Esteban Parra

The News Journal

Redevelopment strategies often lack the vision to turn dilapidated neighborhoods into desirable places where people of all income levels can and want to live together.

The motivation to redevelop rundown, crumbling neighborhoods is usually driven by a financial incentive and usually at the expense of poor residents who are priced out of their community and displaced.

But David Wilk, a real estate adviser and multigeneration Wilmingtonian, said there is a revitalization model in which people of all income levels can live together that Wilmington should implement in communities such as the Creative District and East Side.

"A lot of people have written off downtown and I'm not among those," Wilk said. "But trying to explain to somebody you're going to spend all this money and all this effort and you're really not going to see a whole a lot until 10 or 20 years from now, that's not an easy sell – especially when you need to raise money to be able to sustain a plan during that time."

Through their model, CityLab, Wilk and partners bring academics into undervalued neighborhoods to help create a community-led master plan.

He said all community stakeholders have a role, including business owners, homeowners, the homeless, developers, schools, health care organizations and entrepreneurial organizations.

They have started the model in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., and want to introduce it in Delaware. He will explain the strategy at a symposium Thursday at Hotel du Pont.

CityLab was born in 2012, in Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, where Wilk is working on his master's degree in real estate and infrastructure.

Under the direction of Lindsay Thompson, the Carey Business professor who designed CityLab, academics have been helping develop, along with stakeholders of Baltimore's Jonestown neighborhood, a plan to take the once-undervalued neighborhood into new places of inclusion and shared wealth creation and value.

"What we've decided in this neighborhood, is that we want to be the drivers – the people who are here – instead of someone from outside be the driver," said Thompson, who believed so much in the program that she purchased a home in Jonestown. While people in the neighborhood may not have the money to make that development happen, they are able to connect with people who do, allowing some of these changes to occur.

Jonestown is adjacent to Little Italy and within a short walk of Johns Hopkins Hospital to the northeast and the booming East Harbor to the south. It has undergone urban renewal, thanks to the Housing and Urban Development HOPE VI Program that razed several high-rise projects to make way for mixed-income housing.

This allowed new homeowners to be able to purchase row homes, in addition to live next door to people who could afford $230,000 houses and those in assisted living housing.

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After about four years of developing a plan in the historic Jonestown neighborhood, better known as the home of the Phoenix Shot Tower, the Star-Spangled Banner Flag House and the Jewish Museum of Maryland, Thompson launched CityLab Jonestown's master plan late last year.

"There are all these historic sites that are in this neighborhood that just haven't been curated," Thompson said. "So in addition to those kinds of attractions that are in the neighborhood, it's just a great business opportunity for anybody who wants to invest."

As wealth is created in the neighborhood, Thompson said they want everyone in the community to be part of that growth.

"That's part of the lab experiment," she said. "We haven't discovered the absolute sure-fire ways to include people who don't have a lot of assets and equity in laddering them into opportunity. But we want to be sure that this is a place where we work on how to do that and we figure out ways to do that."

The program has received mixed reaction. Most of the people interviewed by The News Journal said they were encouraged by the direction the community was heading, but were less aware of CityLab.

"There is an experiment that is going on down there," said Dwight Warren, executive director of the McKim Community Association – an 18th Century Quaker meeting house that was converted into a community center in the heart of Jonestown.

Warren grew up in Jonestown's projects, which he compared to a prison. That's no longer the situation there, although Warren said there is still crime and other problems.

"Lindsay [Thompson] is trying her best, and others, to make this a more cohesive community and I give her credit for it," he said. But he said more needs to be done to show people that CityLab is occurring and how they play a part in it.

"I see efforts to do this constantly being revisited by Lindsay [Thompson] and the students pulling together the museums and businesses as best they can," he said. "But at the end of the day we are waiting for the concrete results to actually roll out."

When things take too long to develop, Warren said they tend to lose steam.

Yasser Payne, a professor at the University of Delaware who studies inner-city Wilmington, agrees with Warren. But Payne, who is speaking at the symposium, said he believes CityLab will provide an infrastructure that helps organize people in the community and gives them energy to connect to organizations and businesses that can help build ongoing redevelopment.

"It's necessary. It's timely. It's almost incumbent upon the city and state to find a way to make this happen," Payne said.

Wilk said CityLab Jonestown has been growing steadily, but is still in its infancy.

"Many residents in Jonestown might know CityLab better through interactions with the Jonestown Village Planning Council meetings and or Historic Jonestown, or the Jewish Museum activities which have included Lindsay and my fellow JHU Carey students and mentors," he said.

Thursday's event is designed to bring the CityLab platform and new possibilities to Wilmington and engage with local stakeholders to create new value, next steps and social/economic innovation for city neighborhoods, Wilk said.

"We are still not sure yet how we will implement this type of real estate innovation in Wilmington" he said. "But we thought that by starting with building consensus in the community through broad stakeholder collaboration, we would identify feasible pathways to innovate through some of the challenges Wilmington currently faces and make sure that positive successes are heralded."

Contact Esteban Parra at (302) 324-2299, eparra@delawareonline.com or Twitter @eparra3.

The symposium takes place from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Thursday at the Hotel du Pont's DuBarry Room, located at 11th and Market streets in Wilmington.

Cost for the event is $64.29 to $132.87.

To purchase tickets online visit: http://bit.ly/1rgDoO7