Dorothy Mae Richardson

Dorothy Mae Richardson (1923? – April 28, 1991) was an African American community activist who is credited with introducing a new model of community development in the late 1960s when she led a resident campaign for better housing in her neighborhood on the Central North Side of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

In the mid-1960s, Richardson and her neighbors enlisted city bankers and government officials to help improve their neighborhood. Together, they convinced 16 financial institutions to give out conventional loans to the community, which were used to finance the rehabilitation of dilapidated homes. This effort laid the groundwork for the new field of community-based development and led to the founding of Neighborhood Housing Services (NHS) of Pittsburgh in 1968. The accomplishments of NHS of Pittsburgh became a resource for community leaders and led to the founding of similar programs in 300 cities nationwide. In 1978, Congress institutionalized the NHS network by establishing the Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation, known today as NeighborWorks America, with its mission based on the community development efforts set forth by Richardson and her neighborhood a decade prior.

Richardson was recognized as a "black urbanist" in a 2015 article on New Geography.

Richardson graduated from Allegheny High School (Pittsburgh) in 1940.

Richardson continued to reside in Pittsburgh as an active community member and supervisor of the Pittsburgh Housing Clinic. In an interview with the Pittsburgh Press before her death, Richardson explained why she never left her neighborhood. “I went to school there. I got married there. All my friends are there,” she said. Richardson died of kidney failure at the age of 68 on April 28, 1991, at Allegheny General Hospital. She was survived by a son, Jonathan; one sister, Georgia Davis; and two brothers, David O. Davis and Daniel L. Davis.

In the 1960s, many of America’s oldest Inner city neighborhoods were being bulldozed and residents were moved to public housing projects under the urban renewal movement. The financial industry declared inner city neighborhoods as places that were deemed risky and unfit for good business investments. Richardson, a housewife, refused to see her neighborhood continue to decay. “I could see houses starting to lean, windows rotting away. The solution was not to tear down the whole neighborhood and move everybody into public housing. The solution was to fix the houses.”

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