In the 1960s, a Pittsburgh woman named Dorothy Mae Richardson changed community development by creating a path for Black and brown families to stay in and maintain their homes. Her organizing became a model that’s still used today throughout the country.
Richardson was born in the city’s Manchester neighborhood in 1922, and her family moved to Charles Street Valley when she was a teenager. She graduated from Allegheny High School (now Pittsburgh Allegheny 6-8) in 1940 and later married steelworker and U.S. Air Force veteran Louis Richardson. They stayed in Charles Street Valley and moved to the corner of Charles and Cross streets, where she had two sons.
With the post-World War II boom and the Great Migration, housing in Pittsburgh started to change. Pittsburgh and many other cities across the U.S. were undergoing urban renewal, which often meant razing Black and other minority-owned or occupied homes in favor of public housing buildings. Families struggled to get loans to buy their own properties due to racist lending practices known as redlining.
The post-war boom also led to many white families leaving urban areas in favor of suburban living. Angela Williams, the president and executive director of the Charles Street Area Corporation, said this was particularly noticeable in the North Side.
“Everybody knows white flight, suburban flight,” Williams said. “So [white families] moved to the suburbs and rented out their homes to families predominantly Black, that had moved up North from the South.”
Many of the landlords of these properties, however, left them in disrepair, which didn’t go unnoticed by Richardson and her neighbors. Williams said residents at the time complained about rats, broken windows, and other generally poor conditions. But due to not owning the homes, the inability for Black and brown families to get home loans and little accountability from the property owners, many felt there was little they could do.
“We’re talking people’s lifetimes where racism and discrimination was prohibiting Black people from buying houses in Charles Street Valley,” Williams said. “Dorothy Mae Richardson and the community group and the residents, people she partnered with, other stakeholders who knew that was wrong, they worked together to create solutions that involved government support.”
Richardson founded a group called Citizens Against Slum Housing (CASH), along with many of her female neighbors.
“She had organized her neighbors and called in banks and called in the city and said, ‘We live here. We care about this community. We're homeowners. We can't do this alone,’” Williams said.
CASH started to reach out to banks and other financial institutions with the goal of getting home improvement loans to nearby dilapidated communities. Eventually, she had secured support from 16 such institutions and helped raise $750,000 in grants.
CASH transformed into Neighborhood Housing Services, or NHS. It would go on to become a model for hundreds of cities around the country, according to Joan Straussman, the regional vice president of the Northeast for Neighborworks America, an organization that evolved from NHS.
“Neighborworks America is a national organization that was created by Congress as a result of the work of Dorothy Mae Richardson,” Straussman said. “[Richardson would say] to financial institutions: ‘We need you to make loans to us so we can improve our houses; city government: we need you to work with the infrastructure, put lighting in the streets, fix pavements. That's broken up. Can we develop a partnership?’”
In the years after her initial success and nationwide impact, Richardson and many mostly female advocates traveled the country, talking about how they’d formed their neighborhood partnerships.
“It was homeowners who wanted to invest in their community. It wasn’t a handout. It wasn’t charity. It was a partnership,” Straussman said.
Richardson continued to act as a resource for North Side families. Steve Roberts, a realtor who worked with Richardson and spent several decades working on housing issues on the North Side, said she was part of housing clinics for residents.
“Pittsburgh had a housing court where, if you violated housing rules, you went to housing court rather than just a magistrate,” Roberts said. “Dorothy became head of the housing clinic, which was sort of the person that they could get referred to to solve things.”
Considering the enormous impact she had on housing development, it makes sense that she was a powerhouse in person.
“She was tough,” Roberts said. “She was driven.”
Straussman said when she had the opportunity to introduce herself to Richardson, “It was like meeting the Queen.”
Richardson died in 1991. Angela Williams said still, among her neighbors, she’s revered.
“She's a living legend. Because to me, even though she passed on, the people that remember her, they speak of her so high in such high regard, that it gives me life,” Williams said. “If she hadn’t done the work that she did here, that she started here in Charles Street by just caring for her neighbors, then there would be no Neighborworks, there would be no federal line item.”
