"One of the things we have to realize is that home ownership is not the only response for affordable housing," says Kathy Flanagan Payton, who was born in that hospital and serves as the CEO for Fifth Ward CRC. "It's time for us to be creative." Fifth Ward CRC has said the plans for the hospital will be critical to the continued revitalization of the neighborhood.
Payton remembers the Fifth Ward of her childhood as a community that centered around family, "where you called everyone auntie or uncle, even if they weren't really your aunt and uncle."
Friday nights meant the whole community turned out at Phyllis Wheatley High School to cheer on the championship football team. Payton recalls a sea of purple and white, the school's colors.
But the highways that sliced through the community changed things. Once Houston's black economic core, the Fifth suffered from suburban flight and lack of investment. People traveled across the community instead of through it.
Payton remembers looking out the window on Sunday car rides to church and seeing a different store with a "closed" sign each week. The boarded-up windows reminded her of Alfred Hitchcock's movie "The Birds."
In the 1970s and 1980s, crime and violence gave the Fifth Ward a reputation; people called it "the Bloody Fifth" or "the Bloody Nickel."
But when communities fall, there are those who work to lift them up. In Houston, that included Fifth Ward CRC, founded in 1989 by former Exxon executive Carl Umland and the Rev. Harvey Clemons Jr. of Pleasant Hill Ministries. "Rev. Harvey Clemons was becoming increasingly frustrated because there were more people going into crack houses than were going into his church on Sunday morning," says Payton, who has worked at the Fifth Ward CRC for 26 years, 15 as its CEO. The original idea was to follow the model of Habitat for Humanity, where Umland was president, she says. But Fifth Ward CRC, a NeighborWorks network organization since 1996 and one of several network organizations focusing on the Fifth, adapted and expanded to meet other needs.
Those needs include housing challenges and physical challenges. The greatest challenge, Payton says, is economic. "It's hard to thrive in an economically distressed community. The needs are so great and the resources are so few. How do we get ahead of the challenges?"
"We're able to get to the root of the problem," Payton says. "Normally if a kid is stealing food it's not for the sake of stealing food; they're hungry." The program provides case management and referrals. "Hopefully in the next couple of years we'll seen a turn in terms of employability of these youth and make sure they are active, productive, income-producing citizens in this community," Payton says. The program launched in August and currently has 49 students and 12 adults enrolled.
"If people are challenged, it's in one of four areas," Payton explains. "It's either the physical (their health or lack thereof), the fiscal (their wealth or lack thereof), social relationships and spiritual. If we can help, if there's a sense of recovery, then we have succeeded."
She hopes that the repurposing of St. Elizabeth will add to that sense of recovery. Built in the 1940s to treat black residents when white hospitals wouldn't, St. Elizabeth became a substance abuse center before closing in 2014.
Some in Houston are critical of the development, saying the small units won't accommodate families or that adding low-income residences will stress a community already weighted with need, according to a recent article in the Houston Chronicle. Payton says it's an inclusive opportunity with a mixture of housing opportunities — not just low income. "We want to make sure we're not segregating low-income families," she says.
She acknowledges that you can't please everyone 100 percent of the time; that's one of the things she's learned from her years at Fifth Ward CRC. "Pleasing people is a juggling act," she says. "Everybody's needs and everybody's desires are different."
When she goes through plans and accomplishments, Payton talks quickly to get through her list:
- A recent grant that they'll use to encourage economic development, repurposing an old building for a shared workspace model such as WeWork.
- Recent recognition as a LISC GO community and a Houston Complete Community
- Refurbishing the Deluxe Theatre, which reopened in 2015 as a cultural center
- The creation of the Fifth Ward Jam — green space with an art project and community stage. "That's one of our greatest successes," Payton says.
The Fifth Ward CRC "has developed a number of programs to respond to the needs of the community and is often viewed, in my opinion, as an ‘unsung hero,'" Davis says. "The work that the CRC continues to do to help the community recover from the disaster of Hurricane Harvey has been incredible and creative to say the least." That has included emergency financial assistance, furniture giveaways, repairs, and the elimination of predatory debt.
When talking about the Fifth, Payton speaks of both its spirit and its challenges. The community began in the 1800s with a largely Jewish population before becoming a thriving black community and then a struggling one. Now there's a mix of black and Latinx residents, and Payton says the key is to make the newcomers feel at home while making sure the existing residents don't feel that they're being displaced. "It continues to be a balancing effort."
Art, Payton says, may be one way to record and capture the community's rich history while also looking toward its future. "We want to preserve the past while making new memories with new residents."
NeighborWorks has also helped with funding and investment in people — training at the Community Leadership Institute and other programs, she says.
That investment meshes with her own philosophy. "We can't just focus on the physical development," she says. "We have to focus on the fiscal development and the individual development of people as a whole."
Tools she relies on:
- Open and transparent communication.
- Accountability and responsibility — we want to make sure we can demonstrate our accountability through our track record.
- She's seen headway in the last 26 years, she says. For one thing, there's a renewed sense of pride, something that Davis mentioned as well.
