June 1, 2020

Can you revitalize a York neighborhood without gentrifying? These 2 are trying in Salem Square

Published by Mike Argento, Scott Fisher, Randy Parker, Anthony DiMattia (York Daily Record) | Photos by Paul Kuehnel

In York's Salem Square neighborhood, Tamra Langle looks forward to living in her grandmother's old home, being renovated by Fred Walker and Anthony Moore. Chapter 2 of Saving York, Street by Street.

Tamra left a bad relationship in Dallas and came back home to York looking for a fresh start. 

Her family lived in York, and she was looking forward to helping her grandmother, Verna Langle. She had fond memories of spending time at her grandmother’s home on Salem Avenue and was hoping to create some new ones caring for her, stopping by often to clean and help around the house. Verna had lived there for 70 years, and the home's walls contained a lot of memories. “She was a big person in my life,” Tamra said.

But her fresh start didn’t go as planned. Her life was hard, and at the beginning of 2016, she escaped into heroin. She fell into that hole for 15 months, getting clean in April 2017. Then, the York County Office of Children, Youth and Families took her children – she has three daughters and a son, ranging from 7 to 13 – telling her they weren’t safe with her and that her friend’s home she was living in was not fit. “They said I didn’t make good decisions,” she said. 

She tried to get her act together. She got a job in home health care, went to meetings, stayed clean.

Editor's note: This is the second in a series of stories, "Saving York, Street by Street," that will run through 2022 focusing on the unsung people trying to improve their community.

Tamra Langle, a single mother of four, was living in a Salem Square house that was owned by her grandmother. Nursing home costs forced the house to be sold after her grandmother died. Langle worked with Four Square Construction as it purchased the house from the lien holder and will sell it back to Langle when it's completed. Her house was also part of the facade removal.

In July 2020, Uncle Kenny died, leaving her grandmother alone. Verna died not long after, in September. She was either 99 or 100; it wasn’t clear. 

Tamra’s father wanted to keep the house in the family, so a year and a half ago, she moved in. 

The 100-year-old rowhouse was in poor condition. Her grandmother hadn’t kept up maintenance, and from the plumbing to the electrical service to cosmetics, it needed a lot of work. Grease stains smudged the walls alongside the steps: Uncle Kenny, who worked as a mechanic and had a workshop in the basement, had left his handprints on the walls. “It was creepy,” Tamra said. “He died here.” 

The house was "livable,” she said, but “it’s overwhelming, trying to work and work on your house.” 

She had worked in property restoration in Texas, with her ex, and had some skills, but it was just too much. “I tried to do it myself, but I just couldn’t do it,” Tamra said.  

The house wasn’t worth much — probably less than $30,000 — but it had great emotional value to her family. She wanted to keep it, to honor her family and her grandmother’s memory.

She had done some work, replacing some plumbing and other minor repairs. The bigger problem: The façade was buckling, bowing out. The house, like others in the row, was built with a brick structural façade, meaning the brick supported the roof. If it failed, the house would collapse. 

On top of everything else, her father was in the hospital; she worried she would lose him, too. Her plans to rehab her life while rehabbing her grandmother’s house weren’t going well. 

Eventually, she said, “I’d get too emotional about it and shut down.”

Then she met Fred Walker and Anthony Moore. 

'An instant brotherhood' 

The partnership began at a Leadership York meeting in 2016. 

Moore, a North Carolina native, had just moved to York and was working as vice president of operations at Graham Architectural Products. An engineer by training, he had previously worked for NASA, Cummings Diesel and Alcoa as a kind of “fixer,” examining underperforming factories to make them work better.

Walker is also a transplant to York. He is originally from Philadelphia – something you can tell by speaking to him, his demeanor reflecting the attitude of that city – and had previously taught at Howard University, a venerable Historically Black College and University in Washington. A veteran, he had also worked for the Defense Department in D.C. 

They met through Walker’s wife. She and Moore were talking and learned that they went to the same college, North Carolina A&T, among the nation’s top-rated HBCUs. When he met Walker, they formed a quick friendship. They were both in the real estate business and both had a passion for their adopted community. “There was an instant brotherhood there,” Moore said. 

Then one Saturday, Moore called Walker and asked, “What’re you doing?” 

Both men have other business concerns. Walker is involved in property management and has a restaurant, the old Stockade in the east end of the city, where he mentors employees who are trying to open their own restaurants. Moore had started up a trucking company – among other things – and is deeply involved in managing that. (His first two trucks were nicknamed “Optimus Prime” and “Ultra Magnus,” after Transformers characters.) Walker and Moore are also part of the ownership group of the York Revolution minor-league baseball team. 

Three or four years passed. They kept in touch mostly over social media. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged, Moore began hosting investment seminars over Zoom from home, appearing in his robe, Walker recalled. He recalled Moore saying the pandemic, while devastating, presented opportunities. “Never waste a good crisis,” he would say. 

Walker had an idea: What if you could revitalize a neighborhood without gentrification?

In the past, gentrification in some city neighborhoods resulted in the existing residents being priced out of the housing market, which, in turn, resulted in further concentration of poor, and increasingly expensive housing, in deteriorating neighborhoods. The homes would be sold to neighborhood residents — people who hadn’t previously had a route to homeownership — and that would help them build wealth. 

“We wanted to make these desirable homes in a not-so-desirable neighborhood,” Moore said.  

He also had a notion to take what Moore labeled a “holistic” approach to neighborhood development, retaining city contractors to do the work and hiring people from the neighborhood to do the work at good wages.  

Everything, they said, is connected. The project isn’t intended to just provide decent, affordable housing for a few people. It is intended, as Walker said, “to lift the neighborhood.” 

They decided to partner up. “The funny thing is,” Moore said, “neither of us believe in partners. But we both bring something to the table.” 

They began looking for a project. 

'I get crazy ideas all the time'  

Blanda Nace, as part of his job as executive director of the city’s Redevelopment Authority, oversees condemned properties in the city, buildings deemed uninhabitable and scheduled for demolition. At any time, he said, there are probably a dozen buildings in the city that should be razed, sooner rather than later, at least before they collapse on their own. 

One day, he recalled, Moore and Walker called him up and asked to take a walk in the Salem Square neighborhood. They had targeted that area because it borders a neighborhood where gunfire is a common occurrence and because, over the years, it has been the subject of a number of efforts at revitalization, efforts that hadn’t borne fruit.  

As they walked the neighborhood, looking at properties, Walker pointed out a row of homes in the 500 block of Salem Avenue. The homes, which had been vacant for about a decade, bore what’s called “the red X,” a red placard with a white X signaling to firefighters that the building is unsafe to enter. Nace couldn’t believe they wanted to look at those homes, they were in such poor condition. But Walker and Moore thought they were perfect. 

“I get crazy ideas all the time,” Nace said. But, he thought, Walker and Moore convinced him that they “have the ability to pull it off.” 

“Traditionally,” Nace said, “developers work in a silo. They fix it, sell it and get out. The difference here is that Fred and Anthony are doing the outreach to make it more of a community effort. People in the neighborhood would have a stake in it. Their approach is different. It’s revitalization without gentrification. There’s no reason why we can’t do that all over the city.” 

Walker and Moore bought three of the homes from the redevelopment authority for $1,500. The fourth — Langle's home — was still owned by her grandmother’s estate, complicating matters. They were having difficulty getting in touch with Langle.  

“We had been looking for her for some time,” Moore said. “One day, we were upstairs and out of the corner of my eye, saw her outside and cornered her.” 

She was skeptical at first, but then agreed to put them in touch with the lawyer handling her grandmother’s estate. They were able to close the deal in two weeks, paying Langle’s father $15,000 for the house and agreeing to sell it back to Langle after it is renovated. Meanwhile, Langle is saving money and going through a financial literacy program for new homeowners offered by a housing organization called Tenfold. Upon completion of the program, she will receive assistance for a down payment and help navigating the mortgage application process. 

Langle’s father was emotional about the sale. “He didn’t want to see the house go,” she said. “But it made him feel good that it’s staying in the family.” 

'Good to be part of this' 

“Welcome to our humble abode,” Moore said as he gestured toward the gutted interiors of the homes under renovation. 

Plastic tarps cover the front of the rowhouses, the sagging brick facades having been stripped off. Inside, three of the homes have been reduced to their frames. Langle’s home, on the east end of the row, remains intact, but it will soon join its neighbors. The additions at the back of the homes, which once housed the kitchens, have been removed and will be rebuilt. When finished, each house will have three bedrooms, two-and-a-half baths and new electrical service, plumbing and heat and air conditioning systems.

The homes are expected to sell for about $90,000, they said. That would set the mortgage payments – including property taxes and insurance – at about $500 to $700 a month, Walker said, significantly less than rent, which can be $1,000 a month and up. According to rent.com, the average rent for a three-bedroom apartment or house in York is $1,619. 

The project began once Walker and Moore had engineers and contractors inspect the buildings to determine how to rebuild them. First, they had to build a frame to hold the buildings up as they removed the facades. Then, it was a matter of demolition and design. 

Cody Lighty is overseeing the project. He had been in the construction business – his own business and as an estimator for the contracting giant Kinsley — and had done some work for Moore in the past. In 2020, he shut down his own business and was working as an EMT when Moore called him and asked if he wanted to be part of their team. 

He had done some large projects in the past, but this was something else. He met with Walker and Moore, and as they described their vision for Salem Square, he couldn’t resist.  

“When I heard about this and their vision ... it’s kind of like a dream come true,” Lighty said. “It feels right to be here.” 

Angel Abrantes is the contractor handling the job. He has known Walker since his sister bought a store on West Philadelphia Street from Walker. Abrantes bought the store from his sister and ran a CD shop for a few years before selling it to the current owners, who converted it into the i-ron-ic Coffee Shop/Art Boutique, a cornerstone of the city’s WeCo neighborhood. 

Abrantes has his own business, working as a remodeling contractor, a trade he learned while enrolled in the Crispus Attucks Community Center’s YouthBuild program in 2000. 

When Walker contacted him about the Salem Square project, he was a little taken aback. He has done commercial and residential work, but this job is the largest project he has taken on in his 20 years in business, he said. 

He takes the scope of the job in stride. He once remodeled a bedroom to meet a customer’s vision. It included installing a hot tub in front of the bed, a fireplace and a 55-inch TV that drops down from the ceiling. 

“It’s typical,” he said. “But not to this extent.” 

Best yet, he said, the job is just a few blocks from his home on Penn Street. “I save a lot on gas,” he said. 

And, he said, “It’s good to be a part of this.” 

A second chance at life

The renovations are expected to be completed this summer, which is good timing for Langle. 

By then, she believes, she will have enough money saved to make the down payment and cover other costs. Meanwhile, she is living with friends and working toward getting her children back, rehabbing her life as her family home is rehabbed.  

She is grateful to have a second chance at life, she said. For a while, she said, it didn’t seem like it would ever happen.  

“It means a lot to me,” she said. “It means I’ll have an opportunity to have something of my own.” 

And, she said, “It makes me feel good, just to keep it in the family. God is good. Everything happens for a reason.”