Low poverty areas in city of Akron overcome past struggles with funding

Tierra Thomas April 11, 2018April 12, 2018 0 Comments

A map of Akron shows each area and color-codes where the lie in terms of redlining. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

A lack of funding and a long process of waiting keeps low poverty districts in the city of Akron from advancing at a steadily pace.

Redlining, a term coined in the 1960s, dates back to the 1930s where based on someones ethnic background, race, or religion, they could be denied things such as financing, healthcare and living needs. In Akron, several areas are marked red and defined as “hazardous.”

Ward 3, one of the poorest districts in the city of Akron, recently made positive changes to the community and continues to do so.

“You really have to fight for those funds because, of course, there’s just not enough funds to go over for everybody, you know?” Ward 3 and President of the Council Margo Sommerville said. “Only some projects are going to get funded and that’s just the way it works.”

Then vs Now

In the 1930s, a security map of Akron showed that mixed nationalities lived there with the common occupation being “rubber workers and common laborers.” The old document also provides information detailing whether that area has been “infiltrated” by black people who they refer to as “colored” and “negro.”

A portion for the Security Map of Akron, Ohio from 1939. Courtesy of dsl.richmond.edu.

The document also shows that as more foreign families and black people turned up, there was an increase in the price bracket of the area from 1935 to 1937, along with a decline in price trend. As less white people wanted to live in those areas, the more poor the area became.

Flashward to 2016, the city of Akron received a $5 million grant to create the Akron City Commons, which helped fund projects for working on downtown Akron and Summit Lake.

Deputy Director of Finance Steve Fricker explained how the grant was distributed.

“The areas that are impacted by the grant kind of run from Summit Lake up through downtown and that’s how those areas were picked,” he said.

Changes in the community

Summit Lake originally did not belong to Ward 3 until four years ago.

“When I inherited it, it was a very neglected area, much like how all of the other parts of Ward 3 were,” Sommerville said.

The first thing Sommerville accomplished once she took over Summit Lake was give the community a grocery store. Before then, local farmers provided food for the community because there were no grocery stores in their area.

At the same time, the Reach Opportunity Center came along, which serves as an educational facility for the Summit Lake area.

The community came up with certain projects they wanted to see happen for their area.

“A whole part of the Akron Civic Commons was that people had an opportunity to come together and share the process of how that money was going to be spent,” Sommerville said. “So it was an opportunity to kind of bring residents together to say what they wanted their neighborhood to look like.”

The lack of finances for the city of Akron plays a significant role in how projects get the green light from the mayor.

“That’s how you’re really going to ensure that your project is going to happen,” Sommerville said. “In Akron, that’s just kind of the way the structure is. We’re kind of in a mayor strong city, so when you get the mayors support on something, and he’s backing you—or she—then, you know more likely your project or whatever you’re trying to work on is going to happen.”

Tax Cuts

In addition to the state making labor cost cuts for all cities in Ohio, they also ended the Ohio Estate Tax in 2013.

“The bulk of that money (from the Ohio Estate Tax) used to float back to whatever city (the deceased) lived in,” Fricker said.

With those two factors, Akron lost about $10 million in funding.

“We’re struggling but… we’re paying our bills,” Fricker said. “We’re stable financially, but it is a struggle to fund the operations that we want to be able to fund, and to fund a lot of the Capital projects…”

Sommerville recently received funding for a project that took 10 years of waiting for, including while her father and former council president Marco Sommerville served as the representative.

“For years, I have been fighting to get a total renovation at Spring Hill apartments, but the money kept going to other neighborhoods before mine, but eventually we got it,” Sommerville said. “So it’s kind of like, you know, sometimes you just have to kind of take your turn in terms of which communities get the dollars.”

Although it may take a while to see changes within their communities and get the public support, Sommerville does not rely too heavily on the funding to help her ward.

“We still had other things happening in the district that were good in terms of moving the community forward, and it’s just kind of those things you just… you can’t get it all done,” she said. “It’s just so many things on the table and you’re just kind of having to attack them piece by piece.”