City to target blight around 15th Street
As Augusta moves forward on tackling blight, it is taking a new tack and focusing its efforts on a corridor around 15th Street, where other public entities are investing millions in projects. The city's targeting effort is similar to one that is paying off in Greenville, S.C., which has revitalized 12 neighborhoods but is also dealing with problems Augusta might hope to have in the future with a shortage of affordable and workforce housing.
The emphasis on one blighted area of the inner city for future efforts is an "expansion" of what has been done in the Laney-Walker/Bethlehem redevelopment effort in the area around 15th Street that is just adjacent to those neighborhoods, Augusta Administrator Janice Allen Jackson said.
"We’ve made some good progress in some areas, but there is so much more progress that needs to be made because our inner city has a lot of dilapidated structures," she said. "What’s different about this is A, it’s a specifically targeted area, which hadn’t been done before, it’s been more scattershot, especially with the code enforcement pieces. (Also) we will be aggressively looking for private developers to partner with us, similar to what we believe will be a tremendous success with the Beacon Station project."
It would follow a similar pattern to that project, set to open just off Wrightsboro Road – the city demolishes a number of dilapidated properties to clear the way, a developer comes in and helps develop properties with some assistance from the city, and in the case of Beacon Station, "they are actually going to pay us back for the demolitions that we did in the area as part of the project," Jackson said. "We’d like to replicate that kind of approach. It also makes it a lot easier to appeal to a developer if we’re dealing with concentrated pockets of land."
The city was encouraged to focus on this area in part because of what other entities are doing in that section of 15th Street, she said. Foremost is a massive road project the Georgia Department of Transportation is about to begin to widen a nearly two-mile stretch of 15th Street from Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard to Government Road.
That project runs in front of the T.W. Josey High School campus, where Murphey Middle School moved to a new building that shares some facilities with the renovated high school. The street also connects with the area of the former Cherry Tree Crossing public housing complex, which was torn down to make way for the Walton Green development, which has already opened and filled 80 senior living units, with another 90 mixed-income units under construction and a potential of 250 more, said Douglas Freeman, the deputy executive director of the Augusta Housing Authority.
The school board decided to invest in the Josey campus years before the other projects were announced, in part to help strengthen a beloved school whose enrollment was dropping, board President Jimmy Atkins said, and it makes sense to have the schools share some facilities. The board also mothballed nearby Collins Elementary with the idea of potentially reopening it if more families move back to the area, he said.
Those public entities "have made investments in that area, so it seemed to make sense for us to expand our target area to do likewise," Jackson said.
That targeting effort is similar to one in Greenville, one of the cities Augusta looked at as potential models.
Greenville identified 12 low- to moderate-income neighborhoods to target for redevelopment and met with neighborhood associations in those areas to come up with a master plan for each community, said Ginny Stroud, Greenville's community development manager.
"“The most important thing is to make sure the residents themselves are engaged in the process," she said. "It helps to have a vision from the community about how they would like to see their neighborhood revitalized."
City staff attend monthly neighborhood association meetings and get feedback on the plan and other issues in the area, Stroud said. Jackson said that outreach is something Augusta would like to do, but the corridor is probably a little different than that in Greenville.
"One of the challenges of that is many of these areas really don’t have active neighborhood associations anymore," she said. "Most of the homeowners have moved on and you are looking at communities that may be 80-90 percent rental. They have less of a stake in what happens."
Like Augusta, Greenville might acquire and demolish a property but relies on private or nonprofit developers to revitalize them, Stroud said.
"We can provide a little bit of property or a little bit of funding and then those partners can leverage that investment with other funding," she said. "We don’t have the resources to do it on our own."
Both cities rely on federal Community Development Block Grant funding to hep with redevelopment, and Greenville nonprofit developers can access some funds the city cannot, such as the State Housing Finance and Development Authority, Stroud said. Greenville also is experiencing a problem Augusta would love to have – its stock of abandoned and dilapidated properties is dwindling not because the city has moved against them but because private developers are snatching them up as the area's reputation as a good place to live has grown.
That has created a problem for Greenville in a lack of affordable and workforce housing. A 2016 study found it was short 2,500 of those homes for those making $20,000 a year or less. Each neighborhood master plan includes affordable housing, and the city established the Greenville Housing Fund to encourage that development, Stroud said.
Augusta is not at that point, though many developments do contain an affordable housing component, Jackson said. Though some early developments such as the Pine Street project in Laney-Walker were "a little fancy" and more expensive, the city has more recently tried to focus on homes in the $100,000 range, she said.
"Affordability is always something we’re interested in because ideally you have a mix," Jackson said.
Augusta is choosing to target its new inner-city revitalization efforts on a corridor around 15th Street in part because of major investments others are making in that area.
• The Richmond County Board of Education chose to move Murphey Middle School to the campus of T.W. Josey High School and have those schools share some facilities, including a lunchroom and gym. The board has spent $33.6 million on those projects over the past five years, said school system spokesman Kaden Jacobs.
• The Georgia Department of Transportation is about to let contracts in June to begin widening 15th Street from two lanes to four from Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard to Government Road, with a median separating two lanes each way. It will also install five-foot-wide sidewalks along the route with pedestrian crossings. The project aims to improve the connection between south Augusta and the medical community and downtown while also easing congestion. That project, along a 1.59-mile stretch of the road, has been estimated to cost $21.4 million and is funded by the Transportation Investment Act.
• The former Cherry Tree Crossing public housing complex was razed and replaced by the Walton Green mixed-income development. The first phase, The Legacy at Walton Green, is an 80-unit senior living housing complex and is fully occupied. A second phase of 90 units is under construction, and future phases could add up to 250 units, according to Douglas Freeman, the deputy executive director of the Augusta Housing Authority. The total investment is expected to be between $35 million and $40 million, he said.