The sparkling $187-million New Jersey Center for the Performing Arts, now three years old, has been drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors to this very poor city, ground zero of the most destructive urban riots of the 1960s.Prudential Life has reaffirmed its 125-year commitment to Newark. The New Newark Foundation is perfecting a plan to rebuild an entire section of downtown. Private megadevelopers are making investments. A $325-million downtown arena for the NBA's New Jersey Nets and the NHL's New Jersey Devils is on the drawing board.
But downtowns don't operate in vacuums. The center of Newark probably couldn't be returning to vibrant life if it weren't for New Community Corporation, the United States' largest and arguably most successful community development corporation, which is active in the adjacent Central Ward.
The acrid odor of smoke had barely cleared from Newark's murderous 1967 riots, which took 23 lives and left much of the Central Ward in ashes, when William Linder, a ferociously independent Roman Catholic priest, began meeting with residents to plant the seeds of the Central Ward's rebirth.
New Community Corporation started small, building critically needed affordable housing. In 1990, it moved into commercial development in a big way with the opening of a highly successful shopping center--including a long-awaited supermarket--in the heart of the Central Ward.
Walk or drive the streets of the neighborhood today and it's impossible to miss New Community's green-and-white logo. Symbolizing hope and new beginnings, it marks the sides of NCC's vans, adorns banners on street lights and decorates signs in front of NCC projects.
With reported assets of $500 million and annual revenues of $200 million, New Community now has more than 20 separate facilities around Newark. NCC is into infant and day care, parks, health care, a restaurant, job training, auto repair, a factory, security, and a credit union. Some 500 elementary students attend its $6.3 million New Horizons Charter School, opened last September.
Close by, classrooms in a sparkling new $4.5-million, 25,000-square-foot Workforce Development Center are filled with students studying for graduate equivalency diplomas, taking courses in home health care and learning to operate state-of-the-art computer equipment.
In a converted industrial building, one discovers dozens of youths at work changing tires, tuning engines and fixing other mechanical problems on a dozen cars and vans that have been brought in for service.
The graduates of this Youth Automotive Training Center--an NCC partnership with Ford Motor Co. and a local auto dealer--can expect to move into skilled auto technician positions paying $10 to $20 an hour.
But the youths also get life skills courses. "We have not yet lost one of our graduates back to the streets. And we have a nearly 100 percent placement rate for our graduates," says John Grdovic, the program's director.
Would downtown Newark's comeback have been stillborn without NCC's efforts in the Central Ward? Very likely. "We're only a seven-minute fast walk from downtown," says now-Monsignor Linder. He notes there's also been strong revival in the nearby East Ward, which has enjoyed heavy Portuguese in-migration and rising property values. Positive development has to be under way in the close-in neighborhoods, Linder toldmy writer friend Robert Guskind, "if there is going to be development downtown."
My guess is that both are critical. Flashy projects give center cities a panache and credibility; they're drawing cards making downtowns viable centers and meeting places for entire citistate regions. That's true even if excessive costs--especially ransoms paid to sports team owners in the form of arena and stadium subsidies--get foisted off on the public.
But inner city neighborhoods make a major difference. If they're run-down, if they seem desolate or dangerous, people may fear the center city itself. In some big cities--Philadelphia, for example--imperiled North Philadelphia and other disinvested sections are so close that the downtown revival, as dramatic as it may seem, never quite reaches maturity.
Few cities have restoration forces with strength to approach Newark's New Community. But smart cities, from Boston to Seattle and points between, are working hard to encourage wide varieties of community development initiatives in their neighborhoods--not as a substitute for downtown progress, but a critically important complement.
Neal Peirce's e-mail address is npeirce@citistates.com.
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