Sicelis Perry’s kids go back to school next week, and by late July she was already thinking about their path to get there. It’s been an ongoing problem since she and her family moved to the city’s Old North neighborhood from Atlanta.
The problem is not the distance. There are only two blocks between the two-family home Perry and her husband gut-rehabbed on Palm Street and her kids’ charter school. The problem is the sidewalks. In Old North—and indeed, throughout many swaths of North City—they are often overgrown with vegetation, sometimes high enough to make them impassable. But Perry has instructed her school-aged kids, ages 10 and 7, not to cross the street to the other side, under any circumstances. There, a hulking vacant building looks close to collapse. With both sidewalks impassable, she’s worried they have no choice but to walk in the street.
The sidewalk conditions in Old North have recently become a focus of neighborhood leaders, including Perry. And what’s driving their ire isn’t just the neglect. That they could understand; they know the city is perpetually short of funds and that North City seldom seems to be a priority. What galls them is that the city is paying more than one contractor to mow lots in North City that have absentee owners, yet the contractors seem to be doing the bare minimum, if even that…