Residents New and Old Transform North Hill for the 21st Century

No one comes to Ohio for the weather. Some come for jobs, others for the low cost of living, but most stay here for the people—Akron’s greatest resource. Nowhere in town is that more evident than in the North Hill neighborhood. Immigrant business owners, multi-generational residents, community organizers and police officers have long worked together to build a rich community that thrives despite negative reputations and difficult economic factors. On any given day, you can see children riding bikes, folks clad in colorful clothes strolling around, police officers engaging neighbors, and shop owners plying their wares in this historically multi-cultural community.

Whether born here or coming from halfway around the globe, people are what make Akron home.

Akron Police Department (APD) Captain Sylvia Trundle’s father grew up in North Hill, and she lived there herself for many years before becoming Zone Commander of the neighborhood. She knew first-hand the kinds of challenges North Hill’s diversity and poverty rates presented for both her fellow officers and the residents. She has welcomed and met those challenges with a team of officers who regularly patrol North Hill and work in the area schools and community centers, participate in outreach programs and build relationships with the residents—both new and old.

“This is a team of officers who take ownership of North Hill,” Trundle says, emphasizing the initiatives her officers take in implementing programs like interpreter services that help officers respond to the needs of such a diverse community.

Trundle’s team is comprised of five members: Officer Robert Patrick took the lead on the interpreter program, Officers Kevin Evans and Twila Gaines are Resource Officers in the neighborhood’s schools, Officer Laurie Natko teaches Safety Town and focuses on community relations, and Officer Michael Hill, Sr., patrols the streets daily, looking for ways to build mutual trust with the people he meets.

The efforts of Trundle’s team have combined with those of other area organizations to bring peace and stability to North Hill. People at the International Institute, Better Block, Urban Vision and area churches have worked hard to transform the once-troubled neighborhood into the vibrant community it is today.

Gary Wyatt is no stranger to transformation. The preacher and community organizer who started The North Hill Community House in 2003 was once a drug addict and dealer on Akron’s south side. With the help of his wife, Patricia, Gary got clean and transformed his life “from dealing to healing,” as the title of his self-published life story says. 

The Wyatts noticed new apartment and condominium buildings going up in the Northside area, but felt something was still lacking. “It’s not just about appearances; you need a spiritual change,” Gary says. “What good is a new surface if you don’t change hearts?”

Beginning with afterschool tutoring and Toys for Tots charity drives, the Wyatts soon added broader programs like the Violence Free Zone, Night Out Against Crime, 500 Plates and Neighbor Day that encourage residents to get to know each other. The Community House is also a registered Food Pantry location for the Akron Canton Regional Food Bank because, as Patricia puts it, “if you educate them and feed them, you can change [people’s] mindsets.”

The house itself serves as a powerful symbol of North Hill’s transformation over the years. “This house used to be a dope house; there were dog fights in here,” Gary says. But the prostitution and drug deals the Wyatts observed when they first opened the house are long gone now, replaced by community events and respectful neighbors who watch out for each other.

Many of those newer neighbors are refugees from Southeast Asia, the latest group of immigrants to take root here. Refugees can’t always choose where they are resettled, but once in the U.S., they tend to gravitate to communities where others from their home country have already become established.

That’s how Hem Rai, co-owner of the Nepali Kitchen on Cuyahoga Falls Ave., came to Akron from Dayton, the city where Immigration Services first resettled him. People he had known in Nepal were making North Hill better with businesses like the Namaste Market and Dhimal’s Mini Market, so he came here to find his own niche.

After being in the states for only three years, Rai has found such success with his restaurant that he is planning to also open a bar where his patrons can hold pool tournaments. He says that he loves his new hometown for many reasons, one of which is its affordability. “And also, we don’t have [another] restaurant like this in Akron; this is the only one,” says Rai.

In Nepal, Rai and his fellow countrymen walked everywhere, partly because there were few other transportation choices, but also because it was really safe to do so. Crime inside the refugee camps in Nepal is practically unheard of. In North Hill, Nepalis are always walking, now without fear, because, as Rai observes, “now [there are] no more illegal activities, like robbery.”

Pedestrians are often a symbol of neighborhood safety, one of Captain Trundle’s team members, Laurie Natko points out. “When you have more of your residents out in the street walking and greeting people, it [creates] a sense of community—makes it look and feel safer.”

More than that though, Rai sees his success in terms of how it can transfer to the younger generation. “We want to be an example for Nepali youth,” he says. “We want to show them [that] we can do like American people. Work hard and success is here, too.”

On top of the vibrant, immigrant-owned small businesses in North Hill, Trundle sees the most hopeful sign of transformation in the changing attitudes of older, long-term residents. “Many people who were negative about [refugee] presence initially, the old timers, began to say, these are good people,” she says. “They got to go to meetings and understand that we’re all here for the same reason: to live and work in a great community. And so today you see many more stores opening up, the vibrancy, the mix and mingling of a community.”