Why is North Tulsa so run down?

[Rex]

I took my first trip up there today.  Why is it so run down? And I don't mean poor, I mean it looks neglected by the City.

What's the deal?

[waterboy]

Man, you're asking a novel's worth with that question. Start with infrastructure. My brother is a AT&T lineman. When they are called on a service call, they find often find that all the service to the home is missing. Stolen for scrap. No meters, no lines, nothing.

He has to deal with irate homeowners who don't mind brandishing a weapon and cursing him while he tries to avoid their unrestrained pit bulls. My other brother worked for another public utility for years all over north Tulsa and relays the same experiences.

A cop once told me East Tulsa is worse but the Northside gets the rep. Of course North Tulsa is like any other area of town with good people who have integrity and pride in ownership mixed in with morons who prey on the rest of us so it isn't right to generalize about them. But they suffer from low income, poor education and predatory drugs more than the rest of the city.

Why? Start your novel.

[MDepr2007]

I'd like to see some community policing. This helps pull the neighborhood together. Enforced Code enforcement on those that can afford it and just neglect property because they can get away with it.

[GG]

I grew up in North Tulsa, went to Alcott, Gilcrese  and McLain. (was a 7th grader when Gilcrase opened)

It was a nice area to live in the 50's and up to the late 60's.  I'd get up at 3:30am in the morning and go throw my Tulsa World Paper route be home by 5:30am and sleep until 7am and get uo and go to school.  Never worried about having an problems.  It was a good working class neighborhood.  

We had creeks and field to explore.   Little League Baseball to play. Kick the Can to Play at night and pigeon's and chickens to raise.  

I'd ride my Honda 90 motorcycle all over North Tulsa and feel as safe I would today in Owasso or Jenks.  

I remember going to Teen Town Dances on Friday Nights at the Chamberlin Recreation Center with Live Bands.  Never was there any trouble.  
The last song was always a slow dance, usually "The House of the Rising Sun". You would ask that special girl you had your eye on all night to dance.  Then you would steal a kiss from her waiting outside for her parents to pick her up.  

Yes North Tulsa holds a lot of good memories for me.  Too bad kids growing up there now will not look back 40 years from now with the same good  memories I look back on now from growing up in North Tulsa.

[waterboy]

Unreliable, you brought up sweet memories to me. I grew up around 4th place and Lewis and had the exact same experiences. Kendall, Wilson, Central, Whittier Square, paper routes, bikes and teen parties. Every generation has their sacred memories. They will have theirs too.

Community policing, code enforcement and rebuilding that self esteem you describe are key to North Tulsa.

[Friendly Bear]

quote:Originally posted by waterboy

Unreliable, you brought up sweet memories to me. I grew up around 4th place and Lewis and had the exact same experiences. Kendall, Wilson, Central, Whittier Square, paper routes, bikes and teen parties. Every generation has their sacred memories. They will have theirs too.

Community policing, code enforcement and rebuilding that self esteem you describe are key to North Tulsa.

North Tulsa's problems historically have been:

1) 1921 Race Riot wiped out the Greenwood Business District. Burned hundreds of businesses to the ground.

Insurance companies did not pay off on property insurance claims because of a civil insurrection/riot exclusion in their policies.

Hence, there was NO CAPITAL available for the business people to recover their storefronts.

2) There is a preponderance of poor people who rent, lacking income or capital to own their houses.  

Renters often show little pride in maintaining their rented accomodations.

3) There has been a lot of publically-owned housing in North Tulsa.  

This public policy concentrated poor, uneducated people with low self esteem, poor job skills, poor self-control, and their associated escape from a grim present reality through drugs, crime, and out-of-wedlock births.

4) Lenders and real estate companies "RED-LINED" north Tulsa for decades, i.e. NO LOANS TO A RED-LINED AREA.  

Gilcrease Hills Subdivision was the first major middle-class housing development in decades for north Tulsa, and that was done by an out-of-state development company back decades ago.

[waterboy]

Well put FB. Add in the unhealthy levels of racism that were planted here by the KKK and nurtured carefully for 80 years.

When I looked closely at the geographic location of violent crimes in the last decade that the World published last week it seemed obvious that it was clustered around the high density apartments along the expressways and far North Tulsa. Home ownership is a powerful medicine for that.

[Rex]

When you say racism has been carefully nurtured here for 80 years, is that what accounts for the hostility towards Hispanics?

[Friendly Bear]

quote:Originally posted by waterboy

Well put FB. Add in the unhealthy levels of racism that were planted here by the KKK and nurtured carefully for 80 years.

When I looked closely at the geographic location of violent crimes in the last decade that the World published last week it seemed obvious that it was clustered around the high density apartments along the expressways and far North Tulsa. Home ownership is a powerful medicine for that.

Obviously, local racism was bubbling under the surface just waiting to erupt, as it so terribly did in 1921.

I've heard old timers tell that when the train from St. Louis crossed the border into Oklahoma, that the train conductor moved all African-Americans into the Jim Crow car, i.e. SEGREGATED.

Astounding by today's standards.

The Washington Post newspaper had an interesting, lengthy news analysis this summer on how crime followed the relocation of tenants after public housing demolitions occured.

Crime simply moved to apartment complexes in other parts of the D.C. area that accepted Section 8 rent subsidy payments.

Thereafter, crime was no longer concentrated around the public housing projects.

Rather, crime DIFFUSED to where these low-income families relocated, creating numerous hot-pockets through their Metro area.

I haven't bothered to dig out the link, but I'm sure it is readily locatable in their archives for those interested.

Sorry for loafing this time.

[waterboy]

quote:Originally posted by Rex

When you say racism has been carefully nurtured here for 80 years, is that what accounts for the hostility towards Hispanics?

Although I believe the Hispanic hostility is more economically motivated than racial, the lines tend to blur. Much of the race riot had as an undertone jealousies over the economic successes of the blacks. The less they needed to come south across the tracks to work, buy, sell and prosper, the more a threat to white business they were. Tulsans were more tolerant when the blacks were employed as their domestics. Note that even my modest home built in 1919 has servants quarters and a button in the dining room floor to summon the maid. We're not too far removed from that period, my father was a child during the riots. The children and grandchildren of the rioters are still living here. They nurtured those attitudes through low per pupil expenditures north of Admiral and no representation in city government for decades after the riot. We were forced into bussing in the sixties and eventually magnet schools by 1972. We were forced into a city charter change to give northside a political voice in the 80's. Tulsa's kind of slow on addressing that kind of stuff.[]

However, as a man who was once married into a mixed hispanic family here in Tulsa I can say that I did not see much animosity towards that family in the late sixties to early seventies. Silly, racial toned remarks of course(all those Mexicans like bright colors...)but no real prejudice. But I think the new Klan is more into pure white and Christian these days.

[bbriscoe]

quote:Originally posted by Rex

When you say racism has been carefully nurtured here for 80 years, is that what accounts for the hostility towards Hispanics?

I would say the incident of an illegal immigrant killing a Tulsa citizen when he ran a red light 2 or 3 years ago accounts for much of the hostility towards the illegals.  Legal hispanics who drive with a license and pay their taxes I have no problem with.

[Gold]

I've spent a lot of time up there over the years.  It's not all bad -- you go far enough north and you're in Sperry.  You go east and you are at the airport/ American Airlines stuff.  You go west and you're in Osage County.  In the middle of the north side, there are actually some really nice homes and, in recent years, real live infill.

But there are also some totally sketchy parts and crime, prostitution, drugs all out in the open.

I'm not even sure the infrastructure is all that bad throughout the area.  There are parts that are just fine.  Other parts look like Gaza.

The issue is perception.  The news shows run so much negative stuff.  They try to find the aunt with no teeth to talk into the camera, etc.

Overall, I think it's just different.  I'll ride my bike along the trail starting at OSU-Tulsa.  I see more people out walking around their neighborhood and more kids playing than I do at 31st and Lewis or 91st and Memorial.  Some of the genuinely friendliest, most neighborhood conscious people I've met are in north Tulsa.

I do think north Tulsa has been on the raw end of some deals.  I never really evaluate the race riot into the narrative, though I think it's a tragedy, because I place it before where I think Tulsa really took off (which I generally associate with the 1940's and 50's and American Airlines, etc, moving to town).  It's just too simplistic to say that's why parts of north Tulsa are jacked up.  As another poster said, a lot of that area thrived through the 60's.  I'm not saying the race riot didn't destroy families or that it wasn't genocide; I'm just saying it's not really the root cause of what's wrong up there, 87 years later.

I question a lot of the leadership from that area.  A lot of the best kids do everything they can to get out and we're left with some -- not all -- people with limited perspective.  My understanding is that if you want to invest up there, there are a lot of loopholes and people you have to go through (true everywhere, but unusually so up there, given the need for retail, etc.).  And then, weird or bad things happen; they couldn't keep Albertson's open.

Really, the area is a sociologist's treasure trove.  The story is so complicated -- you have some of the worst neighborhoods and then also Gilcrease, TCC northeast, and Million Dollar Elm.  A lot of it has to do with poor schools (though Emerson, Carver, and Booker T are very good schools).  A lot of it is the lack of investment in the last 30 or 40 years, other than fast food.  And a lot of it is just perception.

[SXSW]

quote:Originally posted by Gold

I've spent a lot of time up there over the years.  It's not all bad -- you go far enough north and you're in Sperry.  You go east and you are at the airport/ American Airlines stuff.  You go west and you're in Osage County.  In the middle of the north side, there are actually some really nice homes and, in recent years, real live infill.

But there are also some totally sketchy parts and crime, prostitution, drugs all out in the open.

I'm not even sure the infrastructure is all that bad throughout the area.  There are parts that are just fine.  Other parts look like Gaza.

The issue is perception.  The news shows run so much negative stuff.  They try to find the aunt with no teeth to talk into the camera, etc.

Overall, I think it's just different.  I'll ride my bike along the trail starting at OSU-Tulsa.  I see more people out walking around their neighborhood and more kids playing than I do at 31st and Lewis or 91st and Memorial.  Some of the genuinely friendliest, most neighborhood conscious people I've met are in north Tulsa.

I do think north Tulsa has been on the raw end of some deals.  I never really evaluate the race riot into the narrative, though I think it's a tragedy, because I place it before where I think Tulsa really took off (which I generally associate with the 1940's and 50's and American Airlines, etc, moving to town).  It's just too simplistic to say that's why parts of north Tulsa are jacked up.  As another poster said, a lot of that area thrived through the 60's.  I'm not saying the race riot didn't destroy families or that it wasn't genocide; I'm just saying it's not really the root cause of what's wrong up there, 87 years later.

I question a lot of the leadership from that area.  A lot of the best kids do everything they can to get out and we're left with some -- not all -- people with limited perspective.  My understanding is that if you want to invest up there, there are a lot of loopholes and people you have to go through (true everywhere, but unusually so up there, given the need for retail, etc.).  And then, weird or bad things happen; they couldn't keep Albertson's open.

Really, the area is a sociologist's treasure trove.  The story is so complicated -- you have some of the worst neighborhoods and then also Gilcrease, TCC northeast, and Million Dollar Elm.  A lot of it has to do with poor schools (though Emerson, Carver, and Booker T are very good schools).  A lot of it is the lack of investment in the last 30 or 40 years, other than fast food.  And a lot of it is just perception.

Where, in your opinion, are the worst neighborhoods in North Tulsa?  From my limited experience (I grew up on the southside around 71st and Yale) I would say neighborhoods north of 244 along Peoria and Lewis but, like you said, that is more perception.

[cannon_fodder]

Areas around Pine and Lewis are pretty sketchy. Get back in there and some of the homes are a little off kilter and, well sketchy.

[Hometown]

To be fair there are run down areas all over town.  I'm always seeing wonderful houses that have been neglected even in popular areas like 15th Street and Peoria.  Tulsa is a little worn around the edges in general.

Northwest Tulsa was built as a 1st Class White neighborhood.  My great aunt lived in the Reservoir Hill flats with her executive husband back in the early 60s.  Shortly after that White flight (caucasians moving to the White suburbs when Blacks bought into their neighborhoods) got started in earnest.

There are also areas that were built for low income people on the northside.  Drive off of Lewis between Pine and Admiral and you find an occasional tiny shanty (1 room house).

The Greenwood Archer area was famous for it's Black owned businesses until White Tulsans burned it out.  I can remember going with our housekeeper to her doctor in the Greenwood area.  The blocks that I remember have since been demolished.

Overall the zoning in North Tulsa reflects a time when Tulsa had better zoning as a result of the City Beautiful movement.  I think the lots and overall configuration of streets and shops is superior to anything elsewhere in the city.  Many northside lots tend to be larger.

I've spent most of my adult life in international cities and North Tulsa has a great mix of people, including many Latinos.  I enjoy the ethnic diversity.  I live in North Tulsa now.

There has been a long standing conflict between the Black and Latino communities.  My sense is that Blacks don't enjoy losing their "only minority" status.

Of course, Tulsa is chocked full of poor Whites and we don't even acknowledge that they exist.

The other day someone described Northwest Tulsa as "hip."  And I would have to agree.  We passed on a house in Saddleback near 41st and Yale and decided to purchase in North Tulsa.  I like to buy low and hopefully one day sell high.  Two homes sold in my neighborhood last year, one at $289,000 and the other $305,000.  Meanwhile, I wouldn't live anywhere else in Tulsa.