Jacksonville's Emerald Trail: Restoring Creeks Without Pushing Residents Out

Jacksonville, Florida's most populous city, has many historic neighborhoods, some of the area's oldest parks, and miles of rivers, creeks and wetlands. One neighborhood, Sugar Hill, was once the center of Black prosperity in Northeast Florida — home to prominent people, gracious homes and thriving businesses.

What was lost

• Desegregation, urban renewal and the building of Interstate 95 largely destroyed Sugar Hill in the 1950s and 1960s.
• Wilder Park — a signature 30-acre space with a library, track, baseball diamond and community center — was taken for the highway.
• A municipal solid waste incinerator ran in the neighborhood for more than 50 years, leaving much of the area a designated brownfield.
• McCoys Creek was channelized and buried in places during the City Beautiful movement; it is hard to reach and floods. Hogans Creek's floodplain is overbuilt, and contaminated in stretches next to industry.

The Emerald Trail

Groundwork Jacksonville, founded in 2014, is planning and building a city-wide trail system that restores both creeks along the way. Due for completion by 2029, the Emerald Trail will be 30 miles of trails, greenways and parks circling the urban core and linking at least 14 historic neighborhoods, Sugar Hill among them, to downtown, Hogans Creek, McCoys Creek and the St. Johns River.

The hope is that the trail will drive social and economic development — from healthier lifestyles and public safety to economic growth and neighborhood revival.

Building it with the neighborhoods

The history of urban renewal is full of projects that ended up displacing residents and businesses. Groundwork Jacksonville means to break that cycle. Throughout planning it met community leaders and residents, working by the motto of doing projects "with" the community rather than "for" it.

According to Gloria McNair, its manager of community engagement and equity, the approach is to keep people informed, listen to their concerns and ideas, and act on them, so residents can see they have been heard. She says Groundwork shows up everywhere, from neighborhood events to community development meetings, and keeps engaging after a project starts. Residents' first concern is housing, then economic opportunity: they want their neighborhoods improved without being pushed out by the improvements, and they want jobs — especially for young people — and more cultural and environmental stewardship.

"Withintrification"

Groundwork's answer is an equitable development strategy covering affordable housing, small-business help, economic opportunity, infrastructure and workforce development. It calls its approach "withintrification": investment led by the interests of current residents, as opposed to gentrification, where the interests of outside developers come first, often at residents' expense.

• Jobs: the Community Restoration Environmental Stewardship Training (CREST) program, a Green Team, and Emerald Trail Stewards — six months of on-the-job training in green infrastructure and landscape design and installation for residents of trail neighborhoods, who are certified as clean water, horticulture and landscape professionals and helped into jobs.
• Housing and property: partners including Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) Jacksonville, the North Riverside and Historic Eastside Community Development Corporations, and Three Rivers Legal help residents get clear title to property and make wills or living trusts so homes stay with their heirs, offer financial counseling and homeownership education, and help low-income residents pay property taxes. A new home repair grant will help residents fix health and safety problems and stay in their homes.

McNair's advice to others: spend time getting to know residents and what matters most to them, be honest and open about your intentions, and build a toolkit of resources and contacts. She hopes every resident of the urban core will have a say in the trail segments through their neighborhood, and that viewing development through an equity lens will become the norm because Groundwork has shown it can work.

More: groundworkjacksonville.org.

Sources

Based on "Community Development: Creating local opportunity through the Emerald Trail and restoration of Hogan and McCoy Creeks," National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain; Gloria McNair's interview is rewritten in hubnx's own words. The source's photographs of the Sugar Hill Mosaic, a recent artwork, and of Ms. McNair are not reproduced.