Pleasantville Mayor Judy Ward, at a campaign event in January 2020, was at the virtual town hall on the Midtown Neighborhood Revitalization Plan on Thursday. The city is encouraging public input on a 10-year-plan to improve its midtown.
PLEASANTVILLE — Efforts to put midtown on the upswing are underway.
Pleasantville residents and officials gathered via Zoom on Thursday night for a town hall to discuss how to improve the city’s midtown neighborhood.
The New Jersey Department of Community Affairs announced in December it would award the Pleasantville Housing & Redevelopment Corporation a grant for a 10-year midtown revitalization project. The grant is being awarded through the state’s Neighborhood Revitalization Tax Credit program.
As defined in the grant, midtown is the neighborhood bounded by the Atlantic City Expressway to the north, the West Atlantic City section of Egg Harbor Township to the east, Bayview Avenue to the south, and U.S. Route 9 to the west.
Jim Rutala is an economic development and management consultant who previously helped with a neighborhood revitalization plan in Ducktown, a neighborhood in Atlantic City. He said at the Thursday town hall that he and the city were eager to hear residents' opinions on how to improve the neighborhood.
“This is really about getting your input more than anything else,” Rutala said to the virtual town hall audience, which consisted of about two dozen people. “This is not an effort where it’s top-down ideas. This is going to be your ideas.”
Attendees outlined several education, training and capital improvement projects they thought would improve the city.
Trina Byrd, a Pleasantville business owner and homeowner, said she wanted to see NRTC grants used to fund workforce training programs that connect local businesses with potential workers. She said it was difficult to access existing job-training programs for many residents and that the COVID-19 pandemic had made it more difficult to use traditional resources like a public library.
She added that training with technology involved in remote working could enable people with limited access to transportation and could provide people access to jobs well outside the immediate Pleasantville area.
“Most participants who are in need of job training and training to actually keep a job, they’re running into difficulties because all these barriers to getting the free-training grant exist,” Byrd said. “We need to look at our residents, exclusively our residents, and see what their workforce-development needs are and kind of eliminate the barriers that prevent them from getting the traditional training grants or getting access to technology."
Mayor Judy Ward suggested that an investment in mental health could help improve the city. She said the pandemic had taken a large toll on the mental health of the city’s potential workforce. U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a report in December warning about the effects the pandemic and school shutdowns have had on the mental health of American children and adolescents.
Cindi Pitts, a local business owner, agreed that the city would need to invest in children and provide them with recreational opportunities.
People at the town hall later discussed the need to recruit adult volunteers to coach Little League and other recreational sports teams.
Pastor Richard Younger of Living Water Wesleyan Church cited the Ignite program, which connects teenage boys with gymnasium space for exercise as well as with adult mentors.
Making the streets of Pleasantville more navigable, meanwhile, was another common theme.
Board of Education Vice President Sharnell Morgan emphasized the need for street lights that would make it safer for young people to walk and ride their bikes.
City Councilwoman Joanne Famularo, whose 2nd Ward contains much of midtown, said she would like to see some of the funds used to ensure sidewalks were shoveled during winter storms. She noted that many of her constituents do not drive and rely on walkable sidewalks to get to work and meet their daily needs, while local businesses need their storefronts clear of ice.
“A very, very minor thing, but if you’re trying to walk to the grocery store that’s down the street from you and you have to walk in the street, it becomes a major issue,” Famularo said. “Again, minor issue, but major when something happens.”
Neighborhoods in need
The New Jersey DCA awards NRTC grants to local nonprofit organizations that are to launch revitalization projects in eligible “distressed neighborhoods.”
At least three-fifths of NRTC funds must be used for housing and economic development, while the remaining two-fifths can be used for other neighborhood improvement projects. The state budgets a total of $15 million per year to the NRTC program and the maximum amount that the DCA can award to a single applicant is $985,000.
Rutala stressed that the NRTC program would complement existing DCA initiatives in the city, such as the Neighborhood Preservation and the Urban Enterprise Zone programs.
The NRTC grant could also help advance projects facilitated by federal tax breaks given to Opportunity Zones, which are neighborhoods certified as an “economically distressed community,” by the IRS. These state and federal programs are bolstered by efforts led by county and local organizations, such as AtlantiCare, workforce-training and English-language classes run by Atlantic Cape Community College, the Atlantic County Improvement Authority and the Pleasantville Police Foundation.
“There’s a lot of overlap, and so we try to leverage various funding sources to really make a substantial improvement,” Rutala said. “We have a lot of opportunities here.”
According to statistics from the 2020 U.S. Census that Rutala presented at the town hall, midtown has a population of 7,085 people. Its residents are 43.6% Hispanic, 37.4% Black and 17.8% white.
Income levels in midtown are low, and its poverty level is high. The 2020 U.S. Census indicates the neighborhood has a per capita income of $20,083, less than half of the $42,815 per capita income for New Jersey as a whole. Its median household income is similarly low, sitting at $47,869. The statewide median household income is $74,176. The median household income in the United States, according to the 2020 U.S. Census, is $67,521.
The midtown poverty level was 24%, meaning about a quarter of neighborhood residents are living with incomes that put them below the poverty line.
Rutala underscored the need for community engagement and how it would be crucial to revitalizing the neighborhood.
“The reality is nothing happens unless we have an involved community,” Rutala said. “We are not going to be successful unless you and additional people stand up, because your ideas are important and you also make us accountable, you make this work.”
There are plans for a second town hall on the midtown revitalization plan to be held in May, with hopes that City Council will vote to adopt a plan in June. The plan would then be submitted for state approval sometime in July.
Contact Chris Doyle
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