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Old South Baton Rouge didn’t need another plan.

At least that’s what folks who live in the historic but downtrodden area north of LSU told the Baton Rouge Area Foundation five years ago.

“People told us, ‘We’ve had a lot of people tell us they’re going to reinvent this neighborhood, and they talked and talked and talked, and nothing much has happened,’” BRAF Executive Vice President John Spain says. “There is a lot of cynicism, and rightfully so.”

BRAF became involved in Old South through its work with HOPE VI, an $18.6 million federally funded effort to tear down old housing projects and build new single- and multi-family homes. The foundation quickly realized a revitalization effort for the surrounding community was needed for HOPE VI to thrive.

HOPE VI ended in September, but BRAF is committed to Old South for at least the next 10 years, Spain says. Working with the Center for Planning Excellence and the Gulf Coast Housing Partnership, BRAF plans to develop a “gateway project” at Highland Road and Terrace Avenue, once one of the worst corners in the city. Seven other areas were targeted for development in the 2006 master plan, and design standards have been approved to keep new buildings in line with neighborhood character.

Private developers are showing interest, especially along Nicholson Drive. Nicholson Estates, a partnership between Lafayette oilman Mike Moreno and Florida-based White Sands Development Group, is assembling about 20 acres for a possible mixed-use development designed by Steve Oubre [White Sands didn’t want to talk about the project for this story]. Property values are starting to creep up. Old South is potentially one of the prettiest places to live in the city, Spain says.

“These projects will happen because they’re the right thing to do at the right time. In our conversations with private developers, they believe they can make a good return,” Spain says. With the hundreds of empty lots in Old South, there should be plenty of room for new development without forcing out the people who already live there, he says.

Given its location between the main LSU campus and downtown, Old South’s rebirth is crucial for any effort to transform Baton Rouge from a smattering of developments connected by strips of asphalt into a place that works and feels like a real city. But the area has long faced the standard inner-city problems, including crime and the perception of crime, blight, lack of investment, absentee landlords and the threat of gentrification. The list goes on. Those issues have arguably been allowed to fester by a typical Baton Rouge problem: lack of leadership.

“The resources are available. We know what the problems are. We’ve just got to connect the dots,” says Kevin Boyd, who became the first executive director of the Old South Baton Rouge Partnership in January. “I think we can do it, but you’ve got to have the will to do it. Right now, I don’t see the will to do it.”

A steep decline

Old South was once the center of black culture and leadership in Baton Rouge. The city’s first black-owned business, first official subdivision and first publicly funded school for black people were all founded in Old South. The Lincoln Theater was a frequent meeting place for the 1953 bus boycott, which predated the more famous Montgomery, Ala., boycott by two years.

Highland Road was particularly vibrant, and even as late as the early 1970s, many LSU students thought nothing of walking from campus to downtown. White flight to the suburbs spurred the decline of many inner cities, including Baton Rouge’s, but Old South was also decimated by a less-reported problem: black flight.

Valerian Butler Smith is a Princeton graduate and money manager; his grandfather was Leo S. Butler, a prominent community leader and businessman in Old South, and his grandmother was Estelle DeVall Butler, a direct descendent of the DeVall family who arrived in Baton Rouge in the 1770s, he says. When integration began to create opportunities in other places, many of the most prosperous residents left, sucking vital capital out of Old South’s neighborhoods.

“By the time I was in my 20s [in the 1980s], it was clear that the sense of hopelessness, the sense of not giving a damn about property and not caring how you behave toward neighbors had pretty much permeated the entire atmosphere,” Smith says while sitting in his grandfather’s century-old house on Terrace in the heart of Old South. “It was depressing, and it was the polar opposite of the community that my grandfather described when he began building his legacy right here.”

Old South, while not the most crime-ridden part of the city, plays host to a flourishing drug trade. Shootings are not uncommon. On Dec. 19, an 18-year-old man was gunned down about 1:15 p.m. in the 1000 block of South 15th Street near Olive Street, police said.

A community meeting held by the Old South partnership in August exposed the frayed relationship between residents and law enforcement. Cpl. Riley Harber of the Baton Rouge Police Department said the community used to watch out for each other.

“They had no problem calling the police,” Harber said. “Let’s start doing what we used to do.”

Many residents requested regular foot or bicycle patrols to help build community relationships, but officers said they don’t have the manpower. Lt. Charles Armstrong said all officers are required to take diversity and sensitivity training, prompting cries of “It’s not working” from several audience members. Derek Hudson, who lives on Tennessee Street, claimed he was pulled over and harassed by a young white officer, but nothing came of Hudson’s subsequent complaint to the department.

“I can’t explain that to my son,” Hudson said. “I did what I was supposed to do.”

“We have some bad apples in our organization,” Armstrong said.

“I’ve had clients who didn’t really want to come out here, and I can’t blame them,” says Adrian Mayes, who owns Accounting Solutions and Services on Myrtle Avenue and 16 rental properties in Old South. “I can walk out my door and watch a drug trade.”

Mayes says the crime wouldn’t be allowed to continue in a white area, but she’s sympathetic to cops who tell her they don’t want to risk their lives to bust some small-fry dealer who’s back on the street the next day. Still, she says crime has declined in the past couple of years.

“The police say they’re doing everything they can, and if they had more cooperation from the community they could do a better job,” Boyd says. “But the community really can’t be the policeman.”

Residents often fear retribution for talking to the police, although tips can be made anonymously. Boyd says major crimes are down, and he says much of the violence comes from people who don’t live in Old South.

Former HOPE VI director Pat Robinson says the department plans to open an office in within HOPE VI, creating a 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week police presence in the heart of Old South.

Dashed hopes

HOPE VI was designed to replace older public housing, and the attendant pockets of poverty and crime, with mixed-income developments. The $18.6 million Housing and Urban Development grant has been spent, leaving behind a total of 48 houses on River South Way and East Polk Street.

HOPE VI includes rentals reserved for public housing residents and homes for sale to moderate-income buyers. Only eight of 21 for-sale homes have been sold, but there’s a waiting list for the rentals. One resident, 72-year-old Dan Williams, says he was attacked by a lumber-wielding mugger in the doorway of his public housing apartment a decade ago. His elbow still bears the scars.

“It was a bad project,” Williams says. “The whole place has changed. It’s a whole lot safer than what it was.”

Wanda Milburn, a cancer survivor who grew up on Harding Boulevard and attended Southern University, bought her first house in HOPE VI this year. She says she feels safe and reports only positive experiences with police, but she says the area desperately needs a grocery store and a pharmacy.

“It’s so odd that I have to drive to Lee Drive to get to a CVS,” she says.

Organizers originally hoped for 127 homes, but Boyd says the second phase was dependent on getting some mixed financing. Developer Cornerstone Housing pursued low-income housing tax credits, most of which ended up going to post-Katrina New Orleans; Boyd says Baton Rouge’s proposal came in dead last out of more than 250 applications.

The only other option was building some market-rate houses and using the sale of those homes to help finance the rest of the units. But HUD wasn’t convinced the market-rate houses would sell, and the law dictated the HOPE VI program had to end in September. So the 171 public units torn down in 2005 weren’t all replaced, and some residents apparently scattered; East Baton Rouge Public Housing Authority Director Richard Murray says “they have left public housing for one reason or another.”

The Rev. Fahmee Sabree, an Old South landowner, community activist and head of the local Islamic center, says some people moved to the Gardere Lane area. He says the HOPE VI disappointment led to cries of gentrification, which he believes aren’t justified because the Housing Authority’s intentions were good. Sabree says many of the same people who complain about not being able to buy one of the new houses aren’t willing to go through the available first-time homebuyer programs.

“As an African-American in this community, I believe we have to take more responsibility for ourselves than we have taken,” he says.

‘Old South needs fixing’

“Right now, I don’t know why the HOPE VI project does not seem to have spurred more removal of blight,” says John Noland, chairman of the East Baton Rouge Redevelopment Authority. The authority, established to rejuvenate neighborhoods by moving blighted properties into productive uses, met for the first time in April. “It troubles me that the program is not having the transformative impact that everybody wants and expected to happen.”

But he suggests a law- and code-enforcement crackdown in the area might help. Near HOPE VI is a motel Noland says is an obvious host of “severe antisocial activity.” The city checked the place for code violations and found none, which left Noland incredulous.

“You don’t have to be the dean of the Harvard property school to see that place is guilty of some code violations,” he says. “So if a code enforcement officer comes up to that and says there’s nothing wrong with it, they’re telling you they’re not prepared to expose themselves to the risk inherent in removing that piece of blight.”

City-parish chief administrator Walter Monsour says he’s learned about the importance of code enforcement through the authority’s work, and he says residents can expect beefed-up enforcement in the near future. Boyd says the concept driving the Redevelopment Authority is great, but the execution will be tricky.

“You just can’t go out and close buildings down and throw people out because the property doesn’t meet code,” Boyd says. “You can go in and close it down, but then you’ve got all those people who don’t have any housing. So what’s better? If you have code enforcement, it has to be coupled with a housing rehab program.”

CPEX administers a façade-improvement program and is helping to renovate a few homes, but Boyd says the money’s out there for something bigger if someone is creative enough to put it together; for example, by using Community Development Block Grants for materials and workforce development money for labor.

The redevelopment authority’s board doesn’t have a staff or recurring revenue, but hopes to identify an executive director in the first quarter of 2009. The board has chosen to focus on Old South first, partly because more work has been done there than in any other blighted neighborhood.

“If we’re going to expand the idea of downtown Baton Rouge, then Old South Baton Rouge needs fixing,” Noland says.

Downtown South

On Dec. 12, CPEX played host to a redevelopment workshop for about 100 people, including eight of 12 members of the incoming Metro Council. One of the speakers was John Alschuler, a member of the Plan Baton Rouge Phase Two consultant team creating downtown’s newest master plan. He stressed that creating connections is just as important as creating places, and he says the most important yet underutilized connection in the city is clearly the one between LSU and downtown.

“There’s an urban core here,” he said, referring to Old South. “It’s there, so use it. It’s not very far. It’s what’s there that makes it seem far.” He suggested a rail line might help cement the connection.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment of the first Plan Baton Rouge was that the successful projects didn’t spur much residential development. Given the cost of downtown development, that’s not likely to change, at least not without significant financial incentives, so Mid City and Old South need to be incorporated into the downtown concept. There’s no history of mixed-race, mixed-income housing succeeding in Baton Rouge, but Spain says market studies have shown that state workers, for example, would be happy to live in Old South if there was a supply of appealing housing and an easy way to get to and from downtown.

“They are desperately looking for the residential density they need to support the commercial development downtown,” Boyd says. “There are only so many loft apartments and condos that you can put down there. You ought to look at what you’ve already got surrounding you right now.”

LSU, for its part, hasn’t always been a friendly neighbor to Old South. When William Jenkins became chancellor in 1996, a consultant working on a campus master plan pointed out the chain-link fence along the north side of campus. The fence, dating to at least the 1960s, was incomplete and served no real purpose except as an ugly, weed-invested symbol of the divide between the university and the broader community. It was quickly taken down.

“It’s time for LSU to be part of the neighborhood, and the neighborhood to be part of us,” Jenkins says.

Today, LSU maintains the Community University Partnership, which works to build relationships with community groups, including the Old South Baton Rouge Partnership. New LSU Chancellor Michael Martin lists improving community relations as one of his top priorities.

“One of the things I’d like to see us be is proactive in Old South Baton Rouge,” Martin says. “There will always be varying degrees of success. The fact that you fail from time to time should not mean you shouldn’t continue to try to succeed.”

Who will lead them?

The Redevelopment Authority is most often cited as the entity that can drive Old South’s recovery, but their ultimate mission covers the entire parish. Boyd believes the Old South Baton Rouge Partnership is in the best position to coordinate the various efforts and “break down the silos” that tend to separate agencies and stakeholders in this city.

At the moment, however, he’s a one-man operation. His office is literally a closet with a desk in the McKinley Alumni Center without phone or Internet service. Most of his operating money came from the East Baton Rouge Mortgage Finance Authority, but he doesn’t have a recurring revenue stream. Boyd reckons he’s got about six months of funding left.

He hopes the new Metro Council representative might help his cause. District 10’s outgoing member, Lorri Burgess, did not respond to interview requests. But at council meetings, Burgess has expressed concerns about gentrification and portrayed BRAF members as wine-sipping elitists who are out of touch with the community’s real needs.

“I tried to get her to help get a rehab program in place,” Boyd says. “She would complain [about the area’s problems]. But I know a lot of people in this community felt let down by her. She wasn’t supportive of this project, and she wasn’t supportive of the HOPE VI project. I don’t know what she’s supportive of.”

The current council tends to defer to a fellow member on matters affecting that member’s district, although Monsour says he’s seen signs of a more holistic approach in the past year. With 10 new faces, hopes are high in some corners that the incoming council will take a broader view.

New District 10 representative Tara Wicker, who worked for former mayor Bobby Simpson, has a professional background in community redevelopment and organization. She helped form the Old South Baton Rouge Community Revitalization Corporation, which conducted an early neighborhood charrette in the late 1990s and built some houses before the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, a national nonprofit that works with community development organizations, withdrew its support because of a lack of local financing and involvement.

“There weren’t enough partners at the table to make it more of a comprehensive approach,” Wicker says. “This community has really been planned to death. Now it’s time for implementation.”

“What we need to do is be very sensitive to letting the residents of the neighborhood drive all of this,” Spain says. He says more than 300 people have shown up for some of the early Old South Baton Rouge Partnership meetings. “The more they take control of it, the better off we all are.”

Which means success or failure comes down to the people on the ground, especially those who have the means to leave but choose not to, like Valerian Smith, Fahmee Sabree and Adrian Mayes. Mayes says people are starting to buy and fix up the old houses, so she figures the word is out that the area is on its way back.

“It’s becoming an attractive area, but it hasn’t been,” Mayes says. “You just have to be a die-hard and say, ‘I’m not leaving.’ Areas like this need to rise above the circumstances, and it’s going to take people like me that stay here in order for that to happen.”