What was once a tight-knit neighborhood on the grid of streets in the city’s northwest corner is now an overgrown maze of abandoned yards and few remaining houses.

Tanica Maxwell sat in her small, well-kept house on a lot on Carroll Street, watching TV with her boyfriend, curled up under a blue blanket her feet resting on the hardwood floor.

She grew up here and inherited the house — one of the few in the neighborhood still in good condition — from her grandmother.

Maxwell won’t live there much longer. The city of Muskogee’s Urban Renewal Authority is trying to buy her land. She’s going to sell it to them, she says.

“I’ve thought about it (holding out),” Maxwell said. “Eventually it’s going to get to the point where they’ll take over.”

They being the city and developers. Muskogee has begun an aggressive redevelopment in her neighborhood. A DICK’S Sporting Goods opened on Friday about a football field away from Maxwell’s house in the new Three Rivers Plaza. A T.J.Maxx and an Ulta Beauty store will soon follow, spurred by millions of dollars of municipal and private investment and the use of Urban Renewal.

The goal is have Muskogee-area residents shopping in Muskogee after a retail study told city officials what they already knew; the city’s crucial sales tax was leaking into other communities. Oklahoma cities are predominantly funded on sales tax. If no one shops, the city can’t provide essential services.

The less sales tax a city has, the more each individual store matters because it represents a larger piece of the sales-tax pie.

Muskogee City Manager Howard Brown Jr. said the loss of Sears at Arrowhead Mall, located about a mile from the new development, was felt in the city’s budget.

The mall was the city’s first taste of Urban Renewal aimed at attaining sales tax. Now, a Dilliard’s is one of the few remaining anchors.

Changemaker

Anchor tenants like a DICK’S or a T.J.Maxx encourage other national retail brands to follow, said Jim Dill, developer of Three Rivers Plaza. He said AT&T, a nail salon and separate hair dresser as well as a Panda Express also will be in the plaza.

The need for anchor tenants gives brands and developers leverage and creates a competitive climate between cities. Dill said smaller cities are in a tricky spot competing for retailers.

“They (national retailers) have a lot of leverage,” Dill said. “All the cities are trying to get sales tax. That’s their lifeblood.”

If the city doesn’t incentivize retail, another city in a nearby county will, Brown believes.

The city gave Vector Companies, Dill’s firm, $4.75 million in economic incentives to help with the cost of the $16.7 million project. The company bought the land for $1.84 million after the city acquired it for just under $1 million with Urban Renewal.

In 1969, there were 124 houses in Maxwell’s area, the 90 acres termed blighted by the city of Muskogee. Today, 47 houses remain with just 31 occupied and even fewer by the actual owners. Ninety acres were owned by more than 100 owners, which made development hard along the prime real estate.

Dill said the owners of the property were scattered throughout the country. Most of them had inherited the small piece of land after they had moved away.

That’s how Maxwell describes the neighborhood. There wasn’t some large exodus, she says. It just slowly melted away into the nascent forest it is now.

It’s probably not the only place that could be described a blight. Clusters of houses similar to the ones in the Urban Renewal area dot the city. Gary Garvin, the city planner, is as quick to talk about the new retail on a blighted 90 acres as he is to talk about the hundreds of homes the city has either incentivized improving or demolished.

There’s talk of another urban renewal area downtown, too.

The city demolishes about 30 houses a month, Brown said. The city of Tulsa, by comparison, is budgeted for 150 demolitions this year.

Foundation for growth

Brown and Mayor Bob Coburn talk with the same zeal about Muskogee, about its potential to grow and attract businesses. Longtime residents like City Councilor Janey Cagle-Boydston, Coburn and lawyer Bob Locke agree Muskogee lost its way over the past few decades, sort of standing still and not really moving forward.

Now, there’s hope because the city got a “shot in the arm,” as Cagle-Boydston describes it, of cash. That cash comes from the City of Muskogee Foundation, the organization formed after city leased its hospital to Capella Healthcare for $100 million over 40 years.

Over the past half-decade, the foundation has invested tens of millions of dollars into Muskogee, ranging from the arts to funds to demolish houses, form the Urban Renewal Authority, and acquire the land.

It directly loaned the city $4 million and guaranteed the city on bond notes when Muskogee formed a Tax Increment Financing District on those 90 acres along Shawnee Bypass, essentially guaranteeing that if sales tax doesn’t pay the money the city’s borrowed, it will.

Risky business

The city is taking a calculated risk with Three Rivers Plaza because city officials feel they have to in order to keep Muskogee on the map. When there’s a lack of services provided by a city, it’s not an attractive place to live. The same can be said for a lack of retail, which is what one of the “quality-of-life” improvements the city is making with foundation cash.

Coburn said it takes those things to land the high-tech, high-paying industrial jobs the city craves. Muskogee’s median income is $12,000 below the state average, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

“One of things I’m told those companies look for is things for people to do,” he said. That’s why the land along Shawnee is so important and redeveloping downtown will probably come next.

Rapid progress

A sizable manufacturing presence still lingers in the city. Owens-Illinois, a glassware company, is one of the largest employers. Businesses huddled around the Port of Muskogee make pipes for energy companies and handle metals coming off the barges. The foundation gave $1 million to the port for economic incentives to lure a company to set up nearby.

More jobs coming to the port could be the sort of middle-class jobs Bob Locke said the city needs. He owns a building downtown and when he invested, he expected the area around it to take off. He filled the building with tenants, but no more development followed.

That’s due to a shrunken middle class, he said.

“We’re dying for jobs, good-paying, middle-class jobs,” Locke said. “We’re killing them on the low end.”

The city has weathered the loss of manufacturing better than some cities. First went Corning Glass in 1986 with its 350 jobs due to declining sales of the company’s namesake home-ware segment and the rise of something new — its production of fiber optic cable.

Container Corp., the maker of cardboard sectioning inside boxes, was bought and then closed.

Retail jobs almost equal manufacturing jobs in the city now, according to the Census Bureau.

Locke, 72, grew up on the now mostly shuttered Summit Street in the shadow of the Corning plant. The reason his family lived there, he said, was so his mother could walk to work. He sat in his well-heeled living room last Saturday, skeptical about how quickly things will change.

“We spend money on stuff,” he said. “People want things to happen. I’m still positive ... I just want it to go faster.”

Cagle-Boydston, his old friend, chided him and called him a cynic. He chuckled and asked if she was running for mayor. She laughed and shook her head no.

Locke gazed at his dog, Sophie, his sock spilling out of the dress shoe resting on the ottoman.

“I wouldn’t have let my son come back here to practice law if I didn’t think there was a chance of something happening,” Locke said, “I wouldn’t let him do it if I didn’t think there was a future here.”

A few hours later and a few miles away, Maxwell shooed away her hovering dog, “Buzz,” and looked around her house. She’ll miss the kitchen the most, she said. Her grandmother used to cook big meals for the neighborhood, and Maxwell feels her presence when she stands at the stove.

“Can you put a price on 30-some-odd years?” she asked.

She doesn’t know where she’ll go yet. She works at Owens-Illinois as a shift supervisor and plans on staying in Muskogee.

The neighborhood isn’t as safe as it once was, she said, but she’ll miss it. Her grandparents built the house and raised her and when it’s gone, their work will be, too.

“It’s a good thing, but it really hits home when you leave yours,” she said.