financial institutions increased their lending to low-income areas, and this substantially shifted the dynamic of urban investment. In the 1990s public and private investment in community development corporation (CDC) housing developments enabled MCC to reshape its most troubled public housing projects that were scattered throughout the neighborhood. These measures, in turn, encouraged banks to increase their lending to poor African American neighborhoods throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s.

From the 1960s onward, Manchester implemented a number of innovative and effective strategies that produced results: hundreds of housing units preserved and constructed, millions of dollars of new private investment, and an enhancement of the neighborhood's overall physical and economic vitality. In the process, Manchester set a number of national precedents for urban revitalization over the course of fifty years: the first use of federal urban renewal funds for historic preservation in the 1960s; the first and largest urban preservation program in an African American neighborhood in the 1970s; the first citywide community-bank reinvestment coalition in the 1980s; the first use of federal funds to demolish and rebuild public housing in a historic neighborhood in the 1990s; and in recent years, a new urbanist housing development constructed on one of the largest brownfield sites in an African American neighborhood.³

Manchester's transformation from “blighted slum” to historic preservation laboratory can be traced to three distinct periods in its postwar history: the 1960s, when historic preservation efforts began and with the formation of the neighborhood's main community-based organization, the United Manchester Redevelopment Committee; the 1970s, when the neighborhood gained control over land and resources and began to construct and restore hundreds of houses; and the late 1980s and early 1990s when the neighborhood took advantage of national initiatives, such as the federal Community Reinvestment Act and HOPE VI program, to attract private investment and physically reshape its public housing. The ensuing sections tell the story of these defining periods.

NEIGHBORHOOD BACKGROUND

Situated on Pittsburgh's North Side adjacent to the Rivers Casino and bounded by Route 65 and the Norfolk Southern railroad tracks that cut diagonally through the North Side, Manchester is a historically low- to moderate-income African American neighborhood. It is distinguished by its stately Victorian rowhouses, many of which have been restored, quiet tree-lined streets, and brick sidewalks. Manchester's primary residential development occurred between 1860 and 1900.⁴ Designated a City Historic District on July 30, 1979, it contains one of the city's largest collection of Victorian architecture, with 609 houses in the Italianate, Romanesque, Classical, and Colonial revival styles.⁵ Originally a mixed-income and mixed-race neighborhood until the post–World War II era (Manchester was 11.6% black in 1940), Manchester began its demographic decline in the 1950s with the population falling sharpest between 1960 and 1970 (a decline of 48.1%), in part due to white flight, property abandonment, and urban-renewal projects on the neighborhood's fringes that substantially shrunk physical boundaries.⁶

Prior to World War II, most of those who worked in Manchester were related to the industrial trades and employed at nearby factories along Manchester's Ohio River border or in smaller machine shops within the community. Manchester's white population, which once numbered more than 15,000 in 1940, began to move out in the 1950s, as blacks displaced from the Civic Arena development of the Lower Hill District sought additional accommodations elsewhere in the city. This swelled Manchester's black population to 4,436 in 1960; it began to fall in subsequent decades.

Today Manchester is a neighborhood of 2,130 residents, according to the 2010 census (down from a high of 17,029 in 1940). The population decline since 1940 is severe due to major urban-renewal projects and expressway construction that shrank the neighborhood's physical boundaries by nearly 60 percent since 1960. Until the 1970s Manchester's geographic area encompassed four census tracts; since 1990 Manchester has been defined by one census tract.

Three major projects initiated in the 1960s and 1970s changed the neighborhood boundaries. First, there was the creation of an industrial park (now Robert J. Casey Industrial Park) on the neighborhood's western edge that consolidated manufacturers into the Chateau neighborhood in the early 1960s. The next was clearance of land for construction of State Route 65 that would separate Manchester's residential core from the industrial park in the 1960s and destroy its commercial district. Finally, there was construction of Three Rivers Stadium from 1968 to 1970 (which included the removal of the historic Manchester bridge, connecting Manchester to downtown via the Point).

As a result of these developments and rezoning that occurred under Mayor Pete Flaherty's administration in the 1970s, Manchester's identity changed from industrial-residential to primarily residential. At the same time, the demographics of the neighborhood shifted rapidly from a racially mixed community in the 1940s and 1950s to a predominantly black neighborhood by 1970 as black residents displaced by urban renewal of the Lower Hill moved to other black neighborhoods such as East Liberty, Homewood-Brushton, and Manchester. These changes also stimulated much community organizing, neighborhood preservation, and a culture of protest within the neighborhood that continues to this day.⁷

CITIZENS FIGHT BACK: THE 1960S

In 1964 Manchester was a gritty, industrial neighborhood in Pittsburgh filled with old, decrepit houses, abandoned lots, and a violent undertone of crime and hopelessness. Banks had given up years ago, and the city demolished the commercial heart of the neighborhood, Beaver Avenue, in the early 1960s to construct State Route 65. In just twenty years since 1940, the neighborhood had lost a third of its population, mostly whites. It was so bad that even ministers carried guns for personal protection. It would appear as if Manchester had hit rock bottom.

Despite this gloomy scenario, hope glimmered off of well-worn, nineteenth-century rowhouses along a beleaguered thoroughfare called Liverpool Street, where the once-stately Langenheim Mansion sat empty and neglected. In 1964 two white men drove through the neighborhood, looking for a shortcut to Sewickley (Route 65 had not yet been constructed, though the land had been cleared). They stopped the car and marveled at what they saw: “As rays from the falling sun picked out the detailing of the gingerbread porches, the two men, moved by the beauty amidst the squalor, resolved to find an alternative to redevelopment by demolition.”⁸ They were James D. Van Trump and Arthur Ziegler, founders of the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation (PHLF) in 1964. They were determined to find a “means to revitalize neighborhoods without removing either historic buildings or the inhabitants.” Based on work that had begun in Savannah, Georgia, Manchester was one of the first such historic preservation efforts in the country. From its formative days, PHLF spent much time in Manchester working directly with the residents to restore, rather than tear down, nineteenth-century houses. In 1967 one of PHLF's first projects was to acquire and restore the 1880 Gustav Langenheim Mansion.⁹ But it would be many years before the community expanded its renovation program to other parts of the neighborhood. Many battles had yet to be waged. Even after PHLF's involvement in Manchester, the URA devised plans in 1969 to demolish a huge section of the neighborhood and develop 109 low-rent public housing apartment and row dwellings.¹⁰

In the 1960s the main barrier to Manchester's revitalization was the city of Pittsburgh's Urban Redevelopment Authority. Formed in 1946 to spearhead the city's vast urban-renewal program, the URA acquired and demolished thousands of older and historic properties in Pittsburgh's Lower Hill District, Allegheny Center on the city's North Side, and East Liberty in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s: areas that had been designated “blighted.” At the time, it was the city's way of responding to urban decline and depopulation; as a strategy, it failed miserably because it failed to stem the outmigration of people, did little to address poverty, and enabled blight to spread.¹¹

While the Lower Hill and Allegheny Center caught the brunt of the city's demolition machine in the 1950s and 1960s, Manchester was spared a worse fate. Two plans to demolish Manchester—one in 1947 developed by the Allegheny Conference for Community Development and another conceived in 1952 to construct a state highway that would cut through the neighborhood east to west—were not pursued. Instead, the highway was built on a north-south orientation and completely eliminated Manchester's Beaver Avenue commercial district. Starting in 1960 URA acquired and demolished hundreds of buildings along Beaver Avenue on Manchester's eastern edge to prepare for construction of an elevated state highway, Route 65. The initial phase of clearance for the roadway proceeded from 1960 to 1963, and it was finished by 1970.¹² Nearly overnight, Manchester became a mostly residential neighborhood with half as many people. On the eastern side of Route 65 lay the Victorian rowhouses and tight streets of Manchester. The other side of the highway became the Casey industrial park bordering the Ohio River. The two were separated by a wall, with only one road leading to the other side. The wall was more than physical, it was metaphorical. Few blacks had jobs in the industrial firms on the other side, mirroring similar trends throughout the region.¹³

Although the URA failed to stem the city's blight, it gave rise to a strong citizens’ action movement in neighborhoods affected by urban renewal. Incensed by the proposed and actual demolition taking place around them, Manchester residents took action. Led by longtime residents such as Betty Jane Ralph, an African American stalwart of the community, and Tillie Janicki, a white woman of Polish descent, they organized protests against government plans to demolish their neighborhood. In 1965, with help from Bidwell Church, residents organized the Manchester Community Development Corporation (MCDC), headed by Michelle Jones. Funded by Bidwell, it constructed new Ryan homes at Franklin and Chateau streets and at Sheffield and Fontella streets. As new Title I funds became available in the late 1960s, the United Manchester Redevelopment Corporation (UMRC) was formed in 1967 to continue the development of the MCDC. Their first operating budget was approximately $32,000 and they hired Stanley Lowe as its first director in 1972. Michelle Jones became his assistant.¹⁴

Trained to adopt the Saul Alinsky–style of organizing—disruptive but peaceful—in Chicago by the late Gale Cincotta (1929–2001), UMRC board members learned how to pack public hearings at City Hall, jam the phone lines of local elected officials, and protest in great numbers to change conditions in the neighborhood.¹⁵ In one protest against the URA and Housing Authority in 1974, Ralph told the New Pittsburgh Courier, “We've always been fighters, and this is no exception. In all our many battles with the city administration, we've been committed to not letting the city come over here, do just what they want, and not consider the needs of the people living here in Manchester.” Ralph would serve as MCC's chairperson for more than two decades (she died in 2010).¹⁶

Innovative white leaders from outside the community guided Manchester's nascent historic preservation efforts in the 1960s. In addition to Ziegler, Tom Cox played an influential role in its early revitalization. He is perhaps best known as the former deputy mayor and chairman of the URA under Mayor Tom Murphy in the 1990s. But in the late 1960s Cox was just a community guy. He began his neighborhood work as the rector of Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Allegheny West, across the street from Manchester. He later became the URA's Manchester representative to spearhead a novel approach to urban renewal.

In 1966 Cox teamed up with Ziegler to negotiate a deal with the URA's assistant director, Bill Farkas, to reprogram federal Title I funds that were originally to be used for demolition and clearance to use them instead for preservation.¹⁷ In addition, innovative incentive programs were developed by PHLF and the URA, such as a façade easement for homeowners.¹⁸ It was the first time such federal funds had been utilized in such a manner anywhere in the United States.

To Cox, the key to Manchester's success was not the community development experts like himself or Ziegler, it was the residents. “The grassroots has to control the street politics—to protect the leaders and allow them to do their work. They looked after us,” he explained. The job as a community development employee was dangerous in those days, recalls Cox. He carried a concealed handgun for personal protection. But the UMRC board provided the necessary protection. “People like Betty Jane Ralph controlled the street,” he said, describing the “phenomenal lay leadership” of UMRC board members who protected their staff.¹⁹

Through the leadership of Ziegler and Cox, along with support from the URA and the fledgling United Manchester Redevelopment Committee, Manchester's revitalization began on Liverpool Street. But preservation was slow to take hold in other parts of the neighborhood. The powerful forces of suburbanization and outmigration left a large inventory of vacant properties, banks unwilling to extend loans, and a city bureaucracy that was still more intent on demolition than preservation. Most important, new leadership from the neighborhood had yet to emerge to extend the preservation work throughout Manchester. Still, at the conclusion of the 1960s, the foundation for future development had been established.

EMERGING FROM THE NEW DEAL AND GREAT SOCIETY IN THE 1970S

In the 1970s several changes occurred within MCC that shaped its approach to community development. First, the organization adopted a strategy not only to retain African American residents, but also to be open to people of all races and incomes. Second, MCC recruited private partners to fill the gap left by reduced government funding to finance its housing development. Finally, Stanley Lowe, a strong, visionary leader, emerged to marshal the necessary resources to achieve the neighborhood's objectives.

The civil rights struggle of the 1960s had catalyzed a movement built on race, but not necessarily place. But by the 1970s, when it came to real estate, CDCs, led by charismatic leaders like Lowe and activist board members such as Ralph, took the lead in the physical reshaping of urban neighborhoods. It was important for Manchester to maintain a positive African American identity and at the same time promote interracial inclusion in order to attract people of all races and income levels back to the neighborhood.

The goal of economic and racial inclusion did not sit well with everyone. Manchester resident James Williams, nicknamed “Swampman” by local residents as well as the press, was one of the agitators for increased black ownership and participation in the 1960s and 1970s. As head of the Minority Construction Roundtable, Williams led a number of protests to increase minority construction jobs on big city projects, including the construction of Three Rivers Stadium in 1969 (along with Nate Smith and Jack Godfrey) and the Convention Center in 1977.²⁰ Williams was a product of the Black Power Movement that advocated for black ownership of businesses and control over black neighborhoods (he also ran for City Council a number of times). In 1978 he said, “I'm not concerned with affirmative action. I'm concerned with Black contractors, Black businesses and total economic change.”²¹ His message conflicted with MCC's more racially inclusive aims. MCC was able to contain dissent from people like Swampman and others. It organized meetings, conferences, and special events for residents, controlled their message in the press, and deflected other questions from within and outside the community through carefully crafted reports, meetings, and public statements.

By 1978 critical operating support flowed into MCC (as much as $500,000 per year from the URA) and homes were restored as new ones were constructed. These changes did not go unnoticed by the black community. One article in the New Pittsburgh Courier asked everyday residents what they thought of the Manchester redevelopment. The printed responses were all positive. “Man, we think that it is absolutely beautiful, just beautiful to see,” said Danny and Regina Hawkins. Othella Frazier said, “Plans such as this discourage people from moving out of the community because they don't want to live here. It gives them a second chance to return to Manchester.” Deborah Sanders exclaimed, “It gives Blacks a chance to invest in their community first, so that it could remain full of Black inhabitants like it is now and at the same time keeps the community restored with that Victorian influence.”²²

In addition to positive press, MCC held a number of workshops to educate residents about home ownership in the 1970s. In 1977 MCC hosted a national housing conference and brought in Carl Westmoreland from Cincinnati's Mt. Auburn neighborhood, an African American community that had begun a rebound around the same time as Manchester.²³ Westmoreland told the New Pittsburgh Courier, “I take issue with those who say government hasn't done enough for me. President Jimmy Carter cannot resurrect ‘The Dream.’ That died with the man [Dr. Martin Luther King]. The Dream is where you are and you have to make it happen.”²⁴ The following year, when the New Pittsburgh Courier asked in a 1978 headline, “Can Manchester Area Remain Black?” Lowe responded, “[Blacks] must start projecting for the future and try to decide what their community will look like five to 10 years from now.”²⁵

During the fiscally austere 1970s, another major change occurred in Manchester that made its transformation possible. In the wake of the Nixon administration's budgetary cutbacks, community leaders sought alternative funding sources. Led by PHLF and Manchester residents, they declared that private sources must be incorporated into a development plan. This thinking would be a critical component to the involvement of banks in Manchester's revitalization strategy in the 1980s and 1990s, a strategy that similar community development corporations around the country would adopt as well. But in the 1970s MCC was on the forefront of this trend.

As a government-supported CDC during the 1970s, MCC was directly affected by the changes taking place in Washington. Housing revitalization in the neighborhood ground to a halt. During the four-year period after President Nixon canceled the federal 312 Program (which encouraged housing rehabilitation), the neighborhood lost about 150 houses to demolition by the URA.²⁶ In addition, there was a change in the city's mayoral administration. In 1970 Mayor Pete Flaherty took office and began to align the city's development policies with the Nixon administration's. The challenge for MCC was to find a leader who could navigate through the changing funding priorities of both Washington and the Pittsburgh mayor's office, and at the same time develop new partnerships with the private sector.

ENTER STANLEY LOWE

As an African American who grew up in Manchester, Stanley Lowe had instant credibility because he had been groomed by those who started MCC. Not only did board members such as Betty Jane Ralph support him financially through college, but Ralph herself tapped him to become MCC's first executive director right after he graduated from Shaw University in 1972. He held the position until 1983 and then remained as a “consultant” to drive many of the organization's programs. He is often credited with much of the development activity in Manchester, such as housing rehabilitation, new construction, new bank investment, and transformation of the community's worst public housing projects.²⁷

Lowe has been described by some to be controversial and abrasive. When Lowe and Cox sought to shut down nuisance bars, they generated tremendous controversy with bar owners and patrons, who saw them as aggressive and arrogant controllers of neighborhood real estate interests. By one estimate, MCC shuttered as many as twenty-one bars in Manchester.²⁸ Yet Lowe was effective. His greatest strengths were the ability to organize and fundraise. During his tenure as MCC director and consultant, Lowe raised millions of dollars to support staff, construct new houses, tear down derelict properties, and restore old homes. He marshaled the neighborhood to support critical issues such as historic preservation and bank reinvestment, and he could turn out neighborhood residents in great numbers at public meetings. “In Manchester, we set out to change the dynamics of urban real estate,” explained Lowe. He described his time at MCC in the 1970s as revolutionary. “What we were doing was radical back then. Nobody had ever done what we were doing.”²⁹ Trained like other local advocates as an organizer in the Saul Alinsky style, Lowe adopted a confrontational manner that also yielded results.

Initially, Lowe's work clashed with historic preservationists. He oversaw the demolition of nearly 900 Victorian houses in the neighborhood and began to construct split-level ranch houses.³⁰ It came as no surprise that when Ziegler attended a meeting held by MCC in the early 1970s, there was a clash of ideas. Lowe stated in an interview with Town and Country magazine, “Arthur came to a community meeting and talked to us about historic preservation. We said, ‘Are you out of your mind? We are not good enough for suburban housing?’ We put him out fast. White flight to the suburbs taught blacks to hate where they live. Blacks said, ‘If it's so bad here, then we don't want it either.’”³¹ That was tough talk from what would become one of the country's most dedicated historic preservation advocates.

Tom Cox recalls Lowe's conversion from “slash-and-burn” community developer to dedicated historic preservationist. An influential bus trip in 1975 changed Lowe's perspective. In March 1975 Cox teamed up with Ziegler and Lowe to take fifty Manchester residents on a bus to see successful examples of historic preservation in cities in Maryland, Washington, and Virginia. Their first stop was Frederick, Maryland. The group also toured preservation projects in Alexandria, Washington, DC, Annapolis, and Baltimore where African Americans had begun to restore old homes.³²

Lowe says of the bus trip, “We had buildings as good, if not better, still standing in neighborhoods all over Pittsburgh. And we were tearing them down.” The bus tour encouraged Manchester residents to save what they had demolished. “Manchester gained a real sense of empowerment. … People didn't run. They turned things around and did something for themselves. … We invited Arthur [Ziegler] back.”³³

By the late 1970s several critical changes occurred within the neighborhood. First, the name of the United Manchester Redevelopment Committee was changed to the Manchester Citizens Corporation (MCC) in December 1978 to reflect a more professional attitude and to announce that they were an official community development corporation with the power to transform urban real estate, rather than simply a neighborhood organization.³⁴ Second, MCC refocused its mission not only to embrace historic preservation (Manchester was designated a National Register historic district in 1976) but to reinforce its support for economic and racial diversity as a central tenet of their revitalization strategy. Third, MCC now had the funds (as much as $1.6 million over three years from the URA) to accomplish many of its housing objectives.³⁵

Yet, for all the work that Lowe and his staff did to rebuild Manchester, they had a lot of help from outside sources, such as PHLF, the URA, and local foundations, as well as from the MCC board itself, which protected Lowe from outside interference. With the aid of staff and external organizations, Lowe and the MCC board changed the course of redevelopment in the neighborhood. Most important, the involvement of foundations and banks would play an increasingly important role in the decades to come.

A final element in Manchester's change in strategic direction was visionary leadership with the capacity to marshal the resources to bring projects to fruition. Lowe stated, “If you are to change neighborhoods, you must operate with two tenets, excellence in all your programs and finding ways to get it financed. [Success] is about vision. Someone's dream and passion to make the idea possible—leadership and resources to implement it.”³⁶

NEW PARTNERS IN COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT DURING THE 1980S

In the 1980s MCC built upon the base of support it had developed in the 1970s and expanded its relationship with foundations to fund its operating budget and banks to finance its housing work. Government was still an important player, but as federal budget cuts slashed project and operating support during the 1980s, the public sector could no longer be counted on as a reliable partner. To achieve its aims, MCC needed to make the neighborhood attractive to the private market. It embarked on some unique initiatives.³⁷

Aided by foundation intermediaries such as Pittsburgh Partnership for Neighborhood Development (PPND), one of the earliest citywide CDC networks in the United States, MCC became one of the “fortunate five” CDCs in the city to receive critical operating support from PPND.³⁸ As much as $853,000 flowed into MCC over the course of two years, from 1983 to 1985.³⁹ It was during the late 1980s that MCC turned its attention to the participation of banks in the neighborhood.

Despite some limited community investments in the 1970s and early 1980s, most financial institutions “redlined” poor black communities and refused to take the same risks as they would in white, suburban communities. Banks maintained secret mortgage lending maps in their offices with a red line drawn around low-income and minority neighborhoods, areas considered to be too high of a risk in which to invest and were thus ignored. Manchester was one of these redlined neighborhoods.⁴⁰

In 1988 Lowe leveraged his relationship with thirty-two CDCs across the city to form the Pittsburgh Community Reinvestment Group (PCRG) to analyze the lending data that banks had begun to disclose under the federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) and enforced by the federal Community Reinvestment Act (CRA).⁴¹ With public access to these computerized bank data, as well as the expertise to analyze it, PCRG assembled hard evidence to prove that banks were, in fact, redlining poor black neighborhoods. In 1988, when Union National Bank and Pennbancorp applied to bank regulatory agencies to form a new corporation, Integra Financial Corporation, PCRG used the authority under CRA to protest the merger. PCRG found that Union National had made no loans to African American census tracts in 1986 and 1987, and in 1987 it made only two purchase mortgages in low- and moderate-income areas. Rather than fight the charges, Union National negotiated a $109-million neighborhood lending agreement with PCRG, one of the nation's largest bank-community agreements.⁴² Over the next several years, PCRG negotiated agreements with the other major financial institutions in the city, which marked a significant achievement for community-based organizations. CDCs now had new private-market partners with which to work.⁴³

For the first time since World War II, CRA advocacy of the late 1980s and early 1990s created a new growth dynamic in urban neighborhoods. Coupled with strong enforcement of CRA from President Bill Clinton's administration along with deal-making experts within the city government and CDCs, neighborhood leaders had in banks new partners in their community development toolbox. By the early 1990s residents of Manchester saw that their efforts to organize, build, and restore began to create the neighborhood they had wanted since the 1960s.

THE “THIRD WAY” TAKES HOLD IN THE 1990S

Pittsburgh's population has declined each year since 1950. As the 1990s unfolded, Pittsburgh's economy stagnated, exacerbated by a deep national recession from 1990 to 1992, and loss of jobs and people to other regions. Neighborhoods like Manchester struggled to contain these macro trends. The city lost more than 18 percent of its population in the 1980s and more than 12 percent in the 1990s. The city's black population, which peaked in 1970, leveled off at 79,710 by 2010, its lowest level since 1950. Manufacturing employment in the city declined by 42.6 percent between 1980 and 1986 and declined another 15.3 percent between 1986 and 1994.⁴⁴ Prospects were dim for community-based real estate projects.

As Mayor Tom Murphy assumed office in 1993 amidst this dismal environment, he could not look to the incoming Clinton administration for budgetary fixes. A “third way” was sought to stimulate inner-city real estate development in Pittsburgh and around the nation.⁴⁵ Public–private partnerships became the operative phrase, as Murphy encouraged bank involvement in low-income areas. Despite federal budgetary constraints, one program became a critical factor in stimulating private-market interest in inner-city real estate, the Hope VI program for public housing, administered by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).⁴⁶

The Hope VI program aimed to “tear down ‘severely distressed’ public housing” and “replace it with new communities premised on a broader socio-economic constituency, while simultaneously expanding the earlier policy initiative to supply more of the poor with vouchers.”⁴⁷ Hope VI enabled cities to use federal funds to demolish old, outdated public housing projects and replace them with a mix of rental units and mixed-income for-sale housing to economically reintegrate urban neighborhoods. It also required the involvement of private partners, such as banks and developers that otherwise were not part of the conversation around public housing. Most important, the Hope VI program was consistent with the Murphy administration's goal to diversify incomes and disperse poverty. Manchester would become an ideal test case.⁴⁸

When he took office, Murphy assembled his “brain trust,” as it was called by neighborhood leaders, from a number of experts in the community development arena. In addition to Cox as Murphy's executive secretary and chairman of the Urban Redevelopment Authority, Lowe was appointed executive director of the Housing Authority of the City of Pittsburgh.⁴⁹ Mulu Birru, who ran the Homewood-Brushton Revitalization and Development Corporation, was tapped to become the executive director of the URA. Mark Schneider, who worked under Cox at the Northside Civic Development Council, became chairman of the Sports and Exhibition Authority under Murphy. In 2006, Murphy's last year in office, Schneider started his own company, Fourth River Development, which redeveloped the American Electric site in Manchester into Columbus Square. Steve Leeper, who had been director of housing for the URA, was appointed to direct the Sports and Exhibition Authority to finance two new stadiums for the Pirates and Steelers.⁵⁰

Although these leaders spent most of their careers fighting city hall, once in power as elected and appointed officials they were in position to correct past abuses, even if they did not have the experience to run large bureaucratic institutions. “One day after I was sworn into office, a huge snow storm hit Pittsburgh. Stanley, Tom, and I sat in my office scratching our heads, trying to figure out what to do. We had spent our entire careers fighting Grant Street; yet there we were, trying to determine the most efficient way to plow the city streets.” Murphy changed Pittsburgh considerably. In total, during his three terms in office, from 1994 to 2006, Murphy and his team oversaw more than $1.1 billion in private and public funding that resulted in new mixed-use development for Pittsburgh.⁵¹

Most relevant to the city's low-income communities, Murphy and Lowe radically reshaped Pittsburgh's public housing through the use of the Clinton administration's Hope VI program.⁵² Using the funds, Murphy and Lowe oversaw the demolition of hundreds of public housing units, which had been built in the 1940s under the New Deal, to construct new urbanist housing.⁵³ In his position as public housing authority director, Lowe secured $7.5 million in Hope VI funds to demolish Manchester's 1970s bunker-style “projects” and replace them with new infill construction that resembled the neighborhood's historic rowhouses. Manchester's Hope VI project was part of a larger, $25.5-million project that combined a variety of public and private sources in a partnership that included MCC, HUD, the Housing Authority, URA, and PNC Bank over the course of three to five years in three phases. When it came time to demolish Manchester's public housing units, Lowe held a “demolition party” and Murphy drove the wrecking ball.⁵⁴

The Hope VI program had a big impact on Manchester housing market. It created 120 new housing units for Manchester, all constructed after 2000. There were eighty-six rental units available exclusively to public housing residents dispersed throughout the neighborhood and thirty-four homeownership units that were available to residents of various incomes. As a result, positive changes were seen in Manchester, illustrated by increases in property values and decreases in poverty rates, unemployment, and crime.

Between 1995 and 2002 property values in Manchester increased from $40,506 to $48,781. Most tellingly, on blocks that featured Hope VI developments, property values increased from $45,031 to $54,689, a higher rate of increase than non–Hope VI blocks. Poverty, unemployment, and crime declined in Manchester at greater rates than the city as a whole. Poverty specifically declined from 38.3 percent in 1990 to 23.1 percent in 2000, whereas citywide in the same time period it declined only 1 percent. Median household income rose 23.1 percent, compared to just 2.6 percent in the city. Manchester's unemployment rate declined from 16 percent in 1990 to 11.6 percent in 2000; citywide, unemployment increased 1 percent over the same period. Part I (violent and property) crimes in Manchester were down 24 percent between 1996 and 2001, while crime had increased 2 percent citywide over the same period.⁵⁵

These figures suggest that the changes created under Hope VI, along with the previous preservation work, new construction, and CRA advocacy, created an improved environment for the private market to take hold in Manchester. As a result, Manchester was stitched back together with a mix of new urbanist, scattered-site infill housing that is both affordable and well designed. Lowe emphasized that “urban design and community development—it's what sells the neighborhood. It took us so long to understand that.”⁵⁶

THE MARKET TAKES OVER

Today, the quiet calm of Liverpool Street is a far cry from what Ziegler and Van Trump first found fifty years ago. The visual effect of neat rows of meticulously restored Victorian houses, painted in bright, multicolored pastels, stand majestically over brick-lined sidewalks and healthy street trees is impressive. Black and white faces peek out of windows and doors to get a glimpse of a stranger: “eyes on the street,” just as Jane Jacobs envisioned how a vibrant neighborhood should function.

MCC's 2012 annual report touts a number of recent accomplishments. MCC estimates that it and its partners have fostered the investment of $33 million back into the neighborhood since the 1990s. Its development projects were the joint venture between MCC and a host of public and private partners, including banks, foundations, various state and local government agencies, and a number of nonprofit partners. The eclectic mix of collaborators, along with the housing developments, indicate that much progress has been made in the last two decades, not to mention since the 1960s.⁵⁷

Despite these accomplishments, some people express frustration with the community's leadership, slumlords, expensive housing, and even the slow pace of change. Marilyn Brooks, a resident of Manchester, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2009

In addition, the persistence of vacant properties provides further barriers to reinvestment. Despite the historic preservation accomplishments and new housing construction in Manchester since the 1960s, nearly a third of the neighborhood's properties are vacant. Yet, others see Lowe's resourcefulness and ability to seek out opportunities that others would have missed.

Chris Shea, who worked for Lowe while he ran the Housing Authority, explained that “Stanley's brilliance was in reframing the discussion in terms of neighborhood. Housing authorities had ungodly access to capital resources. … Mr. Lowe took that money and used it to leverage private money to reintegrate public housing tenants into a neighborhood.” Ultimately community leaders like Lowe are a rare breed. Few people are willing to do the hard work necessary not only to make projects happen, but also to change the neighborhood dynamic that has national implications. Lowe told the Post-Gazette, “People are going to challenge me because I step up in my own neighborhood? The question I have to answer is: What will happen to me if I don't step up?”⁵⁹

CONCLUSION

Manchester's past fifty years is a story about residents who marshaled public and private resources to implement neighborhood transformation and maintained their core identity as an attractive and positive African American community. However, it is not clear whether neighborhoods with an active community development corporation, such as Manchester, necessarily benefited more than others. Some writers who have studied the situation, such as Nicholas Lemann, believe that “ghetto economic revitalization,” as he calls it, is a “myth” and that the entrenched generational poverty that persists in urban African American neighborhoods is the failure of government programs and an overreliance on subsidized housing. Lowe and others who have worked in Manchester would not disagree.⁶⁰

But Lemann, who wrote his polemic against the 1960s Great Society-version of community development in 1994, underestimated how many urban neighborhoods were transformed by public-private partnerships in the two decades after his article appeared. Other “urban doomsayers,” such as David Rusk, believed some cities were past “a critical point of no return” in the 1990s.⁶¹ Yet, the outlook for cities two decades later is anything but dire. Some neighborhood CDCs, such as Pittsburgh's East Liberty Development, Inc. (ELDI), benefited from being in the right place at the right time. After some small-scale initial investments in East Liberty by ELDI in the 1980s and 1990s, several high-profile real estate developments in the past two decades were private-market investments in retailers, such as new Home Depot, Whole Foods, and Target stores, among others (with public-sector support). On Pittsburgh's South Side, the South Side Local Development Company, created in 1982 to stimulate private business development and new housing, folded in 2010 due to its own success. Over a twenty-year period, more than 900 homes were renovated or created, the vacancy rate of the commercial corridor decreased from 50 percent to 10 percent, and the South Side Works, a thirty-four-acre former steel mill-turned retail center, opened.⁶² It is likely that such achievements would not have happened had it not been for the combination of resident involvement, community control over real estate, and the participation of banks to stimulate the private market, rather than more government funding.

There were a number of failures, to be sure. Some CDCs, such as the Homewood-Brushton Revitalization and Development Corporation, failed in the early 2000s. Projects sponsored by others, such as North Side Civic Development Council's initial efforts to redevelop Riverside Commons in 1989, had to be rescued in a structured workout deal sponsored by PNC Bank and PPND in 1992. It is these types of failures that give community development a bad reputation. But they do not tell the whole story.⁶³

The success of MCC and other CDCs that turned around the most beleaguered neighborhoods is seldom told. Few narratives discuss the community leaders who marshaled resources, mobilized people, and forged alliances with unlikely partners, such as banks and redevelopment agencies that once engineered the undoing of urban neighborhoods, to finance their rebirth. Today, many neighborhoods once poor now wrestle with gentrification and displacement. One must ask: What would these neighborhoods have become if no one stepped up and took the risk to stop decline? Manchester has come a long way since the days when banks refused to lend, housing prices plummeted, and whites and blacks fled for the suburbs. The restoration of the Langenheim Mansion and hundreds of other historic properties in the neighborhood is impressive. For now, they have been protected from the wrecking ball.

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