I don’t know what is more amazing – the house restoration work that is going into 19th Street, or the condition that 19th Street is currently in. How can a single street be home to so many derelict houses… one after another? After seeing the work that the WSCC has been doing on the West Side, to finally get to a street like 19th and see this? Now Harvey can thank a citywide organization called HomeFront for coming to the rescue of one of the biggest cleanups the West Side has seen to date. At long last, more than six houses are going to be restored – it’s the only way to do it. One isn’t enough when you look at a street like 19th – the entire street must be done if the hope is to attract future buyers who will live there.
I stopped by yesterday and found The Mayor’s Impact Team taking graffiti off the houses in preparation for a ribbon cutting to be held later in the afternoon. I spoke with ‘Big Gino’ who was talking to one of the neighbors about a couple of squatters in one of the City-owned houses. It was exciting to see the action taking place, but frightful to know what had become of this street. Thankfully, people like Harvey have already been improving the streets in-between 19th and Richmond – so as the westward advance continues, big victories like the one on 19th really send a signal in all directions that this has now become a group effort. From Harvey:
“HomeFront is using the Restore New York funds to rehab 6 houses on 19th Street – these are the same funds that the City has been seriously beat up on for exclusively making demo funding requests even though the funds are primarily meant for rehab (Brian Reilly assures us that this is going to change). PUSH (People United for Sustainable Housing) is planning on doing a few more so I’m hoping for 10 or so houses to be rehabbed on the short 2 blocks of 19th street this year.
19th street is where the WSCC (West Side Community Collaborative) won the national award a few years ago for clearing out all the major crime. This work on 19th street through HomeFront and PUSH follows all the rehabs and new homeownership on Essex and Chenango that have already been accomplished (and here). Although we’ve helped to identify the 19th Street houses and have tracked down some of the owners, the announcement yesterday is due to HomeFront’s work and they are doing a great job.
All of the new investment we are seeing on the West Side right now follows the WSCC ‘block by block plan’ of moving the crime and blight off a few blocks one year, then continuing on to removing crime and blight from the next few blocks further west the following year. This is being done while attracting investment and homeownership on the previous blocks. The next block is 18th Street, which has already been cleaned up by Mike Brundidge. Then there is Brayton Street – also only two blocks (one of which is now almost 100% home ownership). Of course we have the 5 Corners area we cleaned up and are turning back into a commercial area – this is where we put the new Garden Center and are putting in the new park by Urban Roots.
All the work we are doing in the Peace Bridge area right now is to make sure that when we reach the water in a couple of years of our ‘block by block’ work we have a beautiful Olmsted Park, fully restored historic Columbus Parkway neighborhood and will have a thriving Niagara Street Commercial district (future project) rather than a 45 acre truck plaza. We expect to win this battle. Certainly a thriving D’Youville Campus is part of this project as well.
Our goal is to have safe healthy neighborhoods from Main Street all the way to the River within a few more years. I’d love to see West Siders and Elmwood Village and Allentown residents walking and biking through the West Side to the River and Front Park – this is our vision. We would love to start working with other groups on starting a similar project East of Main.
Although HomeFront is using public funds for their part of the project, almost everything else we’ve done on the West Side so far has been though private investment and neighborhood resources.”
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