Community organizers get City to demolish blighted houses near elementary school

The houses stood vacant for more than five years and could be seen from school grounds.

“We have been battling for a long time to get those houses down,” said Lisa Swiggins, vice president of the Local School Community Organization (LSCO) at Westside. “They posed a threat to kids in the neighborhood.”

Community organizers from Southwest Solutions and the Hariett Tubman Center helped mobilize the LSCO and arranged meetings with city officials and City Council members to prioritize demolishing the four houses.

“The parents were skeptical about our community organizing efforts at first because they were frustrated by the city’s inaction to address the issue in a reasonable time,” said Joe Rashid, an organizer at Southwest Solutions. “Now they are energized by what we accomplished together and want to see what we can do about other problems in the neighborhood.”

Parents at the LSCO now want to organize and pressure the City to fix the streetlights and round up the wild dogs in the neighborhood.

“If not for the community organizers who helped us, those bad houses would still be there,” said Lisa. “We have learned that if we work together and get to the right people, we can get things done to make the neighborhood a better and safer place for our children.”