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newark
Residential area in Newark

NEWARK

The Middle Class Returns

Newark is a fifteen-minute train ride into New York City, and office space rents at one-third Manhattan rates. But in recent decades, such advantages haven’t always been apparent to investors and potential residents. In the 1950s and 1960s, Newark fell prey to many of the same afflictions suffered by other cities—“white flight” to the suburbs, relocation of manufacturing jobs, interstates that knifed through neighborhoods, and, in 1967, ten days of deadly riots.

A middle-class exodus left Newark without a tax base, and by the mid-1970s, it had hemorrhaged nearly half of its postwar population. Once-vibrant immigrant neighborhoods deteriorated into slums, and downtown was a ghost town of abandoned office buildings.

But in the 1980s, Newark began a quiet comeback, spurred in part by an audacious proposal by developer Donald Harris. At first, investors scoffed at his plan to construct 40 three-bedroom homes on a deserted lot in the city’s rundown Central Ward. But eventually Prudential Financial (then Prudential Insurance), a founding member of Living Cities, agreed to finance the project with a loan of $2.6 million. The units sold almost at once, and other developers took notice.

In the ensuing decade, Newark burnished its image as a city on the mend. The $1.4 billion redevelopment of Newark International Airport brought jobs and commerce to the city.

The long-established New Community Corporation, with support from Living Cities and the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), gradually brought quality housing, jobs, health care, and schooling back to the Central Ward. In the mid-1990s, HUD brought its HOPE VI initiative to the 40-year-old Stella Wright project, beset by crime and drugs. With HUD money and local support, the Newark Housing Authority arranged for the project to be leveled and replaced by more than 600 mixed-income housing units. Together, these efforts have been a resounding success.

The unthinkable happened. Middle-class families returned, and schools, supermarkets, and retail developments sprang up. City government began referring to Newark’s “renaissance.” In the past ten years, the Central Ward’s crime rate has dropped by 51 percent, and HUD has designated the area a “Renewal Community,” qualifying it for billions of dollars in tax incentives.