Troubling poverty, plagues of predatory lending, and unacceptable unemployment rates created a perception of scarcity. Since the late 90s, community residents including Sharon and Larry Adams recognized Walnut Way’s prospects for abundance and formed Walnut Way Conservation Corporation with their neighbors to organize for change.

At first, neighbors tackled urgent community challenges, working together to restore the neighborhood and drive out crime. In 2000, Walnut Way incorporated as a nonprofit with a board assembled from engaged neighborhood residents. Since then, we have united neighbors in collective action, planted orchards and gardens in vacant lots, and cultivated a spirit of enterprise. Our work has grown to include the quality of life plan for the Lindsay Heights Neighborhood, bounded by Interstate 43 to 20th Street and Walnut Street to Locust Street.

Early in 1998 an old man said, sadly, “The neighborhood wasn’t always like this. It used to be people took pride keeping up their homes. Used to be people sat on their porches, visited, watched out for each other. It used to be quiet and safe. It used to be a good place to live.”

But then, all around us, day or night, we could see prostitutes walking up and down, sometimes doing their business in the back seat of a car right on the street … even next to the elementary school when the children were at play. Cars stopped in the middle of the street, drivers buying drugs from young men, or running in and out of houses where drugs were sold. Sporadic gunfire was heard every day. There were vicious assaults, sometimes killing. Three Police Captains advised me (a community development worker) to stay out of the neighborhood, even during the day … too dangerous. Boarded houses, others in awful disrepair, and trash-filled vacant lots where good homes “used to be” bore stark witness to how far the neighborhood had declined over nearly four decades of job losses and deepening hardship for people in this Central City neighborhood.