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Last shot at greatness

Latinos' voices must heard to influence downtown Phoenix redevelopment

One of Mary Peralta's fondest memories is walking to downtown Phoenix with her parents from their house on Second Street and Garfield.

"They walked to downtown, to the department stores, bodegas, and restaurants," she recalls. Today Peralta is a resident of the Willo neighborhood near Seventh Avenue and McDowell, and a board member of its association.

During the 1960s, downtown was truly the retail and social heart of Phoenix. The mix of entertainment like the Fox and Paramount movie theaters, retail stores like Hanny's and Switzer's, and the commercial warehouse district drew Hispanic residents of the neighboring areas to shop or work there.

That was before downtown suffered a decline in the '70s and '80's that saw these amenities disappear, leaving only office buildings and warehouses.

"That's all gone now and I don't know if we can bring it back," Peralta says.

Downtown's Phoenix's core currently is undergoing a massive overhaul, one that will have both good and bad ripple effects on the Latino residents in its surrounding neighborhoods.

A planning process called the Phoenix Urban Form Project is under way, with the goal of changing outdated, tangled zoning and space design within the downtown boundaries into new urban design guidelines for downtown Phoenix. The project will prepare master plans for public spaces, public art, character districts, and transportation. In addition, the design will allow for the building of residential units downtown, the majority of them high-price condominiums.

In October, the city council approved a development deal called Cityscape. Cityscape is a $900 million project that will bring hotels, office buildings and an A.J.'s Fine Foods, downtown's first grocery store in decades. Construction begins in the spring, and is scheduled to be finished in 2009.

Neighborhood activists worry development speculation in adjacent neighborhoods could displace long-time residents, the majority of whom are Latino.

After decades of neglect, they say, market forces are driving these traditionally Latino areas toward gentrification. Gentrification is the process of higher-income consumers replacing lower-income (often ethnic) residents in a community.

The boundaries of the Urban Form redesign project are roughly bounded by 19th avenue on the west, McDowell Road on the north, 7th street on the east, and Buckeye Road on the south.

This area includes or borders several old barrios, including Garfield, Central Park, Grant Park, Oakland/University Park, and Roosevelt.

Chris Ibarra, an activist with the Downtown Voices Coalition, a downtown area advocacy organization, wants to organize a Latino-led community workshop to discuss possible gentrification of Hispanic neighborhoods.

"I think this project is a good catalyst to hold a broader conversation on how development is affecting the existing (Latino) communities in and around downtown," he says, "and how their current character and socioeconomic diversity can be maintained or enhanced in the future."

Some area neighborhoods, such as Willo and Coronado, are organized to defend their own interests, he says. Most of the Latino barrios are not. He and others are concerned lower-income familes, including Latinos, won't be able to afford to continue living in these areas if taken over by speculators hoping to make money on downtown projects such as the Arizona State University campus, the biomedical industry and the light rail.

Nor will the many be able to afford the high rents ($300,000-$500,000 condos) in downtown Phoenix.

GETTING INVOLVED

Not all gentrification is bad. Louisa Stark, executive director of the Community Housing Partnership, remembers when she first moved into her offices in 1989 in the Garfield neighborhood. Next-door neighbors warned her not to move furniture in over the weekend. Two gangs were warring, and her workers could get hurt, she was advised.

"Two people were killed that weekend," Stark recalls. "Welcome to Garfield."

Since then, Garfield residents (who are 90 percent Latino) have taken back their neighborhood from gangs. They have forged one of the strongest associations of all the downtown neighborhoods.

Stark attended the first Phoenix Form public-participation workshop on Oct. 10 at the Phoenix Convention Center. In these workshops locals can recommend how a future downtown should look, feel and sound. Several future workshops are scheduled during this 18-month process.

Of about 200 workshop participants, "there were very few Latinos, no African Americans and one Native American," Stark says.

However, she adds, the "usual neighborhood advocates" - all White - were out in force.

Unfortunately, unless Latinos and lower-income residents participate in the planning process, she warns, "we may end up with an upper-middle class, very Anglo downtown."

Yet nearby Garfield and Grant Park, to the south, are already feeling the effects of a changing downtown, she adds.

"Every piece of property looks like it is changing hands," she says.

She observed changes in one Garfield rental complex early last summer. The owner wanted to turn it into housing for ASU students. All renters were kicked out, the building was renovated, and the rent was raised to $650. When the student renters didn't appear, the owner lowered the rent again, but those displaced families had to find housing elsewhere.

One ASU professor has documented the effects of gentrification on another city with high Latino populations. Gentrification of Latino areas is happening across the country, he says, not just in Phoenix. Yet the lessons they have learned can be applied to Phoenix.

Film producer Paul Espinosa created a documentary aired on PBS last spring. The Price of Renewal explores the redevelopment of the once-deteriorating neighborhood of City Heights, in San Diego. It examines what is gained and lost as a multicultural community improves itself.

"I think that is occurring in the Phoenix area," Espinosa says. "It has the potential to occur more. There tends to be a displacement of older residents, but where do they go to live?"

Espinosa predicts the gentrification process is going to move out from the Phoenix core to the surrounding neighborhoods.

The lesson for Phoenix residents, he says, is to "be organized."

"It's useful to take a look at the San Diego case," he says. Information on the documentary can be found at www.californiadreamseries.org.

ONE FINAL TRY

Dean Brennan is the city of Phoenix's principal planner with the Phoenix Urban Form Project.

Brennan says city planners know this project is a window of opportunity to get downtown planning right.

"We really feel that with ASU coming downtown, the biomedical field, light rail, this is sort of our last shot at greatness. And if we don't plan it right this time, we're going to be throwing this out," he says.

He admits the city has been struggling with ways to keep the area diverse, with different ethnic groups, and higher- and lower-income residents. Lack of affordable housing and high-price downtown condos will restrict the mix.

"We joke that city staff won't be able to live downtown," he says.

How to incorporate a Hispanic presence and influence into the plan is a concern, he says.

"There has been a lot of discussion about how do we incorporate our Hispanic heritage? That is really very significant. How do we incorporate that into downtown?"

Because the plan needs to connect downtown with surrounding neighborhoods, it is important that there be amenities to attract Hispanic residents to downtown, he adds.

"One of the comments we heard during the stakeholder meetings is that the folks living in Grant Park seldom go into downtown, he says. "Part of the reason is that there is nothing in downtown that really speaks to the Hispanic population."

Brennan says Dyett & Bhatia, the urban planning consultants conducting the Urban Form Project, has built in outreach to Latino residents. However, he says that unless Hispanics come to the table to mold a future downtown, their opportunity for input may be lost.

Tommy Espinoza, president/CEO of Raza Development Fund in Phoenix, considers himself a Chicano activist who is somewhat mellowed out. A founder of the non-profit Chicanos Por La Causa, he recalls when Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport erased the Golden Gate barrio in the name of city economic development.

The difference between what used to be called "urban renewal" and today's redevelopment of Latino neighborhoods is that now residents have a voice. Whether they use it or not is the question.

"What we wanted wasn't even part of the discussion back then," he says. He says the issue in those days wasn't if Latino families might vacate to accommodate the airport, but when they would be moved out.

Today Latinos and other people of color determine their own destinies, he says. The city government is not the enemy, he adds. If there is an enemy, it may be ourselves.

"There has to be a very organized effort on the part of the Latino/African American/low-income families to come together and engage as these planning concepts are occurring," he says. "They need to speak to that and say, 'We need work force housing so that in effect, our communities don't get left out."

The civil rights fights of the past have changed from rock throwing to participating, he says.

"Now we are talking straight up economic discrimination. You just can't afford to live there," Espinoza says.

Latinos are becoming a majority of the population, he says, and need to start engaging in city redevelopment dynamics.

"It puts a different responsibility on us now," he says. "We have to say to ourselves, 'I'm not going to wait for them to invite, I'm going to invite them to engage with me on how I feel the city should be developed.' And that's a different paradigm for our community. And we have to change quickly, because things are moving fast."