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Ciy officials can talk all they want to about federal grants and “empowerment zones.” But Jerry Pryor, economic development chairman for the Avondale Community Council, says education is what it’s all about.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Empowerment Zone Designation has approved $10 million over the next 10 years that will be funneled to the city through and empowerment zone grant to improve the city’s communities.
While community leaders from the zone have identified and array of uses for the money, Pryor says Avondale knows which one will pay off the most.
“We are now battling for employment from around the world,” Pryor said. “We need to teach our students and make them competitive in the world marketplace.”
Pryor said improving the level of education has to be the primary focus.
“There is a relationship between education and a drop in crime,” Pryor said. “We need to educate those people, change their focus and bring them back into the system.”
The Cincinnati Empowerment Corporation is a non-profit organization that was created to implement a strategic plan.
The 33-member board made up of 11 community representatives, 11 business representatives and 11 government and non-profit agency representatives, has mapped out four areas in need of improvement in nine areas of the city.
The nine communities are : Avondale, Walnut Hills, Queensgate, West End, Corryville, Fairview/Clifton Heights, Evanston, Mount Auburn and Over-the-Rhine.
The money will be a starting source to create jobs, fund employment, improve health services, increase home ownership and improve access to technology and transportation.
“This is a regional commitment where Cincinnati competed against 119 other cities nationally,” said Tim Sharp, special assistant to the city manager. There were only 14 other cities including Columbus and Gary, Ind., that received the federal grant.
Sharp said the city would receive other benefits such as tax incentives and increased tax exempt bonding capacity.
Increasing the economic work force will be a primary focus of the project, Sharp said. The project is expected to create 10,000 jobs over the next 10 years for zone residents. Companies involved in the project such as The Kroger Co. and Procter & Gamble Co. will help with job placement and training.
“Fifty percent of zone residents didn’t have access to a car when we did a survey,” he said.
That is why there also will be a focus on alternative transportation in this area, he said.
The other areas of improvement that have been identified are : · Increasing home ownership. · Individual family well-being. · Community building.
Pryor said that by focusing on education, Avondale would benefit not only from a decrease in crime but also an increase of local business.
The community will start to upgrade schools so that classrooms have Internet access, he said. The projects, he said, will begin taking shape in the next several coming months.
“We are getting off the ground right away,” he said. “In about 45 days, we will start recruiting youth to be employed during the summer as part of the employment training project.”
Some communities will use the resources from the grant as a way to finish up older projects as well as start new ones.
Lamont Taylor, president of the Corryville Community Council, said the community has been working on several projects to revitalize its neighborhoods.
“We are trying to get more first-time home owners in the area,” he said. “They will invest more into the community and tend to take better care of their homes. Once people start buying houses in our neighborhoods, everything else seems to fall into place.”
Taylor said that promoting more home owners in the area begins to have a domino effect on the entire neighborhood.
“The advantage is that we will start to see better schools, cleaner parks and an overall interest in the well-being of this community,” he said.
The community, he said, is working with the Corryville Economic Development Corp. and the Urban League to train first-time buyers about owning property and helping them with financing. The applicants must promise to live in Corryville for at least two years, he said.
One of the new projects that the council is working on is an effort to work with the University of Cincinnati to promote jobs available in Corryville to students. Taylor said that the resources from the empowerment zone project would help make that possible.
One of the regulations for getting empowerment zone designation was to limit a zone to 50,000 people, Pryor said.
But other neighborhoods such as Camp Washington and Winton Terrace will be brought in to the zone as the project continues, he said.
“When we looked at 30 years of census data we found that 17 neighborhoods had 160,000 people meeting poverty levels,” he said. “One of the things that made this (possible) was that eventually we would get to everybody.” ©
This article appears in Apr 7-13, 1999.