Rick:

Hello, and welcome to Northwest Philly Neighbors.

I'm Rick Mohr, and my guest is Yvonne Haskins.

I'm excited for you to hear her great stories, from Jim Crow Atlanta through 1960s Philly up to Germantown today, and how in her many careers and volunteer projects, she always homes in on key community issues and brings people together to tackle them.

She's worked as a police officer, parole board director, Camden City Attorney, affordable housing underwriter, and real estate lawyer, among others, and her community work includes the Germantown United CDC, West Mount Airy Neighbors, and the Mount Airy Business Improvement District.

Yvonne always has a lot going on, so besides her stories, you'll also hear the action-packed background of an afternoon in her dining room.

So when did you move to this area, and what brought you here?

Yvonne Haskins:

Well, Philadelphia became my home when I was a teenager.

I had started college at Spelman when I was 16, and it was around that time that my parents moved to Philadelphia from Georgia.

They always lived somewhere around Atlanta, and I had grandparents that lived in Atlanta.

So I was in Atlanta a lot, and I finally graduated high school in Atlanta.

But I wanted to transfer up here because I didn't like being in Atlanta at Spelman by myself, but I fell in love, and so I came at 19, convinced my parents that I should get married.

That I wanted to get married, and I did.

And so getting married, it was my husband who was going to finish college, not me.

And then I got pregnant, had two boys who were like 14 months apart.

But my parents were in Philadelphia.

They lived in Tioga.

And so I got to know Philadelphia living at my parents' house.

So I guess what brought me to Philadelphia was just the migration of people from Georgia.

And then only staying married for three years and coming back to live with my parents and my two kids.

And then I became a police officer.

And that's how I got to know Philadelphia.

I got really engrossed in Philadelphia at the time that was 1964, when I went on the force.

I had been a secretary.

I had done this, that and the other because I hadn't finished college.

But I always worked.

I worked all my life.

Even as a kid, a little kid, I was working.

I worked for the lawyer who became the Supreme Court Justice of Pennsylvania, first black Supreme Court Justice, Robert N.

Nix Jr.

And in working for him, I began to get a little bit of inkling of understanding the law.

But I saw an ad that said they were going to appoint policewomen, and it was for juvenile aid work.

Women were not allowed to do the job, the full job.

So I took the exam.

I was shocked that we were like, we were over at Girls High and every classroom was filled.

And the day that I got told that I was appointed and I showed up for my first orientation, it was only five of us out of that 2,000 people.

I look at my life as reinventing.

And that was a point of reinvention.

It was a point of exploring more than I had ever explored in my life.

It was also a point of knowing power.

I remember my first episode of understanding abuse of power.

This was a 5 to 1 o'clock, 1 a.m.

shift.

I lived with my parents in Tioga, but the headquarters for juvenile aid was not far from Temple.

And we were in plain clothes, not in uniform.

And everybody knew who we were, because we were riding around these little cars with antennas on the top.

But that night, I was in a hurry to get home.

I was tired and I wanted to get home.

And something occurred to me that I could run every red light on the way home.

And I did.

I could have been killed.

I could have been, you know, it was 1.30 in the morning.

Nobody was around.

And I remember barreling up.

It was either 11th Street or 13th Street, barreling up those streets to get into Tauga and go over to where we lived.

And when I got home and pulled up and parked, I was the most embarrassed person.

If something hit me, I sat in my car and cried, that I had been so crazy to do something like that, that I had abused my power, that I could have killed myself and my kids wouldn't have had a mother.

Oh, I went through all of this.

I'm out there just boohooing.

But it taught me a lesson.

It was a learning experience.

And so now, when I see abuse of power, I remember that.

Those are the kind of experiences that I like to share because I think it's a crossroads you come to and you try to figure out which way you're going.

So the question is how did I get to Philadelphia?

That was really how I got to Philadelphia.

And then I met Hask while I was a policewoman.

And after dating and marriage and so forth, we moved here.

And I also became the Westman Area Neighbors Executive Director.

I was working for the school district at the time.

I was an education program planner.

Another, you know, reinvention.

So I became the Executive Director of Westman Area Neighbors and what did that do that taught me this community?

So after I'd been a police officer for two years, I was getting bored.

I mean, that was...

what do you do?

You go find a runaway kid, and you go...

you figure out who stole the bike, and it was just little stuff they were doing.

And they got two captains, no, one captain, not even a captain.

They had one lieutenant and two sergeants.

So it's no promotional opportunity.

And so I was able to go back to school full time because Rizzo agreed for me to do it.

I was the first woman that he allowed to have a fixed shift at night and go to school.

And in 1967, we also had riots.

It wasn't a riot.

It was a march and a demonstration.

It was November 17, 1967, where black kids marched on the school district to get more African-American history in the schools.

And Rizzo, there's a picture of Rizzo with the bull pit with black tie outfit, and it hit the national media, and they said he was hitting kids.

He wasn't doing that, but other people were.

Other cops were beating these kids.

And by now, I've gotten introduced to the head of the commission.

His name was Clarence Farmer at the time.

He's passed, and he accepted my proposal.

He was close to Rizzo, and he said, would you please assign her to me, to the Human Relations Commission, because we got the Kerner Commission report saying that we got to do more on police community relations.

I didn't know anything about police community relations.

But I started sort of following him around.

I read the Kerner Commission report, and I began to understand that police were mostly frightened.

Rookies would come out of training, be assigned to these neighborhoods, and the next thing you know, you got a police brutality case, because the rookies scared to death.

They weren't killing people then, they were just beating them up.

And scared to death, and they didn't know they had leaders in the community, they didn't know they had institutions in this community, because all they saw was poverty and blight and so forth.

So I took all that in, and I created some training for police officers that are coming out of the academy.

I created, they still have these programs for the captains.

It's called Police Service, something or other now.

But I call them captains' workshops.

Every district in Philadelphia had to have a monthly captains' workshop.

And we would go to some of them just to make sure that they were doing it right and inviting the community in.

We were helping them figure it out.

But basically it was inviting leaders in the community to come meet with the captain so the captain knows what's going on and the community knows the captain cares.

Respect, respect, respect.

Bridging, bridging, bridging.

And that still exists today, these police workshops.

And that's when they got police community relations officers assigned.

And they still have those today.

So I was doing all that that year that I was finishing college.

And I didn't have to take any classes for maybe six hours.

I just went to school for the rest of the time, six hours.

And so it relieved me from this heavy thing of never seeing my kids, never getting any sleep.

I studied on weekends, and that's how I got through the first year.

And with that, finishing college, I stayed at the commission for another year, but somebody called me about being the first security specialist for the University of Pennsylvania.

I was the first security specialist for the University of Pennsylvania.

That was a fun year.

And then somebody calls me to become regional director of the criminal justice planning commission.

And that commission was made up of every criminal justice agency in the city, police, probation, judges, anybody having anything to do with police community relations.

The mayor had a representative on there.

Federal Reserve Bank had a representative on there.

It was a huge commission, but I saw it as a pork barrel.

It was simply, you know, the police got their little share, and the probation, and there was no planning going on.

And I was able finally to convince the regional planning commission.

I gave a little speech and said, we really want to plan.

And I enticed them by saying, the reason we want to do that is because we could get more than this $8 million.

I said, there's discretionary money, and we need to do multi-year planning.

We need to plan not just for this year, we need to plan down the road.

It's the way the Japanese do it.

That's real planning.

And I convinced them because they saw dollars, that they could get more money that way.

They rolled up their sleeves.

It was the most exciting time to see the woman who was Larry Summers.

He was Harvard president.

His mother, Anita Summers, was on the Federal Reserve Board.

I don't know if she was chair or what, but she was on my commission.

And to see people like Anita Summers, judged so-and-so, the mayor's person, the head of the prison, sitting in a room, debating, debating criminal justice reform.

And it was just exciting.

We had people from the media engaged.

We had people from the community engaged.

And the other thing I talked about was, this is not just police administration or criminal justice administration.

You've got to get the community engaged.

Crime prevention involves the community.

So what happened?

I looked around and saw two programs that could get money, and I knew they could get money, and I invited them in.

And these were young people.

Some of them were still in law school.

I remember there were some Penn Law students who were looking to start something to help juveniles in court because the juvenile court system was really horrible, horrible, horrible.

Kids were seen and not heard.

And so I invited these law students in to give me a proposal for starting the Juvenile Law Center.

It exists today.

And in fact, the Juvenile Law Center was the center that dealt with that prison where the judges were sending people to jail to get the money and all that.

They just recently won the Supreme Court decision about that, and they've done some wonderful work.

The other program I started was Women Organized Against Rape.

And in those days, I knew from having been a policewoman, because the one thing they assigned us to was whenever there was a rape victim, the detective was like a doctor with a nurse.

You had to have a woman in the room while you're interviewing the rape victim.

And I knew that there were just inadequate provisions in the police department for dealing with rape victims.

And so those two programs, I think, WER still exists.

So I was able to get the commission to begin to award more money into community prevention and to recognize the importance of community prevention.

I stayed there until I got another call saying, would you like to be head of the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Paroles Philadelphia office?

And it's the largest office in the state.

So I got into parole for about ten years.

Rick:

So what sparked your interest in real estate law after your work in law enforcement and education?

Yvonne Haskins:

Well, I'm not sure how that happened, except I somehow understood that because my family had always been land owners, even in the South, I guess that was something that I grew up knowing, that you owned property, that land is limited, and it's a good base of wealth building.

I didn't know all that, but I must have instinctively known that we needed to invest in property.

So I started just watching sheriff sales and houses for sale.

And so I'd read it like people read the stock market.

I was reading the real estate sections, and I found a house in 1980 that was a single family house.

I'd never done anything on zoning.

I'd never knew anything about investing.

It was just in the unit block off of Germantown Avenue.

So instinctively, I understood that that house had some value, if we could get three units.

We went to see the house.

They wanted $30,000 for the house.

And we went back to the car and asked to buy, buy.

And we signed the agreement right away to buy it for $30,000.

And that house ended up paying for my daughter's, part of my daughter's education at Penn, because we could refinance it.

And so I began to understand how you, you know, values and so forth.

And my husband says, you're getting bored again.

So here comes another reinvention.

He says, you can go to law, why don't you go to law school?

And I can't go to law school.

I got a 10 year old, I don't know how old Kristen was.

I think she was eight and I had teenagers.

And I said, I can't go to law school.

And he enticed me, he says, well, we could get somebody who lives in the house and keeps the house.

Oh, that's different.

So I did the LSAT bit and didn't realize that I did very well.

I thought I got in because of some minority thing, but I found out later that I had one of the high scores at Temple.

And so I applied to Temple Evening School.

But I worked full time as director of the parole board office and went to law school.

And then in law school, we had already invested in this one property.

I was still interested in real estate.

And I took a seminar in real estate and property law, fell in love with it.

But still, I'm an older woman now.

I'm in my 40s.

And had no idea what I was going to do with this degree.

I said, well, I guess I'll just keep being a director and figure it out.

But I went to see the dean and said, I'm going to graduate with some honors.

Now, what am I going to do with this?

And he made some phone calls for me.

And he called a law firm, Schneider, Harrison, Siegel and Lewis.

And I applied, and they liked me.

I didn't know they would pay for...

I could quit being a director and just come on their payroll, and they were going to pay me while I studied to pass the bar.

It was great.

And I doubled my salary.

It still wasn't $60,000, I don't think.

But this was $86,000 that I finished law school.

And it was my husband again.

You know, I'm a country girl.

My husband had a great influence on my life.

And, of course, I blame him because I should have gone into litigation when I first got into Schneider.

I had had some important research that I'd done, and people were really praising my litigation, my analysis and writing.

But he says, don't let them talk you out of being a real estate lawyer.

You need transactional work.

You got to get that training and how you do documents and blah, blah, blah.

So at Schneider, they rotated you through these various departments so that you'd get a taste.

So I was in litigation, and that was my department, and they said, we want you to stay in litigation.

I wanted to go to real estate.

And they said, the real estate department has been decimated because all the lawyers have gone over to Ballot's Bar.

And I said, well, I still want to go to a real estate.

But then after two years in the real estate department, I realized he was right.

That real estate department didn't know what the hell they were doing.

I was actually bringing in business to the department.

And I realized I needed to transfer over to Ballot, and I did.

And they wanted me big time.

Again, they're going to tell me, we're going to make you partner.

You're doing a lot of rain making and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And the year it came time for me to make partner, it was me against somebody else that they really wanted, and I lost out.

And also, I noticed that two other black lawyers, associates before me had lost out.

They were great.

They were on partnership track.

But you get to that last year and the eighth year, and suddenly they're talking gobbledygook.

And so with me, they did the same thing.

My valuations up until that year that I was being considered for partner, I go into the evaluation.

There are three lawyers sitting there.

I said, are you talking in tongue?

For some reason, I don't understand the words you're saying.

And David Cohen, who is at Comcast, he's a powerhouse.

He was an associate that I worked with.

And so he was groomed to make partner.

And that's why he got to be who he got to be.

And then I finally got it.

I said, oh, that's how it happens.

And you understand because this is a partnership.

It's people get to know people that they like and they want with them.

And I'm not sure that it's racism per se.

It's probably more institutional racism than it is discrimination, like we know it to be.

And so anyway, that's how I got into real estate law.

Rick:

Yeah.

You've put so much energy into improving things in Germantown.

And you wrote that the key is creating a path to home ownership for existing residents.

Yvonne Haskins:

Absolutely.

Rick:

Could you talk some about that?

Yvonne Haskins:

You know, everyone is afraid of gentrification.

If you mention that word, my God, it gets a whole slew of people on Facebook who are mad and upset about gentrification.

And if you consider the demographics of Germantown, it's a perfect place to try to manage gentrification.

We never want to stop improvement in the economics of a community.

But in doing so, it usually means that you're attracting other people into your community, and you're enlarging your market for housing, such as what happened with West Mount Airy and East Mount Airy.

When I moved here, what is it, almost 50 years ago, my house was worth $18,000.

And with the growth of the market and with the stability of the community, my house is now worth $550,000.

So I can say that in Germantown, you have 80% black population, you have 25% poverty, people assume that's all black people, I don't think that's true.

And yet, it has the largest neighborhood commercial district outside of Center City.

It has five regional train stations.

Transportation is always key to the growth of an area.

About five years ago, when we first started Germantown United, CDC, I had suggested that we do forums, that we begin to have people come together to look at possibilities, to understand the community better, to begin to get engaged with us in trying to rebuild the commercial district.

First forum was on planning.

What does that mean, and what is community development?

We had people from other parts of the city who have been very successful.

In fact, the executive director for New Kensington, now why would we bring Kensington here?

But they had done an awful lot.

And we had other people from, we had the head of an agency in Brooklyn come in and talk about what they did to rebuild Bed-Stuy, Bed-Stuyverson.

And there was 250 people in that audience.

And they engaged and they learned, they were excited.

But there was still this undercurrent of doubt and undercurrent of fear, and the fear pops up so easily.

So we decided the next forum was the environment.

People love that.

So I said, okay, now we're going to do one on the big G.

And we did one on gentrification.

And we had the person who was head of commerce and head of the city planning commission, Alan Greenberger, was our moderator.

And we had notable speakers.

And again, you had almost 200 people.

And one of our workshops was affordable housing.

And it came out exactly as I have always believed, that if you build in affordable housing, even before gentrification begins, but not so much so that it takes over the community.

In other words, you cannot put a whole bunch of people of low income in one area and expect them to be able to stabilize and have resources to build their community.

It has to be mixed income.

That's been discovered over and over and over.

That's how we all grew up in our various areas.

If we're over 70 years old, people were of mixed income.

People didn't run out of the community with flight, middle class flight.

I call it, people call it white flight, but I think it was middle class flight, running away from the big migration of poor people or the influx of poor landlords breaking up big houses.

And redlining, redlining was the biggest thing.

So we had this forum, and we came out of it saying, we really need to look block by block in Germantown, see where there are opportunities for developing affordable housing and building an interest and credit worthiness among the existing residents.

That's about three or four years ago that we did that, and everybody agreed.

But we didn't really do anything about it.

Last year, when we uncovered what I call the crime of the head of the settlement agency, the nonprofit that was doing all the development in Germantown for years, Emmanuel Freeman, had taken over 50 properties as his own.

They had been bought by the nonprofit, and when the nonprofit went bankrupt, he just transferred ownership to himself and his wife.

And so we've been fighting that, and we've been successful in keeping him from coming back into that community.

We've been successful in taking over these properties with the city as a receiver.

And I see now with that volume, that number of properties, that we have a golden opportunity.

We have the second thing that makes it golden opportunity is a program called Jumpstart Germantown.

Because in addition to having the skills, which is what they focus on to develop properties, and that's building wealth among young developers, entrepreneurs, you also need financing.

And you need financing for people, the lenders, banking on the ability and the capacity of the developer and not the credit of the developer, because most of these young people don't have decent credit.

A lot of them have high student loans, whatever.

But if they're demonstrating an earnestness and an ability to develop and rehab a house, and they're doing it at a pace and an amount that will keep that house affordable, the third thing we need to do is to attract people to get their credit straightened out.

And that's what we started last year.

A credit counseling program that had been going on in Mount Airy, we invited them to come to Germantown with all of their experience and resources.

They're state certified, but they hold your hand and help you to get your credit straightened out.

They explain the mysteries of buying a house.

They reduce the fear of buying a house.

They arm people with the kind of knowledge they need to protect themselves in buying a house.

So it's like an eight weeks program, I think.

The program that's doing this is Germantown United, CDC.

And Germantown United has been understaffed.

We're going to have to grow a little bit so that we can handle all the opportunities and the work that's piled on GU CDC to be able to deliver.

And we have to have partners in the community who will pick up some of the slack that we can't handle.

But I'll give you an example.

I was doing some volunteer work at Green Street Friends, and there was a woman there who I guess is like a security person.

She heard me talking about the credit counseling program we were starting.

And I said, you know, we want people who live in the community who would want to buy a house and work and live in Germantown.

And she heard me talking about it, and she said, I live in East Germantown, and I want to stay there, and I want to own a house in East Germantown.

Can you tell me what I need to do?

And this woman is probably making $30,000 or $40,000 a year, and she's probably paying rent that would equal a mortgage of a house that she could afford.

And so I started coaching to her, go take the classes open now.

And I don't know if she took them.

Sometimes you have to keep mentoring and coaching people to make that first step.

Rick:

But just the fact that a random person was so interested suggests that many, many people.

Yvonne Haskins:

I'm sure we have two groups living in Germantown on Facebook and a group called Changing Germantown.

And it must be 10,000 people on both groups or more.

I think that there's a lot of interest.

And I think that if you can get enough residents, grow enough residents, if you will, grow their credit, grow their interests, and then grow the house to meet their need and their ability, then what you're going to do is manage gentrification.

And what you're going to do is have mixed income as new people are coming in.

And we have to welcome new people.

You know, this anger about all those outsiders, and you hear that a lot.

They're going to take over Germantown and so forth and so on.

We don't want gentrification to take over Germantown, but we want gentrification to help Germantown.

And it can be a good thing and it can be a bad thing if you don't pay attention.

And we need to pay attention to the schools.

I tell you, the one thing that will change every community is good schools.

Every community.

And that happened in University City.

University City overnight became a gentrified community.

Overly gentrified because of that school near Penn.

So focusing on the schools is something we can do to help a community to grow.

Rick:

You talked about or you mentioned Jumpstart Germantown, which is Ken Weinstein's program.

I mean, maybe you could say a word or two about that for people who aren't familiar with it.

But then I also want to know, what is the incentive for a developer to sell at an affordable rate rather than to get as much as they possibly can?

Yvonne Haskins:

I think the market is going to tell you how much you can sell a house for.

And that's why I say I think we have the opportunity right now, because the market in East Germantown is not going to be pushing through like it is in other parts of Germantown.

Jumpstart Germantown has classes and mentors of experienced developers working with inexperienced developers.

I won't say young, they can be any age, to teach them the ropes.

Developers don't have to have any skill in carpentry, plumbing or whatever, but they better know what a house needs as far as carpentry, mechanicals, plumbing, roof, windows, all the things that you have to pay attention to when you're looking at a house that's vacant and blighted, and you don't know what the condition is.

You can usually buy a house in a place like East Germantown for under $100,000 still.

You can go to North Philly, probably, and buy a house for 30-some thousand, 40-some thousand.

Now the market is probably not going to be any more than about 90,000.

So the equation you have to understand is, what does this house need?

A house that costs 90,000 might need the same thing that a house that costs 300,000 needs.

So those houses aren't going to get done unless you have some government subsidy.

They have these tax credit programs out here.

But they don't really work for single-family homes.

They're for multi-family homes.

All the tax credits that are out here are not for affordable, single-family home ownership.

I don't know why the federal government missed that boat.

But the tax credit programs that are out here support rental housing and only rental housing.

So back to Jumpstart.

Jumpstart started, I guess, three years ago, four years ago, where Ken Weinstein, being a major developer in Germantown, actually said, I want some competition.

I can't rebuild this community all by myself.

I mean, he's a smart guy who realizes that plenty to go around and the more other people are doing development, the better his property values are stabilized.

And so he decided to do two things, to teach people development and also to lend money with less credit need that people might have.

He still expects you to put some skinny in the game.

You know, he's only going to fund you 80% of the acquisition and purchase price.

So jumpstart in doing this sort of parallel thing began to attract hundreds of people.

I think they've had 600 graduates.

And they also have attracted attention from across the city.

Every community wants a jumpstart.

But Ken is still in control because he has a line of credit.

That comes through him and he guarantees it, I'm pretty sure.

He then entertains applications.

I'll use an example of one that we're doing with jumpstart.

A house that cost us $65,000 to $70,000 to settle.

And then we've estimated it's going to cost about $80,000 to fix it.

So we're ending up somewhere around $145,000 totally.

That will cost to acquire and fix up the house.

80% of that will be lent.

The other 20% has to come from the developer.

And then you have inspections as you go.

Before that loan is made, Ken will personally come out and take a look at the house, or maybe he has other staff that can do it.

I've always seen him personally come out, because he's been doing this for so many years, point out this looks a little weak, and oh, don't put a whole lot of money here, and those kind of tips, which is so good for a young and experienced developer.

The other thing that you're doing is bringing investment by 600 people into the market.

Now, they don't just have to do Germantown, I don't think, but I think the focus is Germantown.

Rick:

And have those projects been completed?

Yvonne Haskins:

Oh, yeah, it's one by one, and here and there, but you see projects coming on the market, and it's wonderful, but Germantown is huge.

It's a large area, and there's a lot of need in the lower part of Germantown to develop the properties.

So, how it comes out, if only $145,000 is spent, and the offers come in at $175,000, well, the developers made a little profit, $30,000, and that's enough to go do another house, if the developer is smart, instead of going to buy a car or whatever.

And so, as long as you're rolling that money over, you're getting more experience among these young developers.

You're getting more investment.

Rick:

Yeah.

So, you grew up in a house that your family lived in in Atlanta, I mean, that your family owned in Atlanta.

Yvonne Haskins:

Right.

Rick:

Was that common for black people at that time?

Yvonne Haskins:

In Atlanta, we had a black bank.

We had a black insurance company.

We had a black newspaper.

I mean, it was a parallel, you know, separate but equal place.

We had colleges.

I never experienced feeling like a minority when I grew up.

And so, the thought of owning your own property in my family went back to my great-grandfathers on both sides.

My great-grandfather, Zachary Hubert and his wife, Camille, had been slaves, and they bought property, and they were written up.

You can look them up.

There are books that they are a part of on the story of the South, where they came out of slavery and bought, with his two brothers, he bought land.

And he raised 12 children, and all 12 were college-educated.

Three of them became college presidents.

They became teachers, lawyers, you know.

The role models for me were all around me, and everybody I knew owned their house.

Except a few homes, it was a small neighborhood behind my grandfather's house where people did rent.

But it was mixed.

It was home ownership and rental.

My grandfather had a rental property.

My grandfather was the first black doctor for Decatur, Georgia.

And he had an office in his home, and he had the office out in Decatur.

But he also had a little corner store during the Depression, because people could pay in chickens with chickens.

You know, it wasn't like the doctor's life that we know today, but he did own a block of land.

And on maybe a third of the land, they had, you know, corn growing and had a farm, a little farm.

And I guess it was a community garden.

And us grandchildren grew up every summer.

I stayed with my grandmother.

And all of her grandchildren would come to visit.

And they were like my sisters and brothers.

It was a very close-knit family.

My father grew up on a tobacco farm that his parents owned.

And he went to college.

All of his brothers went to college and sisters.

And that was in Valdosta, Georgia.

And so when you think about that heritage of growing up with a family where there's a high expectation that you're going to college, there's no question of stability in the family.

There's no question of the health of the family.

I got to know my grandmother's brothers and sisters very well because her house was a way station for them to come through.

One brother was the first executive director of the Urban League in New York.

It was before the Urban League became national.

And he and his brothers went up to Martha's Vineyard to do a little social work with the Indians up there and ended up buying a lot of land.

And so I always asked my grandmother, why didn't you go with them and buy some of that land up there?

And she says, too far, too far.

But my mother and father met each other at what is now Savannah State College.

It's in Savannah, Georgia.

They used to be Georgia State College.

And it was just expected.

Everybody went to college.

I went most of my life to small schools.

My father was an ag man.

He was what they called a county agent.

And he taught farmers how to farm.

He taught irrigation and soil rotation and all that kind of stuff.

He had a master's in agriculture.

He had been a principal, he had been a teacher, and he finally ended up being a county agent in agriculture.

And so every five years or so, the government would send us somewhere else.

And I remember we lived in three different places as I was growing up.

But it was always close to Atlanta, because the family was very tight-knit and had to come home, to my mother's home.

But we'd also go down to Valdosta, and I remember seeing tobacco leaves, big tobacco leaves, and seeing the gathering of that family.

And interestingly enough, my family in South Georgia was a lot more mixed than the family near Atlanta, although they were mixed too.

But the family in South Georgia had the most mixed race.

We looked like Brazilians.

They were the most beautiful people.

They were Indian.

My great-grandmother was German, pure German.

I remember seeing her, and her hair was down here, and she was blind, and she didn't die until she was 100.

And just being in this presence of these mixed-looking people, I think had an impression on me of not being afraid of anybody looking different, not being uncomfortable around anybody that looked different, came from a different kind of culture, because the ones who came from mostly had more African American or more Native American were different.

You could see there were different tastes and whatever.

But I think that exposure growing up, I have no fear of anybody, and I love difference.

My daughter is even more so.

And it's just been a wonderful experience of seeing my kids have the same kind of feeling about people.

And it's from how kids grow up.

And that's why integration is important.

It's why diversity, we call it diversity, is important.

Yeah, folks own their homes, and my mother was a loan officer in the bank.

Rick:

So those black-owned institutions existed at that time.

Do they still exist there now, and is there a possibility that that can develop here?

Yvonne Haskins:

You know, unfortunately, when integration was forced on the South, and we had all the furor around it, I don't know what happened, but something happened.

We didn't have the poverty that we have in Atlanta today.

We didn't have the crime that we have in Atlanta today.

We still have the institutions, but we no longer have that black bank or the insurance company.

I understand that principals and teachers were uprooted.

The principals and teachers who loved us and made sure that we were educated.

After I left, after integration, I didn't live in the South.

I sometimes think the true story has not been told in fairness to everybody who was in the South.

We see the pictures of George Wallace blocking the door.

We see the pictures of these horrible, these people saying hateful things, like Charlottesville.

And I think a lot of that is from fear, from ignorance, that we don't deal with.

We just simply point fingers and say they are terrible people.

And in the South, when I was growing up, I knew white people.

I didn't think of them as monsters.

I never encountered, maybe encountered once or twice something that was fearful.

I remember being chased home one night.

I was driving home from Spellman.

And these white boys in a car started chasing me.

And they were yelling at me.

And I just boogered at home and got home.

And I felt safe.

And I was OK.

But that's the only encounter I ever remember.

You know, I didn't realize going in a store where you had to go to the basement to try on the shoes down there instead of upstairs in the big department store.

Was anything wrong with that?

I didn't think sitting in the balcony instead of sitting down below that there was anything wrong with that.

I didn't think they were better than us, because I'd go and drink out of the White Fountain and see what's the difference, and wasn't any different.

So I was perfectly happy in my world.

I just don't think we've told the whole story about the South, because there were good people on all sides, as Trump says, in those days.

I don't think Charlottesville was good people on all sides.

I think that was horrible.

But there are stories that have not been told, and that people are fearful of telling, because it's not politically acceptable to say that I grew up at a time when I was safe, I had high expectations, my family had resources, and my family built wealth.

What's wrong with that?

What's wrong with that?

And so the separation was good for me.

We didn't have crime, we didn't have runaway kids, and everybody in my high school was expected to go to college when we graduated.

What's wrong with that?

And so what's wrong with it is what you found maybe in Mississippi and other places in the backwoods where people were being terribly mistreated, or the lack of ability to vote and whatever.

But that wasn't going on in Atlanta.

It wasn't going on in the small towns around Atlanta.

And so that part of the story has never been told.

That part of the story of how you develop kids to be strong adults.

What does human development require?

And today we're not doing such a good job on human development.

Rick:

So you told me the story of work that you did that led to the city understanding councilmanic prerogative.

That that wasn't widely known before, but now it is and is being examined.

Could you just summarize how that happened?

Yvonne Haskins:

It was a case of zoning.

A zoning case.

Zoning is our last place for having a town hall, I think.

It's where the community comes together and says, this is what we want to have in our community.

And so you have to have a balance between property owner and what the community sees and perceives.

In this case, it was a Germantown case, and it was a developer who had the supermarket closed, and everybody got upset and got involved with what are we going to do and started talking to the developer.

And long story short, the developer decided to put in a dollar store instead of a supermarket, and that's called Shelton Plaza.

And when they did that, community came out of the woodworks, and they had lied on the application.

They said on the application that they were putting in a retail grocery store, and the dollar store is not a retail grocery store.

And so at that meeting, I volunteered on a pro bono basis to appeal that application.

The application had gone across the counter.

No variance, no zoning, hearings or anything.

It was going to just be as of what we call as of right.

And so I appealed, and I said to people in the community, I need you to pack the house.

I had six organizations who appealed to say that this was blighting the community.

We already had 22 dollar stores and we had nail salons up the yin-yang.

I had a researcher in the community.

Her name was Susan Guggenheim.

She had researched and found out there's a classification for a grocery store.

And then there's a classification for a dollar store.

They're not the same.

Well, the top lawyer in the city was representing the developer.

His name is Carl Primavera.

And Carl and I started out together zoning lawyers.

So I was excited that I'm up against Carl Primavera.

And they had all kinds of assistants.

They had architects and paralegals and all kinds of props.

I just had me and a room full of yellow t-shirts.

That community, Germantown, was fabulous.

We had two buses.

My daughter had designed these yellow t-shirts, no to retail grocery store.

And the room was packed.

And so I won.

I won the appeal.

The zoning board canceled that permit, said they had to have a variance to put in a retail grocery store.

Here's where Councilmanic Perogative came in.

The councilwoman at the time was the name of Donna Reed Miller.

And so the developer went to the councilwoman and said, I want you to rezone, get a new ordinance to say that this lot permits a retail grocery store.

Now, to change the zoning code like that is something called spot zoning.

Zoning is supposed to be a community plan.

It's supposed to be something that covers a whole area.

You're not supposed to be able to go in and help one developer create one lot with one ordinance in certain use.

It's supposed to be a plan for the community.

Because it's constitutional, it goes to the heart of property ownership.

So you're taking away and you're giving rights to use property.

That has to be on a broad scale instead of one person being able to do that.

And that's called spot zoning.

And what did she do?

She did a spot zoning ordinance.

And so we started fighting in city council.

We thought, wow, we started lobbying the council people.

We lobbied Bill Green.

He said, I agree with you.

We lobbied Curtis Jones.

He said, I agree with you.

We lobbied Blondell Reynolds Brown.

She said, I agree with you.

And don't you know, on the day of that hearing, we went and testified.

We had the room packed.

We testified about how wrong this is for Germantown.

Germantown needs a grocery store, the zoning board, blah, blah, blah.

And I testified about spot zoning.

And I gave a clinic on how in the law spot zoning is illegal.

And don't you know, we lost 17 to zip.

Why?

Because Donna Reed Miller was a district councilwoman, and she said, I mean, this is my bill, this is my community, my district, and I want support.

So all those councilpeople who said they agreed with us went along with her.

Why do they do that?

Because they want them to go along with them when they have a bill.

So every district councilperson, it became clear to me, and I coined the phrase, we've got ten little mayors.

I said the problem here is that we have ten districts, ten little mayors, and the mayor has slowly lost his power.

And the inquirer picked up on this somehow, and they printed on the editorial page two huge columns on the opinion side.

One side was by the paper saying councilmanic prerogative is not good and why.

The other side was by Daryl Clark, who said councilmanic prerogative is an unwritten law.

It is good for the community because the district council people know their community better than anybody else, and he gave his argument.

And for the first time, people began to understand that this existed.

And so we kind of kept it going, you know, in various ways that we were able to get before the public.

And all of a sudden it became something that people started to look at and understand.

So we are the origin of understanding councilmanic prerogative.

Rick:

And in this election there's people talking about it.

Yvonne Haskins:

Well, they're talking about it big time and people are against it.

I think people have seen it with the land deals that have been done, that gave favors to developers and the developers made big profits from.

So it's now understood and people are coming out against it.

I don't know if the existing district council people have come out against it.

Rick:

But that's what it will take.

Yvonne Haskins:

Yes, that's what it will take.

But that's the story.

Rick:

Well, Yvonne, thank you so much for telling me your stories.

Yvonne Haskins:

You're welcome.

Rick:

For more about Yvonne Haskins, see the show notes or go to our website nwphillypodcast.net where you can also suggest a guest when you run into someone in Northwest Philly with good stories to tell.

If you like the show, please tell your friends, share on social media, and give us a rating if you listen on Apple podcasts.

See you next time for more stories from Northwest Philly Neighbors.