This is an opinion column.

Now, this is how you resuscitate what’s long since died.

This is how you restore communities to what some of us once knew. Once lived—safe, vibrant places with more pride than police, more purpose than poverty. Where children dreamed of possibilities instead of harboring nightmares of pain and fear. Where people cared and took care of each other.

This is how you repair broken families. How you plant seeds that bear the fruit of self-worth. Self-worth that inspires work not want, that pours into families emptied by conditions and circumstances, that empowers and prepares parents to be the first teachers in their children’s lives.

This, too, is how you reduce crime. Major crime. Crimes that break our hurts. Crimes that destroy families and transform neighborhoods into killing fields of fear. Crimes that cost lives, especially young ones—for no justifiable reason.

This is how you restore hope. Hope melted. Hope evaporated. Hope dissolved. Hope quashed. Hope extinguished for too many—replaced with a void where people make decisions for today not tomorrow because a hopeful tomorrow is just not a thing.

It ain’t real.

Now, full stop: I’m not so naïve to believe the $50 million bestowed upon Birmingham by HUD Secretary Ann Fudge as a Choice Neighborhood investment in Smithfield, Graymont, and College Hills —one of eight awarded nationally, with the city’s being the largest among the $370 million granted—will alone accomplish all of that.

RELATED: HUD awards Birmingham $50 million to revitalize Smithfield, Graymont, College Hills

Not even the $294 million city officials say will be leveraged from Fudge’s grant will alone restore, repair, or reduce.

Demolishing public housing that should have been leveled at least a generation ago and replacing it with new dwellings alone will not restore, repair, or reduce.

Were it that simple hope-drained communities nationwide would have been eradicated long ago. Were it that simple, the failed near-century-old national experiment of concentrated poverty would have been flushed generations ago. Or maybe not. (See: They Cloned Tyrone.)

So let’s cram all poor Black people into depressing brick buildings, redline the owned homes around them out of any equity (wealth) growth, create a war on drugs (wink) that’s really a war on Black men, lull them into dependency with programs that disincentivize families, work and worth; suck the jobs from their community, turn a blind eye to the influx of guns, and drain resources from their schools…

Imagine if those absurdities had not been enacted: There would be no cavernous generational wealth gap and minimal health disparities. There would be copious working-class jobs, infinitesimal differences in schools. There would be more Black men at home. There would be neighborhoods safe enough for a sunset stroll (on sidewalks) or watching the moonlight on the porch.

There would be hope.

Instead, that is not where we are. Yet we are here, too, with a comprehensive, multi-faceted, whole-neighborhood, whole-person plan, that finally offers the best chance of fixing what long since should have been fixed. What should have been restored, repaired, and reduced.

What should have been resuscitated.

The Smithfield Choice plan is bold and broad. It includes programs and facilities targeting children and the adults in the home, including quality education (again, not just for youth) in a souped-up library, health programs, new businesses, and an incubator called the “social innovation center” that will be the center of workforce training for jobs paying a true living wage as well as critical “wrap-around services”, the buzz-phrase you’ll hear a lot between now and the many, many years required for this restoration, repair, and reduction to happen. (It didn’t die overnight, so it won’t be revived in a blink, either.)

Bottom line: Building new homes means nothing without also building new people, new hope.

“We want people to know there is a grocery store up the street, that their kids can go to a decent school,” Fudge said on a sweltering Wednesday morning in Smithfield. “We are getting ready to change lives.”

Not merely living rooms. That is not enough.

The preponderance of residents now in Graymont, Smithfield, in Colleges Hills simply want to live their lives. To wake up. Eat. Breathe. Work.

To Survive. No, check that—to thrive.

Just like you.

They don’t want to be defined by those living one breath at a time, those worrying little about the next one—theirs or someone else’s.

Just like you.

They don’t deserve to be swallowed by the whale of hopelessness, to wallow in the belly of despair, to feel forgotten.

Bulldozing 900 worn homes and replacing them when 1000 subsidized, “affordable” and market-priced homes isn’t alone the salve that restores, repairs, and reduces.

Now, finally, there is a plan to do more.

Birmingham is the dog that chased the car, then caught it. Now it must fulfill and build. It must restore, repair, and reduce what’s been too long been dead — awaiting a viable revival.

More columns by Roy S. Johnson

Listen to Birmingham’s foot soldiers, whose voices are strengthened by pain

Dear Black girls, they will believe you next time, despite what Carlee Russell did

Attorney who argued historic redistricting case says Alabama will be ‘much richer’ politically

51 years ago today, the Supreme Court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional, really