How a pastor improved his west side neighborhood one house at a time
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It was the spring of 1985, and while First Baptist Church of Greater Washington Park was still Classie Thomas’ home on Sundays, the neighborhood was no longer the one she had grown up in.
The shotgun houses lining each street had fallen to shambles. The parents and grandparents Thomas knew as a child had either died or, like Thomas, moved away.
Lack of clear title was a common problem in the predominantly poor, African-American neighborhood. Without ownership, those so-called “heir properties” fell into disrepair. Others were left empty and available to drug peddling and prostitution. Blight threatened to become the identity of a community that lacked indoor plumbing but had plenty of pride.
The neighborhood needed a savior. Coincidentally, the church needed a pastor.
“God sent Reverend Welch to the church,” Thomas said. “Because of his leadership, the church took off and the community took off.”
The Rev. Willie Welch was an energetic, 28-year-old preacher when he was asked that spring to deliver a trial sermon. Months later, Welch moved from Birmingham to Montgomery, mounting the First Baptist pulpit for the first time in September 1985.
Over the next few decades, Welch led an unprecedented revitalization effort, a one-at-a-time system of buying, building and selling that residents say has not only made the neighborhood safer, but has also convinced former residents like Thomas to return to a neighborhood that has rediscovered its pride.
“I said, ‘Maybe it won’t be such a bad idea to come back home. And of course Pastor Welch had already begun rebuilding the community,” said Thomas, who now lives a block away from Welch’s church on 2nd Street and leads the Greater Washington Park neighborhood group. “Now we’re trying to really bring the cohesiveness back where we tell people, ‘Look, come back to where you grew up. It can all happen again.’ And it is slowly happening again. You have people coming back.”
The streets of Greater Washington Park stretch west from Mobile Highway and count southward from 1st to 7th. Each is a dead end that butts against the railroad tracks. The church sits near the center, straddling 2nd and 3rd streets.
Nearly 33 years to the day since Welch’s first sermon at First Baptist, he drove past the homes he had built. They’re easy to spot and obviously new, many with bright, white window frames set into pastel-colored siding.
Welch leaned out the window as he arrived at a house he never got to, a rickety, 5th Street shotgun shack with mismatched doors. Its gray, patchwork roof bent inward as if pressed by an invisible thumb.
“That’d be the best house. That’s what everything looked like when I got here,” Welch said.
Welch did not have an immediate desire to rebuild the neighborhood after arriving in 1985. First, he had to rebuild the church.
First Baptist of Greater Washington Park added nearly 100 members a year between 1988 and 1992, Welch said.
One of those was Annie Burnett, who had moved back to Montgomery and was living in the Riverside Heights projects when her mother’s friend suggested the church.
“I was like, ‘Down here?’ and my mother’s friend said, ‘Yes, down here,'” Burnett said. “Just vacant lots and empty houses. That’s all I saw.”
After the new church building was completed in 1994, Welch set his sights on combating the area’s blight and building an empowered base of homeowners.
“I figured there was no need having a new church building in a neighborhood where the house values were $19,000,” Welch said. “So what I did was just start buying up the vacant land around, a lot of drug houses and dope houses then, and I just bought the property and tore the drug houses down. Then I started recruiting new members to build houses here.”
Welch was systematic: Buy a property. Clear it. Build a house. Sell the house. Pay down the line. Repeat.
“He cleaned the neighborhood up around his church. At one time this was one tough neighborhood,” said Mac McLeod, the former president of Colonial Bank who is now the current city chief of staff . “There was no government funding. This was purely our bank dealing with Willie and his church.”
Welch had no board of deacons to seek approval from as other pastors did. Having turned down pastor jobs that required him to marry, Welch didn’t have a spouse to stop him from mortgaging his own home “three or four times.”
“Being single helped,” Welch said with a laugh.
The reverend benefited from a team of community stakeholders and church members as well as a friendly relationship with Colonial Bank loan officer John Ronan.
“Ronan could approve up to $90,000 on his own without approval so we always built houses for around $75,000,” Welch said. “When I came here, the average house value in Greater Washington Park was $18,000. If you do the average value now, it’s probably $100,000. I made homeowners, and we kind of cleaned out the neighborhood.”
The first property he purchased was on 4th Street, one street over from the church’s south entrance.
It’s the only house Burnett has ever owned, and one she said she’ll stay in “until Jesus comes back.”
“He said, ‘If I build you a house, would you move in?’ And I said, ‘Yes,'” Burnett said. “They said drugs were down here and prostitution. I looked past all that and said, “I’m going to have a home.'”
Welch eventually built nine houses and renovated two others, but the impact on the neighborhood went beyond beautification.
The demolition of vacant properties not only erased blight and increased property value, it also eliminated much of the criminal activity, residents said. Welch cleared empty lots of trees so those selling crack cocaine didn’t have a cool place to stand in the summer. He built a cinder block wall around the neighborhood for $3 a brick to keep Smiley Court residents from crossing the tracks into the neighborhood.
“The impact is you do really get rid of the loitering, the drug trafficking and all of this once you start buying up property saying it belongs to these individuals or it belongs to the church,” Thomas said. “It gives you more security.”
But Welch’s vision did not overlook the financial needs of the historically impoverished community where Thomas’ family grew up boiling groundwater and washing in a foot tub.
Welch would attempt to pay property owners fair value for the land. In the cases where they refused and let it go to a tax sale, Welch bought the lot for a bargain and paid the owners anyway, he said.
Welch and his team worked with a Colonial Bank credit counselor to help prospective home buyers improve their credit. The initiative provided work for residents such as Earnest Sanders, who built some of the homes and hired community members to work alongside him.
“It’s brought the neighborhood up a lot,” Burnett said. “It’s given the neighborhood a sense of pride. When people come down here, the word is, ‘Wow.’ “
Obtaining loans became more difficult after the Sept. 11, 2001, World Trade Center attack and doubly so after the Great Recession hit in 2008, all but stymieing his plans for continued revitalization, Welch said.
But by then, word had gotten out that the neighborhood had changed and others began investing in Greater Washington Park.
“I just think that if he had not been a pastor, I don’t believe the community would look like this if you really want to hear the truth,” Thomas said. “His thing was build the people, build the community. His vision was totally different.”
Thomas was one of the first to follow her roots back to Greater Washington Park after completing construction on a $185,000 house in 2001.
Welch calls Thomas’ house the neighborhood’s “anchor.”
“I think it’s just wonderful. You have a few who didn’t grow up in this area, who started going to the church and bought into the vision of wanting to own a home and stay down here. But now we’re getting people who actually grew up in the community saying, ‘You know I think I want to build a home back here.’ I’m really really excited about it,” Thomas said.
Welch and his church members readily admit there is still work to be done.
Some small, skinny houses Burnett called “chicken shacks” sit with boarded up windows and broken siding, resembling the neighborhood Welch arrived in in 1985.
At a Greater Washington Park community meeting this week, Montgomery Police Department Cpl. Greg Dixon said the neighborhood only had two crimes reported in the past month: a domestic violence incident and a cellphone theft.
But residents chimed in with other tips for the officers, pointing them toward houses where illegal activity and drug sales had been spotted. All the suspicious activities were seen between 5th Street and 8th Street, the blocks Rev. Welch never built on.
“We’re not quite there,” Burnett said. “I’m hoping more of the younger families come back and take 5th and 6th streets and just build on it. That would be a good thing.”