Building On Rock, Not Sand

On May 17, 1980, all hell broke loose in Liberty City, Fla. A Tampa jury acquitted four white policemen in the beating death of a black insurance agent, and the heart of Miami's black community burst into violence. Three days later, 18 people were dead, 1,100 arrested, and some $100 million in property destroyed.

The riots left Liberty City among the least redeemable pieces of real estate in the nation. No private investor in his right mind would risk opening a business on Seventh Avenue, where a looted Pantry Pride grocery hulked on the corner, a symbol of the destruction. Unless local officials did something "very different and dramatic," warned Otis Pitts, Liberty City would erupt again.

In the end it was Pitts who led the way. A tall, warm welcome of a man, Pitts, 46, knew the neighborhood as no outsider could. He had grown up there, walked its streets as a city cop and volunteered in a local youth service agency. Over the years he had come to understand that all too often the poor in the inner cities live more like inmates than citizens. Liberty City had health clinics and community centers and every kind of social service agency. But it had no supermarket for 60,000 residents, and no new family housing had been built in 20 years. Liberty City's needs were the needs of any neighborhood: a decent place to live, a grocery store, a barbershop. If young working families regained faith in the neighborhood, Pitts believed, they would become part of its healing.

So in 1982, without the least background in business, he founded the TACOLCY Economic Development Corp., Inc., now one of the nation's most successful nonprofit community developers. He did not simply want to build nicer ghetto housing; he wanted to build an economy. "It was real new for us," he admits, "because it was an economic approach to solving problems, as opposed to social intervention."

Pitts did not look for cheap victories. He picked as his battleground the commercial strip along Seventh Avenue, already partially abandoned before the riot and utterly ravaged after. With the help of a Ford Foundation spin-off called the Local Initiatives Support Corp., and some local and federal money to secure the necessary loans, TEDC transformed the Pantry Pride site into Edison Plaza, a $2.1 million shopping center with thriving stores and offices, anchored by a Winn-Dixie supermarket.

There followed a McDonald's, the aptly named New Era Pharmacy and New Beginning Shopping Center. Then a police substation, a community college satellite and a tide of renovations by local merchants. Pitts meanwhile cleared the way for building the $5.7 million Edison Towers, new housing in the heart of the riot area, and is now at work on another housing initiative, Edison Gardens. The speed of the turnaround, says LISC's Sandra Rosenblith, was dazzling. "This is the way community development is supposed to work," she says, "but I've never seen it happen so clearly, or so fast."

Given the friends and victories he has won, Pitts these days is surrounded by people wanting to help him. They want to make him rich, or they want him to run for office. "One of the things that happens in poor communities is that there's a tendency for competent people to get skimmed off," he says. "But this area needs people who are willing to hang around for a while." With so much left to do, Pitts is staying right where he is.