Graphics:

Map of city-owned Homewood properties and violations filed against them

From a settlement of wealthy industrialists to an enclave of crime and poverty, Homewood’s history has undergone dramatic changes during the past 140 years.

In the 1880s, the mostly rural area attracted barons of the gilded age, including Andrew Carnegie and George Westinghouse.

For the first half of the 20th century, the neighborhood -— divided into three sections: North, South and West -— became home to a mix of workingclass immigrant families. Much of the community’s housing stock survives from this era.

In the 1950s and ‘60s, the city razed more than 1,000 homes and businesses -— belonging to mostly Black families -— in the Lower Hill District to make way for the Civic Arena. Many of those families went to Homewood, “one of the only places African Americans could go,” said John Wallace, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Social Work and a pastor in the community.

The shift in the Black population increased nearly fourfold from 1940 to 1960, triggering “white flight out of Homewood,” Mr. Wallace said.

While Homewood’s population was beginning to shrink before 1960, it diminished significantly overall in the second half of the 20th century.

Community leaders focused on keeping the neighborhood’s business districts alive built dozens of housing units in the 1980s, but growing crime and an eroding tax base continued to present significant challenges through the 1990s.

The poverty rate grew through the early 2000s -— with up to two-thirds of residents living in poverty by 2009.

Today, Homewood has an aging population of roughly 6,500 residents after losing about 80% of its residents.

Housing values are among the lowest in the city and “reflect market failure caused by population decline, blight and disinvestment, rooted in the region’s economic restructuring,” according to a University of Pittsburgh Center for Social and Urban Research neighborhood profile in March 2011.

Henry Louis Taylor Jr., whose research at the University of Buffalo focuses on distressed urban neighborhoods and the health of those who live there, said the trajectory of Homewood follows a familiar pattern.

“In American cities and suburbs, the way you increase residential land value under the current system in the country [is] as whiteness and social-class exclusivity increases, values go up. As Blackness and people of color increase and social inclusivity increases, values go down,” he said.