The City of Wichita is holding a community round table Tuesday evening to discuss the South Central Neighborhood Plan.
The plan covers around three square miles between Kellogg and Pawnee, and from Washington to the Arkansas River. Anyone who lives in that community is invited to the round table from 5:30 to 7 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 29 at the Wichita Water Center (101 E Pawnee St).
Adam Barlow-Thompson is a co-founder of The Neighboring Movement, a nonprofit group working to improve the area. He said that neighborhood faces a lot of difficulty but has a lot of potential.
“It’s a neighborhood that’s really defined by the South Broadway corridor,” Barlow-Thompson said. “Most people think, in Wichita, of the South Broadway corridor as a place where there’s crime and not things that you’d really want. But, the people who actually live in the neighborhood know that there’s a lot of good things there.”
Barlow-Thompson said the South Central Neighborhood Plan gives residents a chance to reclaim the neighborhood and tell a different story about the place they live.
“There is a tendency with these kinds of things for people to say, ‘Here’s all the problems in our neighborhood,’ and that’s a natural way to gather around something,” Barlow-Thompson said. “That’s good, and we do need that. Also, I want to hear what people are good at and what kind of things they want to share as individuals.
“Because, really, the way a neighborhood changes, is that individuals give of themselves and say ‘I’m willing to offer these types of skills, these types of resources to help make my neighborhood better.'”
The neighborhood is not far from downtown or Delano, and the group wants to figure out how to leverage their location to improve the community.
“I can walk from my house to downtown or Delano in 10 minutes,” Barlow-Thompson said. “So, that’s a pretty cool thing that we have. How do we leverage that and use it to advertise that this is a cool place to live?”
Many of the homes in that area are 100 years old or older, and low-cost home renovation will be one of the topics in the plan. Other topics will include transportation, property development and homelessness. The plan is community-driven, and the City of Wichita is helping out.
“The community members, as part of the neighborhood association, wrote the grant to fund the project,” Barlow-Thompson said. “The Metropolitan Planning Department is the city partner in that, and they kind of help lead the process. We hired a consultant that does this work across the nation, they’re out of Omaha, and they’ve done similar work in other areas.”
Barlow-Thompson said the group wants to hear what the people in the community are looking for. You can learn more about the South Central Neighborhood Plan by listening to last Sunday’s At Issue program. You can stream the episode as a podcast from your web browser or your phone by clicking here.
