Local Self-Reliance

For the past several years, the good folks at the Institute for Local Self Reliance in Washington, D.C. have worked to help urban residents gain greater control over their lives through the use of low-technology, decentralist tools and concepts. We strongly believe that more people (city dwellers and country folk alike) should be exposed to the Institute's efforts ... which is why we're now making this "what's happening where" report by ILSR staffers one of MOTHER's regular features.

To many people Newark, New Jersey seems to be the epitome of the decaying, depressed, Eastern urban center. The city's population has declined 20% in the last decade. Whole blocks of homes, factories, and warehouses lie vacant. One Newark neighborhood—with a population of 40,000 people—has only one supermarket. At the same time, unemployment has reached incredible levels and high blood pressure affects one out of every ten residents. It's little wonder that great numbers of people—who remember the 1967 riots which ripped through vast areas of this town—shake their heads in resignation and consider Newark a wasteland . . . an unsalvageable city.

The Tri-City Citizens' Union for Progress—a multi-purpose non-profit community corporation based on Newark's western edge—however, thinks differently. Since its founding in 1967, Tri-City has worked in its twelve-square-block neighborhood to maintain and improve the quality of life for area residents. For eleven years, then, Tri-City has focused on providing essential services: housing, health care, and education. Its underlying goal has always been the same ... to foster local economic development and to provide local leadership.

After the 1967 race riots, for instance, when much of the city's housing was abandoned because nobody wanted to invest in Newark . .. the people at Tri-City didn't abandon their neighbors. Instead, they sponsored the purchase and rehabilitation of Amity Village I, 96 units of housing which were designed to be owned collectively.

Amity Village—which was funded by the New Jersey Housing Finance Agency—was the first housing rehabilitation project in postriot Newark. Furthermore, the cooperative has played a continuing and important role in the development of Tri-City's program and—at the same time—has contributed to the stability of the area. (In contrast to the rest of the neighborhood—where only 19% of the residents have lived in the same house since 1965—three out of every four residents of Amity Village have been there since the cooperative's inception.)