on the stoops." () Things changed in the 1960s, when some Garfield residents began to leave the City for nearby suburbs in Shaler and Penn Hills. In response, the City's Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) used eminent domain and attempted to change nearby East Liberty from an urban shopping area, then the third-busiest retail center in Pennsylvania, to a suburban one. The URA knocked down many small shops, accessible on foot or by bus, and thereby opened land for larger ones, accessible by car. At the same time, the City's housing authority built several massive public housing complexes on Garfield's borders: Garfield Heights, a 600+ unit complex high up on Fern Street, and the East Mall, a 20+ story tower straddling Penn Avenue at the entrance to East Liberty. These changes, designed to halt the slow trickle of Garfield residents to the suburbs, instead turned a trickle into a torrent. East Liberty lost most of its businesses, and the new housing projects, inhabited by poor African-Americans, unnerved Garfield residents. In 1969 the federal government gave the City funds to enforce housing codes in Garfield so that as old residents fled, their homes were not allowed to deteriorate. This move also backfired: long-time residents, told that homes built in 1900 (and often passed through families over the years) did not meet codes written in 1960, moved away rather than pay for upgrades. Thus began a textbook case of white flight: in 1970, Garfield had a population of roughly 10,000 people, 80% of them white. In 2000, Garfield's population had been cut almost in half to 5,450 people, 83% of them black. To halt what they perceived as the neighborhood's decline, in 1975 parishioners at St. Lawrence O'Toole founded the Bloomfield-Garfield Corporation, a Community Development Corporation that uses private and government funds and activism to encourage homeownership and business development. Over the years, the organization has built or renovated dozens of housing units, and renovated commercial properties for dozens of small businesses, from restaurants to art galleries to theater companies. In the 1980s, a similar group called the Garfield Jubilee Association formed, with a goal of creating affordable housing. In recent years, the two groups have joined together in a joint project to build dozens of new single-family homes. In 2000, the BGC and Friendship Development Associates, Inc. formed the Penn Avenue Arts Initiative. The PAAI encourages artists to live and work along