Real Estate & Construction
Revitalizing Lower Hilltop How the Wilmington Land Bank is restoring hope and homeownership in city neighborhood BY JIM DONAHUE
NORMAN MERCADO has lived in Wilmington’s Lower Hilltop community—an eight-square-block area between the busy 4th Street corridor to the north, Pleasant Street to the south, and Van Buren and Franklin Streets to the east and west—for 45 years. In that time, he’s seen many of the neighborhood’s early 20th century rowhomes abandoned by owners or their descendants, left to the elements by absentee landlords, boarded up by the city for back taxes, or targeted by squatters for criminal activity. “It’s hard to feel good about your neighborhood when what you see is boarded up doors and windows and people you don’t know doing things you don’t want to know,” Mercado says. But that was then. Today, Mercado says things are looking up in Lower Hilltop, a majority-Hispanic and African American community. And he credits the Wilmington Neighborhood Conservancy Land Bank (the Land Bank) and its Lower Hilltop Affordable Housing Initiative for the progress. 24
“Things haven’t looked this positive in a long time,” he adds. The Land Bank was created as a nonprofit by state legislation in 2016. The goal was to return the city’s dilapidated, abandoned, and delinquent properties to productive use. Under Mayor Purzycki, the city invested $1 million in 2022; later that year the state kicked in an additional $850,000. More recently, M&T Bank posted $250,000 in support of the initiative. The Land Bank acquires properties from owners, tax sales, and donations. From its founding, it has acquired and repurposed 359 properties across Wilmington. But the Lower Hilltop Affordable Housing Initiative is the Land Bank’s most intensive initiative to date. Above: Lower Hilltop resident Norman Mercado, joined by Governor John Carney and Bud Freel from The Wilmington Neighborhood Conservancy Land Bank. Right: A Property in Lower Hilltop that was renovated by The Land Bank. March/April 2024
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