According to Avalon Village founder Shamayim “Mama Shu” Harris, Highland Park is “a phoenix rising from the ashes.”
In 2016, she launched the Avalon Village nonprofit with the mission to transform vacant and abandoned land in the city from “Blight to Beauty,” starting on Avalon Street between Woodward and Second Avenues. She had already been cleaning up the area since 2009 and wanted to continue that work on a larger scale, inspiring community members in other local neighborhoods to do the same along the way.
On Sept. 26, the last blighted house on the block, located at 75 Avalon St., was finally demolished with a “Blight to Beauty” watch party. The site is the fourth blighted property that Avalon Village has torn down to beautify the community and make it more safe.
Since 2016, the “eco-village in the making” has grown to include resources such as the youth programming building The Homework House, community event space Jakobi Ra Garden, the My 3 Sunz basketball court, and a shipping container housing women-owned retail store The Goddess Marketplace.
A few years ago, Avalon Village purchased the land for $1 from the Wayne County Land Bank as a demo property. But then the COVID-19 pandemic hit and things had to be put on hold. This year, Avalon Village received a grant from the Ford Foundation to finally make the demolition possible.
“It’s actually our core structure that we’ve been able to garner resources to tear down and get out of our neighborhood,” Mama Shu says. “I think that it’s important that we remove the blight in the city because they hold just a bunch of bad energy, it’s dangerous, it’s not safe for the children walking back and forth to school. Some of them are boarded up, there are germs, dead animals sometimes, so we just want to make sure that we remove all of that. It makes room for something more beautiful to come into that space.”
Looking forward, Harris hopes to use the land where the recent demolition occurred to build a school to continue supporting Highland Park’s children. Eventually she would also like to build a cafe and a greenhouse.
“We basically just took a block, rehabbed the whole block, and just basically are building wonderful things for the community,” she says. “It’s one of the most notorious blocks in Highland Park, just torn down over the years with crime and drugs and the things that kind of happen in some cities, and so now it’s beautiful to see it overcoming that.”
Mama Shu says she wants to inspire community members and officials in other cities to do the work to make their spaces more beautiful, comfortable, and secure.
“It shows that a community, just a group of folks who really want something to happen, they can come together and make it happen,” Mama Shu says. “It’s leaked over into Detroit, I see that they have followed suit. The mayor has called one of his campaigns ‘Blight to Beauty.’ I see that it’s spreading and I love that because I know that it’s infectious and that’s what it’s meant to be.”
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