Progress Village residents look to withstand the changes within and pressures all around them to preserve a community that has nurtured homeownership and pride since 1960.
By JANET ZINK
Published June 11, 2004
[Times photos: Thomas M. Goethe]
Longtime Progress Village resident Frances Pascoe, left, trims the hair of Willie Glennwood Burns last week. Pascoe, 72, still works in the village barbershop that she has sold to Debra Carter, background. Right: A decal on Emanuel P. Johnson’s car marks his membership in the Progress Village Civic Council. He was one of the first residents of Progress Village.
The Progress Village Civic Council Association points to this new entrance to the Progress Village Recreation Center as a sign of positive momentum. When construction is completed, people will be able to get to the center from Progress Village Boulevard instead of cutting through residential streets.
ABOVE: A spartan home on 87th Street resembles the original Progress Village home, said Hilrie Kemp Jr., the president of the Progress Village Civic Council Association. Many longtime residents chose to stay, some adding on to their homes. BELOW: Among them is Frances Pascoe, one of the first residents to move into Progress Village in 1960.
PROGRESS VILLAGE - When Frances Pascoe bought her house in Progress Village in 1960, it was a dream come true. She and her husband, Waldie, were living with her parents in West Tampa when they heard about a subdivision for black people coming out of the ground in the middle of south Hillsborough County wilderness.
No matter that Progress Village had no bus service, no street lights, no telephones and appeared to be a suburban outpost surrounded by nothing but palmettoes and pastures.
The young couple saw this as a chance to realize the American Dream of homeownership. They made a $200 down-payment on a $9,000 three-bedroom, one-bathroom home with less than 1,000 square feet of living space.
"It was the best thing that ever happened to me," Pascoe said.
Now 72, Pascoe sees changes all around her. The population explosion in Brandon and Riverview has reverberated to the edges of this 853-home community where the average price of a house is less than $80,000 and 91 percent of the residents are black. Longtime residents are seeing their property values rise, even as more renters move in and the community faces the prospect of one day being bought out by developers.
To keep pace with the surrounding growth and make sure Progress Village residents have a say in planning the community's future, the Progress Village Civic Council Association has developed a 10-year strategic plan.
"We need to do something to make sure this community moves into the 21st century," said Hilrie Kemp Jr., 66, president of the Progress Village Civic Council Association for the past two years and leader in the creation of the strategic plan.
While residents in Ruskin, Riverview and Apollo Beach craft community plans with the help of county employees that will protect their rural way of life, residents in Progress Village work unaided on a strategy to keep their suburban enclave on the map.
The goal, Kemp said, is to make sure this historic and proud community is "not sucked into a vacuum and no longer exists."
Pascoe wonders if she's going to be pushed out of a neighborhood that she and many of her friends called home for more than 40 years.
"We can't stagnate," said Pascoe, pausing a minute as she cuts a customer's hair in a Progress Village barber shop. "But we'd like to know what's going to happen and have a say."
She worries about increasing property values that will raise taxes and the cost of homeowners insurance.
Michael Randolph, a Tampa consultant hired by the civic group to help with the plan, said there's also concern about increased traffic caused by new developments and a loss of resources, such as law enforcement.
One of Pascoe's longtime customers, Johnnie Washington moved to Progress Village in 1960 from the Lee Davis housing project in Tampa.
He likes the conveniences growth has brought. He doesn't have to drive as far to get groceries or put gas in his car. But at 71, he sees an uncertain future.
"I wonder," he said. "Are we going to have to move out for the progress that is spreading our way?"
Fundamental needs
Progress Village, Kemp said, has always had to fight for fundamentals that most new communities automatically get - streetlights, sidewalks and adequate drainage. Residents pushed for speed limit changes and to get new basketball courts at the Progress Village Recreation Center.
Now, they'll be competing with their neighbors for county services.
There's the Pavillions and Canterbury Lakes to the north and Oak Creek on the south. Homes in those neighborhoods start at $110,000, and some top $200,000.
"It's raising the value of the property here. It's becoming prime property," Kemp said.
At the same time that property values are increasing, Progress Village has seen another trend - more renters. As people can afford to move out, Kemp said, they hang onto their homes and rent them. Many now house people relocated from Tampa housing projects that have been torn down.
According to city and county officials, families living in government-subsidized rental properties in Progress Village have increased from 257 in 1999 to 323 today.
That brings residents who may not be able to afford or be willing to maintain property they don't own.
Kemp, who retired from Anheuser-Busch in 1995, moved to Progress Village from a West Tampa housing project in 1962.
These brand new one-story residences with eat-in kitchens, living rooms and carports provided an affordable alternative to subsidized housing. They were all cinder block homes with three bedrooms and one bathroom. Kemp and his wife put $250 down on their home and paid $49 a month to pay off their $8,500 mortgage.
As he earned more money, he could have moved. But he wanted to stay. So the Kemps added 700 square feet to the home where they raised three children. The 1,400-square-foot home is now valued at $63,000, according to Hillsborough's property appraiser.
"There were naysayers who said this community wouldn't survive," Kemp said.
But it did more than survive. It thrived. A strong community association, established months after the residents arrived in 1960, worked to protect and bring improvements to the neighborhood.
Emanuel P. Johnson, 83, one of the charter members of the association, remembers the group's first meeting in a tool shed led by A.D. Gaither.
"A.D. said all these people are going to want to come out here and run the show," said Johnson, who remembers Klan members rallying in the 1960s outside the entrance to Progress Village. "We wanted a strong group so we could stay in control."
Along the way, Progress Village has had some help.
Cargill Crop Nutrition, as a trade-off for building a gypsum stack nearby in the 1980s and then expanding it in 2000, agreed to perform environmental and community projects and beef up employee recruitment in Progress Village. In 1992, the sheriff's office opened a substation there to control a growing crime problem.
The community also may get assistance from the federal government. County officials are classifying Progress Village as a weed-and-seed community, which will potentially bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars each year from the U.S. Department of Justice to fight crime. And last year, because of the number of low-income residents, a larger portion of Progess Village qualified as a community development block grant district, bringing in funding for programs from Housing and Urban Development.
For the most part, whatever has come to Progress Village has come because community members demanded it.
"They're very close-knit, organized, involved and knowledgeable about what's happening in their community and around it," said Chris Smith, public relations manager for Cargill.
They've fought against liquor stores and bars and concentrated their efforts on churches and improvements, said County Commissioner Pat Frank, who attended a town hall meeting hosted by the Progress Village civic association in April.
The people behind the Progress Village community plan, she said, are much different from the players in the community plans under way in Riverview, Ruskin and Apollo Beach, which have thousands of new residents.
"It's a more historic community," Frank said. "That community at Progress Village has been there forever and there are roots that are deep."
She speculated that Progress Village might find itself in a situation similar to Central Park Village in downtown Tampa, where developers want to push out the people who have lived there for years to make way for upscale projects.
"Progress Village has to think ahead and avoid that," Frank said.
The surrounding development, she said, could be good for Progress Village if the residents hang onto their land and make sure they're the ones who benefit from increased property values.
"They have to decide how they can make that community last," Frank said.
A strategy for the future
Kemp believes the 10-year strategic plan is a blueprint for making Progress Village last.
The plan has three components - economic, physical development and social issues.
Randolph, owner of the National Institute for Strategic and Tactical Planning in Tampa, served as consultant. He is working on turning the civic group into a non-profit community development corporation so the group can apply for government and corporate grants.
The crux of the economic efforts would include a business incubator, employment center, job training, and steps to attract new businesses funded with grants and payment for services.
Physical development covers topics such as land use and housing. Plans call for beautifying the entrances to Progress Village and the stretch of 82nd Street that provides access to Progress Village Middle Magnet School.
Randolph envisions a time when the community development corporation will be able to build affordable homes.
Social issues planning addresses crime and youth. Plans include hiring a youth coordinator to organize constructive activities for young people in the neighborhood and building a health center for senior citizens.
Delaney Pittman, 41, a member of the civic association who has lived in Progress Village since 1986, said these are the steps that must be taken to make sure his community continues to thrive.
Longtime Progress Village resident Frances Pascoe, left, trims the hair of Willie Glennwood Burns last week. Pascoe, 72, still works in the village barbershop that she has sold to Debra Carter, background. Right: A decal on Emanuel P. Johnson’s car marks his membership in the Progress Village Civic Council. He was one of the first residents of Progress Village.
