Owning THEIR FUTURE A CITY OF TULSA MASTER PLAN IS GIVING NORTH TULSANS HOPE TO OWN LAND AND BUSINESSES TAKEN FROM THEIR PREDECESSORS.
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s a young girl, Damali Wilson spent a lot of time at her grandmother’s house, one of many along Greenwood Avenue in the years before Interstate 244 was built through the heart of the neighborhood. In nice weather, she and her cousins slept on the enormous porch, dozing off to the sounds of the brickyard across the street. Wilson often went to the store next door for her grandmother’s groceries and left with full arms, having exchanged no money. “Grandma took care of the bill whenever she got her check,” Wilson says. “I can remember that sense of community.” Greenwood declined after urban renewal, but Grandma’s house was still a haven until the late 1980s, when the University Center at Tulsa Authority used eminent domain to force her landlord to sell the land. The house was bulldozed. “It just broke our hearts because it was gone — everything we knew,” says Wilson, whose grandmother moved further north. The property and surrounding land — 200 acres just north of the Inner Dispersal Loop — were intended to become a higher education campus called University Center at Tulsa comprised of Langston University, University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State University and Northeastern State University. However, more than 30 years later, Langston and OSU are the only universities there; much of the land remains undeveloped. Through a court settlement in 2018, Tulsa Development Authority and the City reclaimed 56 acres of the UCAT land and identified three “opportunity sites” for redevelopment (see map). Led by a national urban planning firm with help from local engagement partners, including Wilson, the City has begun a master planning process for the three sites — collectively called Kirkpatrick Heights — to ask north Tulsa citizens what redevelopment should look like. The City also has publicly committed to exploring options related to the long-term governance and ownership of the sites, including the possibility of “communal ownership.” For many north Tulsans, that means a chance at rebuilding generational wealth in their families and their community. 50
TulsaPeople DECEMBER 2021
The project’s three opportunity sites, marked in red, comprise 56 acres.
THE ASK
On a rainy October evening, tables and chairs are grouped around colorful foamboards at the Greenwood Cultural Center. On one table are cut-out words like “intentional,” “renewed” and “power” as well as images of happy Black families, Black graduates and a young Black girl in an astronaut suit — all possible choices for a north Tulsa vision board. The event is the first of many community workshops aimed at gathering ideas for the three sites from members of the community. Dozens in the room have gathered often in the past 10-15 years when the City of Tulsa asked for input from residents of north Tulsa. Many others stopped coming long ago, frustrated when the City didn’t heed their suggestions. Kian Kamas, executive director of the Tulsa Authority for Economic Opportunity, says this time is different.
“From the beginning we recognized this couldn’t be an effort where the City, the planners, just kind of led and engaged the community, and then ultimately we put everything together, and then presented it to the public,” she says. “We knew this had to be a much more collaborative process where it wasn’t just one-way communication, where it was much more two-way communication, and in many ways a shared level of decision making.” First, the City gathered an 11-member Leadership Committee comprised of north Tulsa leaders past and present. The group is tasked with steering the process, specifically details surrounding long-term governance, through leveraging their networks and making recommendations for local engagement. Led by the Leadership Committee, the City hired Philadelphia-based WRT LLC to facilitate the Kirkpatrick Heights Addition and Greenwood Site Master Plan. In turn, WRT retained two local partners with roots in the north Tulsa community — World Won Development and Standpipe Hill Strategies — to support outreach and engagement, an essential step to building trust among residents and stakeholders. Charles Harper, executive director of WWD, says many people came to the community workshops out of “love and respect” for him and Wilson, who is his business partner. “It’s kind of humbling when somebody says, ‘We don’t even trust the City, and we wouldn’t even come because we’ve been on this roller coaster before. But if you and Damali are heading this up, we’re going to come and look because we know Damali asks 1,000 questions, and Charles asks 1,000 questions, and Greg Robinson (Standpipe Hill Strategies) does, too.’ “We appreciate that even if they have some doubts about the process with the City, they trust World Won Development enough because of what we do.” As thoughtful as the discussion tables appear at the workshop, this format for community engagement isn’t new for the City, says Ashley Philippsen, co-chairwoman of the Leadership Committee. “The range of input is what is unprecedented,” Philippsen says. “There will be months-long engagement
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STORIES BY MORGAN PHILLIPS