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Reflections by Jim Wehner and John Liotti
Gentrification with justice occurs when wealthier residents, whose understanding of community includes the less-advantaged, use their competencies and connections to ensure that their lower-income neighbors share a stake in their revitalizing neighborhood.
 Jim Wehner:
“Gentrification can be a bad word. It can be ‘the gentry’ coming in and just moving the poor to another place in the city. Doing ‘gentrification with justice’ we try to keep 35-40 percent of the housing affordable, and the rest ‘market rate.’ This keeps up the property values. Before, we’d buy affordable houses in the specific area we’ve targeted to serve, and move low-income families in who’ve always been renters. But we just created a pocket of poverty that way. So now we may buy affordable houses and then invite people who can afford their own home because they bring resources that the community needs.
But we were concerned. We aren’t trying to just create a ‘cool community.’
Grant Park, for instance, is a place we started working in years ago. Today, it’s a pretty popular neighborhood, a fun neighborhood. We look at that as a success story of how gentrification with justice can help a place turn around, but we also ask ourselves if it hasn’t gentrified too much…I’m not sure if a family could buy an affordable house there now. We know there are people out there who disagree with us, but it’s an ongoing conversation.
The Zone
We work in a dozen square blocks with about 500 homes. We know what houses are vacant, which are Habitat for Humanity houses, which are owner-occupied, and which are rentals or investor-owned.
Before: The ‘Build It' Model—New Construction
We used the Habitat model: we raise money, purchase land, build a house, qualify a homeowner for the loan. Then we do a 20-year, zero interest loan, mostly to folks who wouldn't qualify for a loan or would find the interest to be too high if they could qualify. We offer them a one year lease purchase, and in that year we teach home repair, budgeting, what to do when there's no landlord to call for problems, etc. At the end of a year we sell them the home for the price it cost us to build it, plus an administration fee. In 2000 we were partnerning with Habitat to build 120 homes at a cost about $125K each.
We were going great through mid-2007, until the first wave of foreclosures happened, mostly due to predatory lending. Our neighborhood was one of hardest hit in Atlanta—right now one in four houses are vacant, for a total of about 150 vacant.
Vandalism, prostitution drugs and bad stuff happens when you have 4-6 vacant boarded up houses on a block. We saw crime rising. If a house is vacant for more than three weeks in our neighborhood it is totally stripped of anything of value, faucets, everything. So we stopped new construction. It forced us to completely revamp what we were doing.
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