After reading reporter Dale Ellis’ two-part series on the city’s Urban Renewal Agency, we came away thinking A. That agency should have been around for the past 20 or 30 years in its present form, and B. That agency is easily one of the most important functions of Go Forward Pine Bluff.
Big picture: There’s good going on in Pine Bluff, we all know there is, but for the visitor looking to buy or build or locate, etc., there’s a lot of ugly.There are crumbling buildings in the downtown area and burned out husks in the residential areas. Very quickly, the visitor is thinking, uh, maybe not here. And the Urban Renewal Agency is attacking those problems on both ends.
Let’s start with the residential areas. It does not take much of a drive off the main drags to find burned out houses. That condition is apparently the last stop for many abandoned homes, of which we have many. The story points out that the city has 200 burnouts, with 30 more added each year. Can you imagine what burned out houses do for a neighborhood? Left unattended, they become homes to vagrants and rats, and at the very least, they are severe eyesores. Trying to sell a house across the street from one of these? Or just rent it? And when no one wants to live in a house under any circumstance and the owner has moved away, it is just a matter of time before that structure becomes another burned-out eyesore.
In a real sense, these ruined houses and other blighted properties are cancers in these neighborhoods, causing erosion of property values and erosion of any neighborhood morale that might develop with pride of ownership.
To combat all of that, Maurice Taggart, executive director of the agency, and the commission that oversees the agency, are all working to shorten the time it takes from alerting an owner about a burned out or blighted property to the point of the city tearing it down. As Taggart said, the goal is to have these salvageable properties repaired and put back into service. But when that fails, he wants to be quicker about getting rid of them. That whole effort is long overdue, and we’ll know it’s working when those falling down and burned out houses are starting to disappear.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
The work downtown falls along the same lines. Certainly, the area is looking better than it has, but there are still many abandoned, unsafe buildings down there with just a few businesses spotted around. The Urban Renewal Agency is hitting that problem on two fronts, which, in the end, will provide both the chicken and the egg.
The agency, which operates within an urban renewal zone, is taking some of those old buildings — three in fact — and bringing them back to a point where they are safe and are ready for a business to take over and design and create its own interior space. Not just any business, as Taggart said, but something that has shown previous success.
“We’re not looking for fly-by-night operators,” Taggart said. “We’re looking for tenants with resources and a track record of achievement.”
The problem with developing the downtown, well, another problem with it has been that few people live there. Take a look at downtown Little Rock today. There are numerous businesses in and around that area, such as restaurants and bars, and just one or two blocks away there are nice neighborhoods of single family homes and apartments — all filled with people who frequent those establishments.
To plant the seed for that happening here, the agency is planning to develop a three-acre parcel into housing for as many as 30 middle-income families.
“The housing piece is important because the intent of it is to feed the downtown market,” Taggart said. “That’s why that housing is so important, to ensure that we have that foot traffic in the downtown corridor.”
As we said earlier, we seem to be decades late in the creation of an agency that puts Pine Bluff in a position to take these steps and make these improvements. We can thank the five-eighths cent Go Forward sales tax for that. And despite a few grumblings from a couple of folks on the Pine Bluff City Council, most of the city’s leadership appears to be on board with the way things are headed now.
That puts the city in a good place today, which, we can all hope, puts the city in a better place tomorrow. Goodness, we all know by now that we do not want the city to continue to be what it was yesterday.