University Times

Following the speakers at the Oct. 23 Senate fall plenary session, a panel of representatives from Oakland community groups presented brief descriptions of what their organizations do and how they have partnered with Pitt.

Community Human Services Corp. (CHS)

Adrienne Walnoha said that CHS has been a community center in South Oakland for almost 40 years.

At first the organization served as a get-acquainted center for Oakland residents who wanted to talk about their community, she said.

“Now, we have not only a fully functioning community center, we have a whole host of community services, everything from primary health care to housing for individuals who are homeless.”

Walnoha highlighted CHS’s partnership with Pitt’s Community Outreach Partnership Center (COPC), a U.S. Housing and Urban Development-funded project launched in 2000 that allows Pitt to use human, intellectual and institutional resources to help revitalize communities.

“We at CHS have been the recipients of so many benefits from COPC,” Walnoha said. For example, faculty from a variety of Pitt units have trained CHS groups on writing and other interpersonal skills, she said.

“We have had interns and volunteers every year since the start of COPC. This year, we are at our summit with 17 students participating in our organization’s activities. Without those students and their energy, enthusiasm and creativity, the center couldn’t be the vital place it is right now,” Walnoha said.

COPC also has helped CHS to improve its services, she said. “We’ve had evaluations of our services, outcomes, real hard data, that our organization would not have been able to achieve internally without the assistance and technical merit of University of Pittsburgh staff.”

For more information about CHS services, go to www.chscorp.org/.

Oakland Planning and Development Corp. (OPDC)

OPDC executive director David Blenk said his organization was formed in 1980, spinning out of a planning process called the Oakland Plan.

OPDC focuses on three initiatives: real estate development, community organizing and workforce development, Blenk said.

“We filled 291 affordable housing units, the majority of which are sold or rented to people who have something to do with the Oakland employment base. Definitely, it’s a live-work community,” he said.

“In workforce development, we help people transition from unemployment.” OPDC serves about 1,100 unemployed people a year, placing about 425 of them into jobs, he said.

“In our community organizing component, we’ve worked within that seam between different user groups in Oakland to try to bring them together to contribute to a vision of Oakland,” Blenk said.

He noted that OPDC and the other groups represented on the panel last year formed the Oakland Neighborhood Partnership to increase collaboration among the member groups.

“Eight years ago when I came to Oakland, I got a lot of: ‘The problem is …’. There was a lot of finger-pointing. Everybody pointed at somebody else: the students, the University, the landlords, the residents, the city, the police, the code officers, the community. But I think there’s been an awakening over the last couple of years that you can’t just point to somebody else, because everybody is part of the Oakland problem, just as all of us are part of the Oakland solution. I say, let’s get everybody working together to try to get over those problems we have.”

For more information about OPDC, go to www.oaklandplanning.org.

Oakland Community Council (OCC)

OCC official Andrea Boykowycz is an Oakland native and current resident, who left for a time. “I’m something they call a boomeranger,” she said.

“It is very exciting to hear somebody talk about a new master plan. In 1972 when the first Oakland master plan was created I was a toddler, and my mother and my father and my whole childhood were wrapped up in the creation of an Oakland Community Council.

“Now that I have my own toddler, it’s exciting to me to hear talk of a new vision of what we are all about.”

OCC was formed as a bulwark against the University’s early-1970s expansion plans, she noted.

“There was a need to organize the community in a way that would center people’s ideas about what kind of future the neighborhood would have that was not necessarily driven by the desires of one player. That is, we were all in this together,” Boykowycz said. “So the Oakland Community Council functions as a forum for residents and public investors and public players.”

In addition, she said, OCC works to empower Oakland residents to take ownership of the solutions to the neighborhood’s problems.

“We try to focus in on ways that individuals can bear some responsibility and some ownership for the safety and quality of life here. That involves things like developing a citizen police. We have a public safety watch that our residents engage in, some patrolling nightly, some monthly, and we have a code watch that works to identify exterior code violations, reporting them and following up,” Boykowycz said.

A key OCC issue is parking and transportation planning, she said. “It’s a key concern to residents, for owners and renters. We have many more parking permits that are issued in Oakland than there are parking spaces. We would like very much to work with the University on ways to address that issue,” Boykowycz said.

“What we found is we needed to expand the conversation to include the students who are here, the University and the institutions that are here, and the organizations that are developing programs to meet the needs of an evolving community,” she said.

“Our biggest challenge and also our biggest opportunity is in redefining what we consider the Oakland community. So, for example, when I was kid, Atwood Street was an old Italian family neighborhood. Everybody had tomatoes in their front yard. That is my childhood memory, but there’s no use in our dwelling in nostalgia, because we’re not going back.”

For more information about OCC, go to www.oaklandcommunitycouncil.org.

Peoples Oakland

Sandy Phillips, executive director of Peoples Oakland, picked up on Boykowycz’s theme.

“In reflecting on the history of Peoples Oakland, I reflected on the history of University-community relationships. I support what everybody here has said. But I think it’s important that we do know that our good relationships today grew out of fire and controversy,” Phillips maintained.

(See March 16, 2002, University Times.)

“Not that we should fear that. But we grew together when we were apart. Why were we apart? The University of Pittsburgh became state-related in the mid-1960s, and went through a period of very rapid expansion, buying up property in the residential area around the University and renting space in the commercial district.

“That movement resulted in a fight-back from the community; the neighborhood organized. There was a lot of heat, a lot of anger during those days. Residents came together and that was the origin of Peoples Oakland.”

After a series of unpleasant confrontations, Pitt’s early 1970s master plan largely was abandoned, Phillips noted.

“After that time we put together the first joint planning group, called Oakland Directions Inc. That Oakland group pulled in the city, the state, the University and the health center and after four years we developed the template and published a plan in 1980,” she said.

However, the lesson had not been learned.

The Oakland Task Force, then primarily composed of the large Oakland institutions, recommended a 1,700-car garage at Terrace and Darragh. “That was contrary to what had been agreed on about where parking should be located. The community again fought back, went to City Council, the zoning didn’t go through and that garage was never built. That place is now a small park.”

Phillips said that as a result of that controversy the Oakland planning process now includes the various stakeholders. “People should understand that and be proud of all that has taken place over the last 25 years,” she said.

While Peoples Oakland began as a community planning organization, it eventually narrowed its focus to serve the mental health needs of Oakland’s population, Phillips said. “We became a mental health organization because so many people had come into Oakland who had been de-institutionalized when the state decided over a period of a few years to close the big state hospitals.”

The organization studied other cities’ models, she said. “We now have what we call a holistic recovery program for people who were in treatment for persistent mental health illness and co-occurring substance-abuse disorders. It’s holistic in the sense that it’s based on the principles that say: People who suffer mental illness — often called consumers of services — should be the ones that drive their own treatment.”

For more information about Peoples Oakland, go to www.peoplesoakland.org.

Oakland Task Force (OTF)

G. Reynolds Clark, chair of the Oakland Task Force, said that organization was established more 30 years ago by then-Mayor Richard Caliguiri to provide a forum for the various institutions in Oakland to exchange information regarding current and future development plans so that the city could track what was going on.

“Today it’s grown to be a partnership of over 25 Oakland institutions, businesses and community groups, public agencies and city government focused on improving Oakland,” Clark said.

Over the years, he said, there have a number of studies of what should be done with Oakland: The Oakland Improvement Strategy, the Oakland-City Group and, most recently, “The Future of Oakland: A Community Investment Strategy.”

“What these all have shown the Oakland Task Force is a firm belief that Pitt could be a proactive force and a place for a policy forum and discussions about Oakland and the projects in Oakland,” said Clark, who is Pitt vice chancellor for community initiatives.

“Today Oakland Task Force has an agenda to addresses the community investment strategy. We have really sharpened our focus on what we can and should do for Oakland. We have an umbrella theme now: ‘Create a sense of place,’” he said.

OTF has three focus areas:

• To continue to stimulate partnership and collaboration;

• To make it easier to get into, out of and around Oakland;

• To be an advocate of high-quality development.

“We don’t have the resources to do the development ourselves, but as an organization we can stimulate that,” Clark said. “Our mission is to be the forum for the Oakland community and neighborhood organizations, institutions, government entities and public agencies to exchange information, foster relationships and work to resolve issues around the quality of life for all its stakeholders. Simply put, we find the common denominator that works for everyone involved and then we move forward.”

OTF aims to make Oakland an international center for research, education and health care and a magnet for technology-based entrepreneurial activities, Clark said. “We want to make Oakland an outstanding fixed-income urban residential neighborhood, a commercial district with local character, a place that nurtures and celebrates creativity and diversity and a destination for local, national and international visitors.”

Clark cited two examples of successful collaboration: the Schenley Plaza project that converted a surface parking lot into a recreational green space, and the Boulevard of the Allies Bridge project, in which OTF had so much constructive input in the design and scope of the project that it caused PennDOT to alter its original plans.

For more information about the Oakland Task Force, go to www.city.pittsburgh.pa.us/cp/html/oakland_task_force.html.

Oakland Business and Improvement District (OBID)

Georgia Petropoulos, OBID executive director, said that as a teenager in the 1970s, Oakland, particularly Forbes Avenue, was a big draw for her socially.

By the time she became a Pitt undergraduate, things had changed. “I avoided Forbes Avenue in the ’80s and ’90s. It wasn’t an attractive place to me as a student. I leave and come back and — lo and behold — here I am a part of an organization formed in 1999, because the business district thought it could come back and that there were opportunities for that,” Petropoulos said.

“It happened because over 150 businesses and more than 75 property owners and institutions including the University of Pittsburgh wanted it. They assess themselves a pro-rated value of the property. They used that money to attack litter. They worked with city police, Pitt police, CMU police to deal with the graffiti issue and the panhandling issue. Becoming safe and clean was the primary goal.”

OBID further decided that Oakland’s image and reputation needed a makeover, in order to make the business district a destination hand-in-hand with its cultural amenities.

“So we developed marketing initiatives,” Petropoulos said, including the “Only in Oakland” campaign, the farmer’s market, the “Taste of Oakland,” which touts the more than 65 restaurants with international cuisine, and the Passport to Oakland campaign, which rewards patrons with discounts for visiting a certain number of stores.

For more information about OBID, go to www.oaklandbid.org.

Oakland Transportation Management Association (OTMA)

Mavis Rainey, executive director of OTMA, said her organization is dedicated to improving transportation and parking conditions in the Oakland area. OTMA also strives to play a role in increasing mobility, reducing congestion and improving the quality of life in Oakland by increasing the use of public transportation, shared vehicle programs, parking management programs and alternative transportation modes for those traveling to Oakland, and encouraging pedestrian and bicycle transportation.

Rainey said, “OTMA was founded in 1993 as a collaborative effort of institutions and residents and as a forum for community groups, students, visitors, employers and workers where people can address questions of concern about transportation, construction, access and other transportation issues.”

Funded by PennDOT and Pitt, OTMA’s membership is open to institutions, businesses, non-profit community organizations, local government agencies and regional transportation planners and providers.

An example of a successful project, Rainey said, is the Hometown Streets project, where OTMA looked at problematic intersections on Fifth and Forbes avenues and secured funding to increase pedestrian safety at 11 intersections.

OTMA partners with Pitt in its annual Arrival Survival event, and works with Parking, Transportation and Services and Pitt student groups to gather data related to parking and pedestrian habits.

“We’d like to find out if they’ve changed since our parking study in 2003, where we determined there were 11,180 parking spaces in central Oakland. Of that, for transient parking, 4,381 spaces were available,” Rainey said.

For more information about OTMA, go to www.otma-pgh.org.

—Peter Hart