Tahirah Walker, photographed outside her Turtle Creek home. (Photo by Ryan Loew/PublicSource)
Tahirah Walker, a writer and teacher, reflects on 10 years living in Turtle Creek and what it taught her about community-making and neighbors who care.
by Tahirah Walker, PublicSource
“Turtle Creek is changing … the whole Mon Valley is changing.” A woman campaigning for state representative said this to me in April 2018. I wanted this to be true because I wanted to continue living in this place I have called home for almost 10 years. My journey to confirm her statement has been incredible and full of intense reflection. It has called to mind a message I first received as a little girl listening to my mother’s box set of “Best of Luther Vandross” vinyl records.
A house is not a home
This line became a proverb when my mom and I decided to live together as adults. We needed a place that would not only be structurally sound and occupancy ready. We needed one where our non-traditional family could build a life and grow that homeownership equity all the finance and credit gurus had preached to us over the years. I was struck by the seriousness in my mom’s voice when she said: “We should buy a place together, that way you’ll have something when I’m gone.” She had overcome several health challenges. We were both afraid that her apartment in East Liberty was too far from mine in Swissvale. We needed to be closer to each other. But her sense that a generational changing of the guard was part of our house hunting seemed strange to me.
As we started looking for the right balance of house and home, we found the Mon Valley Initiative [MVI]. The organization was flipping properties to create homeownership opportunities for folks who would otherwise find themselves priced out. My mom and I were drawn to a property in Turtle Creek with two houses on the lot. The first time we tried to mortgage the property, the deal fell through because the amount MVI wanted for it was more than its appraisal value and against the crest of the housing market crisis. Banks were simply not willing to loan more than a home was worth. At least not to me and my mom. A year went by and like many of the other homes in the neighborhood, the property we wanted was still vacant. We tried again. The numbers came into alignment, and in October 2012, my mom and I became joint homeowners. Before all that, I had only been to Turtle Creek once and knew very little about the borough that now became my home.
When the two of us are far apart
In the first week of living here, someone broke in. One neighbor said his house had also been burglarized. He told me to send the police his way for more details. The police told me that the neighbor I spoke with was an addict, couldn’t be trusted. I froze. My father was a recovery champion who fought hard to shake negative stereotypes that lock others into thinking that people with addiction are irredeemable, cannot be trusted, cannot recover. The language they used and the whole situation nauseated me. I began to rely on isolation as a coping mechanism. I thought of it as minding my own business. My mom thought of it as fear. She knew how important it was to keep faith. She did not want to see me drift to the latter. She did not want us to be so close and yet so far apart.
We had all begun to settle into a routine when my house was burglarized again. That time I purchased an alarm service, cleaned up the broken glass and moved on, thankful that both times my mom’s place had been left alone. Thankful that she was still having a good time exploring her new neighborhood. Thankful that she kept encouraging me to explore and wrapping me in her optimism. It must have been hard for her to model because I know my mom was perfectly content to be in her quiet little one-bedroom house with her plants, books and visits from grandchildren to keep her busy. She felt that I should get out and see more of our new neighborhood. And she showed me by doing just that for herself.
Not meant to live alone
By 2014, we began to notice our little borough getting more diverse, more lively and more compassionate. Kelley Kelley had become our mayor and her leadership provided a critical turning point for the community, including for folks in recovery. My mom pointed this out to me and kept up her drumbeat of told-you-so’s for our decision to move here. She cared deeply for our neighbors. She also had great admiration for the teachers in our community. For the first time in their lives, my daughters had a Black woman principal and several Black teachers at their new local school. This mattered to us because we knew it meant the children were more likely to have positive educational outcomes. My mom also loved the nearby park where she took the girls to play. “What park?” I asked her one time. “You gotta get out more,” she said. And she was right.
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