After four years and much progress, Patricia Smith, Philadelphia's Director of Neighborhood Transformation, has stepped down to take on a new job at the Reinvestment Fund, a nonprofit organization focused on community development.
Mayor John Street and city officials marked the end of Smith's leadership, as well as the accomplishments of the Neighborhood Transformation Initiative, on Tuesday with a reception at World Cafe Live, located at 3025 Walnut St.
After the reception, Smith led a tour of three transformed sites around the city.
The NTI began in 2001 as part of Street's effort to improve the city's blighted areas and halt the city's population decline.
"It was the mayor's vision and commitment to make this happen," Smith said.
The project sites visited were the Reserve at Packer Park in South Philadelphia, the Lucien E. Blackwell Homes in West Philadelphia and Pradera ? Spanish for meadows ? in North Philadelphia.
The focus of the NTI's projects has been not simply on redevelopment, but on creating and managing sustainable and diverse communities.
"A neighborhood should be a place where you can live, work, shop, learn and play," Smith said about the guiding principles of the NTI.
The impact of the NTI can be seen in the numbers of residents staying in the city and returning from the suburbs.
"Population loss was nil this year," said Smith. "We hope to show a steady increase by 2010 for the first time in 45 years."
The Reserve at Packer Park consists of 230 market-rate townhouses. Pradera contains 50 subsidized home-ownership units as part of a larger community-development effort that includes housing-counseling services, vacant lot-clearing and the development of a local elementary school.
The Lucien Blackwell Homes, part of the Mill Creek Revitalization in West Philadelphia, comprises 180 home-ownership units and 180 rental units. It will soon include a two-and-a-half-acre landscaped park.
The Mill Creek Revitalization project cost $109 million. This was funded partially by a $35 million grant from the federal government.
Next for West Philadelphia is a major development in the Mantua section just north of Penn's campus, for which the NTI was awarded state funding in a statewide competition. It will include 50 units of various types of housing.
