Riverside (Wilmington)
Riverside is a residential neighborhood located in Wilmington, Delaware, situated along the Christina River in the southwestern section of the city. The neighborhood carries a layered history that spans post–World War II urban planning, significant economic decline, and contemporary revitalization efforts. Riverside has attracted renewed attention in recent years as a designated Opportunity Zone, drawing investment and redevelopment projects aimed at addressing persistent poverty and housing challenges that have shaped life in the community for decades.
History
Post–World War II Development
Riverside's origins as a distinct residential community trace directly to the period following World War II. In the years after the war, city planners and housing authorities constructed two massive public housing neighborhoods in Wilmington to accommodate returning veterans: Riverside and the adjacent Eastlake neighborhood. These developments were conceived as comprehensive communities rather than mere housing blocks, and they included schools and supporting civic infrastructure intended to serve the families of veterans settling into postwar life.[1]
The scale and ambition of the postwar construction reflected broader national trends in public housing development during the 1940s and 1950s, when federal policy encouraged the building of large-scale residential projects to meet the housing needs of a rapidly expanding population of veterans and their families. Riverside, in this context, was not unique in concept but was significant in the local geography of Wilmington as a neighborhood planned to absorb a substantial portion of the city's new population.
Waterfront Character and Early Neighborhood Life
The neighborhood's position along the waterfront gave it a distinctive character during the middle decades of the twentieth century. The area along the river was home to working waterfront institutions, including the Seafarers Boat Club at 2100 M Street, which served as a gathering point for residents connected to maritime and river activities.[2] The riverfront edge of Riverside, accessible only by following railroad tracks at certain points, retained an industrial and semi-rural quality that set it apart from the more densely developed parts of Wilmington to the north and east.
By the early 1980s, journalists and observers documenting the neighborhood found a community that retained some of its working-class vitality but that was also showing signs of the economic pressures that would intensify over subsequent decades. The physical landscape included a mixture of residential blocks, waterfront structures, and the infrastructure of river commerce that had defined the area since its earliest settlement.
Relationship to Historic Wilmington
Wilmington's broader historic fabric, which drew visitors and scholars interested in the city's colonial and early American heritage, surrounded but did not always include Riverside in its narrative of notable places. A 1985 account of walking tours through Wilmington's historic districts noted that visitors might encounter the mix of commerce and decline visible in parts of the city near its historical core, including army surplus stores, bars, and adult establishments bordering otherwise historically significant areas.[3] This broader citywide context of mixed development and uneven preservation helps explain the economic trajectory that Riverside followed as Wilmington's industrial base contracted in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Economic Conditions
Poverty and Its Causes
By the early twenty-first century, Riverside had come to represent some of the most concentrated poverty found anywhere in Wilmington. Data gathered by community organizations and consultants found that Riverside leads the entire city in child poverty, with approximately 70 percent of its children living in poverty.[4] Analysts and community observers attributed this poverty to a combination of factors that had accumulated over generations, including the loss of industrial employment in the Wilmington metropolitan area, disinvestment in public housing stock, and the broader structural challenges facing low-income urban communities in the northeastern United States.
The neighborhood's economic situation reflected a pattern common to many postwar public housing communities: an initial period of relative stability, followed by increasing concentrations of poverty as working-class residents with rising incomes departed and federal investment in maintenance and services declined. The schools and civic institutions that had been part of the original postwar development vision struggled to maintain quality under conditions of fiscal pressure and demographic change.
Opportunity Zone Designation
In recognition of Riverside's economic distress, the neighborhood was designated as a federal Opportunity Zone under legislation enacted at the national level to encourage private investment in economically disadvantaged communities. The Opportunity Zone designation created tax incentives for investors willing to direct capital into qualifying projects within the neighborhood's boundaries, making Riverside eligible for a form of economic development financing that had not previously been available to the community.
The designation attracted attention from developers, nonprofit organizations, and social enterprise operators who saw in Riverside both a community in need and a location where federally incentivized investment could produce returns. The presence of the Opportunity Zone status became a significant element in the pitch made by organizations seeking to attract outside resources to the neighborhood's ongoing revitalization efforts.
Revitalization Efforts
REACH Riverside
Among the most substantial redevelopment initiatives undertaken in Riverside is the REACH Riverside project, a comprehensive effort to rebuild the neighborhood's housing stock and community infrastructure. REACH Riverside's plans include the eventual construction of hundreds of new housing units intended to replace deteriorated public housing and to introduce new residents and economic activity into the community.[5]
The REACH Riverside initiative represents an approach to neighborhood revitalization that combines housing construction with broader community development goals, including the improvement of educational opportunities, public safety, and access to services. The scale of the planned development — involving hundreds of new units and significant changes to the physical landscape of the neighborhood — marks it as an ambitious undertaking by the standards of urban revitalization projects in smaller American cities.
The project has required coordination among city government, state agencies, private developers, and nonprofit organizations, reflecting the complexity of transforming a neighborhood with the depth of challenges that Riverside presents. Planning and parcel assembly work has proceeded incrementally, with the full buildout expected to unfold over multiple years as financing is secured and individual phases of construction are completed.
Second Chances Farm
A distinct but complementary dimension of Riverside's revitalization story is provided by Second Chances Farm, a social enterprise that began operations in the neighborhood in January 2020. The farm, located within the Opportunity Zone boundaries of Riverside, employs formerly incarcerated individuals as part of its workforce, offering a model of reentry employment that attracted national attention during the early months of its operation.[6]
Second Chances Farm operates as an urban agricultural enterprise, producing food while simultaneously providing employment and job training to individuals who face significant barriers to workforce entry as a result of criminal records. The farm's location in Riverside connects it to the neighborhood's broader economic development narrative, as it represents the kind of socially oriented enterprise that Opportunity Zone advocates pointed to as a model for how tax-incentivized investment could serve community needs.
The farm drew high-profile political attention in September 2020 when federal officials visited and publicly praised its model, bringing Riverside and the farm's work to a wider national audience. The coverage highlighted the intersection of criminal justice reform, agricultural innovation, and urban economic development that Second Chances Farm represented within the specific context of Wilmington's most economically distressed neighborhood.
Community and Institutional Engagement
Beyond the large-scale development projects, revitalization in Riverside has involved sustained engagement from faith communities, neighborhood associations, and social service organizations working at the block and building level. The effort to rebuild community cohesion and institutional capacity within Riverside has been as central to revitalization advocates as the physical construction of new housing.
Organizations working in Riverside have framed the neighborhood's challenges in terms that emphasize the structural origins of poverty and the need for comprehensive interventions that address education, employment, housing, and public safety simultaneously. The concentration of child poverty — with roughly seven out of ten children in the neighborhood living in poverty — has provided a focal point for advocacy and for measuring progress as revitalization efforts continue.[7]
Geography and Physical Environment
Riverside occupies a section of southwestern Wilmington bordered by the Christina River along its southern edge. The neighborhood's riverside location, which gave it its name and shaped its early development as a working-class and waterfront community, also created certain physical boundaries that affected its relationship to other parts of the city. Railroad infrastructure running along portions of the riverfront has historically served as a dividing line between the navigable waterway and the residential interior of the neighborhood.[8]
The physical landscape of Riverside has been marked by the legacy of its postwar public housing construction, which produced a built environment of mid-century residential blocks that has aged significantly over the decades. The REACH Riverside redevelopment effort involves substantial demolition and replacement of this aging stock, transforming the physical appearance of the neighborhood as new construction proceeds.
The Opportunity Zone designation applies to the neighborhood's geographic footprint, meaning that parcels within Riverside qualify for the associated investment incentives. This geographic specificity has influenced where developers and social enterprises have chosen to locate their projects within the broader Wilmington landscape.