Clearwater city government and the community are collaborating to revitalize the North Greenwood neighborhood. community was once a bustling Black business district and residential neighborhood.
A 2013 poverty study conducted by Pinellas County government showed that 25 percent of North Greenwood residents lived below the poverty level. Zeroing in on a specific section of North Greenwood between Drew Street and Union Street, with a western boundary that runs along Myrtle Avenue and then juts over to Douglas Avenue, the study showed 51 percent of residents living in poverty, the highest rate in Pinellas County.
Community groups pressed for a solution. In 2019, the nonprofit Clearwater Urban Leadership Coalition mobilized a community campaign of residents and more than 40 local businesses urging city leaders to revitalize North Greenwood by establishing a community redevelopment area there.
A CRA allows local governments to take the property tax revenues generated by the increase in property values in a geographic area and put them to use revitalizing that area through grants to improve businesses and homes, infrastructure projects like sidewalks, streetlights and streetscaping, upgrades to parks and community centers and other projects and programs.
Clearwater already had an established Community Redevelopment Agency in place with staff managing an existing community redevelopment downtown and the City Council serving as the decision-making board members.
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City of ClearwaterPublic outreach on establishing a North Greenwood CRA included community workshops in 2022.Following the community’s grassroots activism, city officials commissioned the required study to show there is a need to establish the city’s second CRA in North Greenwood and worked in collaboration with community groups to identify the priority needs in the area and establish a plan mapping out how the CRA would address them.
“There was heavy community interaction to make sure the needs of the community were actually being met and to get their buy-in to create the community redevelopment area,” CRA Executive Director Jesus
Niño says.
Through that process, affordable housing, aging or failing infrastructure and working in partnership with the community emerged as priorities.
Getting to work
In May 2023, the Pinellas County Commission approved the establishment of the North Greenwood CRA. The city provided $5 million from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) to jump-start revitalization efforts. The city first invested $1.4 million into 25 local nonprofits, including the Clearwater Neighborhood Family Center and Artz 4 Life Academy, to support community improvement.
In recent months, the CRA has ramped up its activity with the establishment of two grant programs - one for improvements to homes and one for improvements to businesses. Both grant programs align with a community priority - improve North Greenwood while helping the residents and businesses already there to stay there.
The Residential Exterior Improvement Grant Program offers up to $20,000 to low-income resident homeowners for renovations, repairs and upgrades to the outside of their homes. The grants work on a sliding scale based on a household’s income and size. To qualify, the household cannot earn more than 120 percent of the area median income.
“We understand that because they are low income, their contribution can’t be high
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City of ClearwaterClearwater Community Redevelopment Agency Executive Director Jesus Niño at all,” Niño says. “If you tell someone, ‘Okay, we’ll give you a twenty thousand dollar grant to fix your roof but you have to put down four or five thousand dollars,’ that’s a killer. They’ll say, ‘Whoa, I can’t even pay my electric bill, you expect me to put down four thousand dollars?’ To make the grant accessible to them, we made it so their contribution can be volunteer hours in the community at community centers or nonprofits. If they are disabled or elderly and they have a younger individual in the household, that individual can volunteer on their behalf.”
He says the program takes a different approach to affordable housing, crafted with community input.
“It’s not similar to how other CRAs operate in that we’re not building affordable housing or investing money for a developer to come in and build something or renovate an affordable housing complex,” Niño says. “Here, the way we are handling affordable housing right now is through these grants. We want to make sure that people stay in their homes. We want to make sure that their homes are upkept and improved. Then, hopefully, those homes are passed on to the next generation within that family.”
The second initiative, the Commercial Grant Program, focuses on helping existing businesses stay in business by funding improvements to the building or property.
“It’s part of helping improve the aging or deteriorating structures in the North Greenwood area,” Niño says. “That includes the residential homes and also the commercial businesses. That’s a major component of our plan, helping business owners, especially the legacy business owners who have been out there for years, sometimes even generations, to improve their structures and their properties. A legacy business gets more assistance with the grant. The more years you have been out there, the less your required match is.”
Already, CRA staff has received “ a stack of grant applications” for both programs, he says.
A seat at the table for the community
Throughout the years-long process of establishing the North Greenwood CRA, community groups and residents were steadfast that the community needs to have a seat at the table not just in identifying the area’s priority needs and establishing a plan to address them, but in implementing that plan. City officials agreed and created the North Greenwood CRA Citizens Advisory Committee.
The committee’s five members are the residents, business owners and nonprofit group leaders who serve as the community’s voice to city officials. Kinard Robinson is the newly established committee’s first chair. His family’s roots in North Greenwood run deep.
Robinson’s great-great aunt Cherry Harris was a longtime community activist. A neighborhood park bears her name. His great-great-grandmother Ethel Bryant owned the Cab Stand, a neighborhood restaurant, and was an NAACP chapter president. His great-great-grandfather Jack Bryant owned a cab company, New Deal Taxi Co. His great-grandmother Leola B. Washington graduated Pinellas High School in 1943 and later taught in the Pinellas County school system for almost 20 years. His great-grandfather Harrison Washington was the head plant operator at Dunedin High School. They were both active in their churches and local community groups.
Now Robinson is carrying on the family’s legacy of community involvement.
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Courtesy Kinard RobinsonNorth Greenwood CRA Citizens Advisory Committee Chair Kinard Robinson's family roots in the community go back generations.“When the CRA was established and there was an opportunity for people in the community to get involved and have a voice in how the CRA was established and how the community is revitalized, I saw that as a perfect opportunity to not just get involved, but carry the torch for my family, so to speak, and continue to push things forward,” he says.
As the North Greenwood CRA and its Citizens Advisory Committee start getting to work revitalizing the community, Robinson sees good things ahead.
“From my perspective, I see this as an opportunity for the community to play a major role in its redevelopment,” he says. “Because many times, when an area is redeveloped, it is being redeveloped by people and individuals from outside the community. Often in those situations, the people who have been there for years, sometimes decades, unfortunately, are unable to remain in the community for various reasons. So I see this as an opportunity for us to achieve the same goal of redevelopment while allowing the people who have been instrumental in making the community what it is the ability to stay where they are and enjoy this new phase of the community. Being able to help play a role in that is something I am extremely excited about.”
For more information, go to North Greenwood CRA