“Suddenly Young Again:” Who is Shaping Hazleton’s Future?
Hazleton’s demographic change is making the city "feel like there is a future." One community organization is expanding opportunities to shape it.
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We sat down with several members of the Hazleton Integration Project: Rossanna Gabriel, Executive Director; Bob Curry, Co-Founder; Elaine Curry, Co-Founder, Program Director; and David Dominguez, a Hazleton Area teacher, about the city’s ongoing demographic shifts and their work to bridge the insider-outsider divide and increase opportunities for civic participation among Hispanic immigrants. Hazleton, Pennsylvania has experienced remarkable growth in the 21st century, driven largely by an influx of immigrants from the Dominican Republic. After decades of population loss and industrial decline, the city found itself in the midst of a resurgence. In the 2010s alone, the population rose by 20 percent.
Across the country, other post-industrial small cities are undergoing similar demographic shifts. In Springfield, Ohio, a growing Haitian community has helped revive the local economy, and in Kalamazoo, Michigan, new waves of residents are contributing to population and economic growth. This story of revival, however, has been met with local resistance and heightened national attention amid aggressive federal immigration detention efforts.
Families bought and rented homes in Hazleton – the same duplexes built a century prior. The city that had been aging and emptying was suddenly young again. “All of a sudden you have families coming in. You have children,” says Elaine. “It brings a different aura to the city.” With youth, people once again feel like there is a future for their city. Downtown, which had sat hollow for decades, began to fill as well. Small businesses opened and “are mostly run by people that came from other countries,” says Rossanna. “All the supermarkets, all the stores… everything grows because of the amount of people.” As David puts it, “Hispanics are the labor force. They are the economic force.”
Along the same I-80 corridor that once anchored the region’s mining economy, a new warehousing industry is flourishing and providing steady work. Immigrants, as a result, are “starting to settle in Hazleton for all of the same reasons that previous generations landed here,” Bob explains.
In the foothills of the Poconos – where the I-80 corridor connects New York City to places westward – sits one of the only regions in the United States where there are large deposits of anthracite or “hard coal”. During the nineteenth century, anthracite coal became one of the most important fuels for heating homes and powering industries in cities like Philadelphia and New York. Once the coal deposits were discovered and transportation routes expanded, companies rapidly opened mines across northeastern Pennsylvania. Along these routes has left a desolate landscape of extraction, where mining sucked out most of the natural landscape. Hazleton sits on a high plateau directly above several anthracite seams, which made it an ideal location for shafts and rail connections. “Patch towns” – small, planned settlements, sometimes referred to as “coal patches” – were built down by these seams by coal companies to house workers.
Photo credit: Patrick Joust
These patchtowns were satellite grids of those found in Hazleton. In both, the streets are lined almost entirely with duplexes built by immigrant workers making the most of their compact urban lots. Above the rooftops, stand the spires or ogee domes of churches built by different ethnic groups from Eastern and Southern Europe arriving for work. Although tensions often existed among these pan-European immigrant communities, the opportunity to build, worship, and create distinct religious and cultural institutions made it easier for newcomers to establish and sustain themselves.
Over time, these neighborhood grids came to reflect both the original vision of planned mining communities and the later expansions that accommodated continued waves of immigration in the 1930s and 1940s. Starting in the 50s and 60s, the region gradually emptied. The city’s population peaked around 40,000 in 1940 and had dwindled to 22,500 by 1990. David described Hazleton in the 2000s as “a ghost town.” Rossanna added that the streets were filled with “empty storefronts, empty houses, and empty buildings.”
“What happens when your population shrinks like that?” asks Bob Curry. Elaine describes the moment: “Our children and everyone else’s children had left and were not coming back.” Bob continues, noting that “a brain drain of the young, entrepreneurial set, the young professionals” were driven away by the lack of opportunity. This mass exodus of people left a void in the social fabric as the industry that had structured daily life disappeared. Limited municipal capacity and weakened civic institutions left few mechanisms to help residents process these moments of social and economic transition.
Today, families who have recently immigrated to Hazleton are living overcrowded in the same aging duplexes, sometimes six families in housing meant for two. Nearly 60% of the city’s housing stock is still made up of duplexes built in the early twentieth century. Unlike earlier periods, when newcomers were able to build their own homes and physically expand the footprint of the city, little new physical infrastructure has been created to support the city’s recent population increase. Suburbanized zoning codes adopted in the 20th century have largely limited what is possible – effectively prohibiting the construction of the very duplexes that now house much of the city’s population.
These physical barriers to entry and housing were compounded by social resistance, as third-generation members of Hazleton’s earlier pan-European immigrant communities felt they were “losing” their city. Those anxieties were shaped by both past demographic change and racialized notions of who “belongs.” This social resistance to immigration surfaced again physically as the city and residents advocated for discriminatory ordinance, titled the “Illegal Alien Immigration Relief Act,” in 2006. As David recalls, these “prohibited speaking Spanish… and renting to Spanish tenants.” The city sought to enact laws aimed to prevent Hispanic immigrants from establishing livelihoods in Hazleton, making it exceedingly difficult for them to secure housing or participate in civic life. The law was ultimately struck down by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court as unconstitutional in 2007, but it underscored how social resistance and tension has built policies to deter the physical and civic entry into communities.
In 2011, Bob and Elaine Curry established the Hazleton Integration Project (HIP) to counter this resistance. They created a civic institution designed to enable Hispanic residents to participate in shaping the city’s future, lowering language barriers, expanding access to civic voice, and building the social infrastructure necessary for communities to accept change and accommodate new residents.
HIP’s work centers on creating civic opportunities that decrease barriers for newcomers to participate. The organization began by focusing on youth programs, launching the area’s first bilingual pre-kindergarten. Recognizing that language barriers affected entire families, the programs expanded. “We added ESL classes for adults, because we realized one of the biggest problems in the area is the language barrier,” Rossanna explains. ESL and language classes provide immigrants with language skills and confidence to engage in community life. Lowering the language barrier also directly counters the earlier tactics of city government to prevent the civic engagement of Hispanic immigrants.
In addition, HIP Executive Director Rossanna Gabriel was elected in 2025 to serve on the Hazleton Government Study Commission. She is the first Latino to serve in an elected office in Hazleton. “If there are so many people here, we need representation,” she says. Roles like hers are essential to ensuring that Hispanic residents are not only represented, but feel empowered to participate in civic life. “We are fighting to have a place… we are rebuilding this community.”
Yet, as both David and Rossanna note, significant barriers remain. Few Hispanic residents have run for office, and those who have often struggled to gain traction; participation in local government is still limited. Expanding access to these pathways, through greater awareness, mentorship, and support, is a key next step in their work. David is now running for election, a move shaped in large part by his involvement with HIP.
Hazleton’s efforts to expand civic participation have become a key strategy for fostering broader acceptance of the city’s growth and creating an environment where newcomers shape what the city can become. While tensions and resistance have not disappeared, the past fifteen years of work have begun to soften and blur longstanding lines of division. HIP has served as a consistent bridge between long-time residents and those who have recently arrived, building the kinds of relationships that many small cities with limited municipal capacity struggle to support on their own. “The idea was to have a place where everybody… can come together without thinking we are different,” Rossanna says. “This is a place for everybody, open to everybody.”
More recently, however, a charged federal immigration climate has threatened their progress and introduced new uncertainty into everyday life in the city. For many immigrant residents, heightened enforcement and the visibility of federal authorities have created a pervasive sense of fear that makes it harder to participate openly in community life. Activities that once served as important points of connection have begun to see lower attendance as some residents choose to stay home. “People, on average, are more afraid of coming out and being out and about,” says David. “Even our students, who always felt so safe, don’t feel safe anymore,” says Elaine. They have seen a significant decline in enrollment in ESL classes over the past year. In addition, their monthly community dinners that brought members of the entire community together – usually over 600 people – has seen a decrease in attendance by “30 to 40%,” says Bob.
As HIP has worked for years to build the social infrastructure that allows residents to belong and thrive in the city, that progress now faces new challenges from the federal government’s extreme and violent detainment efforts of immigrants throughout the country. In this climate, the organization keeps its doors open and programs running.
Will the broader community of Hazleton show up to protect and support its immigrant neighbors, as has been the case in larger places like Minneapolis, Chicago, and Los Angeles? Having spent fifteen years working to soften lines of division, its leaders hold onto a cautious optimism that the broader community will show up and support one another now. They find that unlike the beginning, “they aren’t alone,” says Elaine.
As a new generation of immigrants repopulates neighborhoods, fills pre-zoning duplexes, and reactivates local businesses, organizations like HIP work to create the social change needed to make these transitions possible. In a small city with limited municipal capacity and a built environment unequipped to support its current population, this civic infrastructure has become the primary means of accommodating growth and expanding the community’s sense of belonging. Ultimately, down the line, these institutions will create the social conditions that will ease and undo the barriers to new, necessary housing development and physical expansion. Hazleton remains a patchwork, not only in its geography but in the ongoing process of weaving new residents and institutions into its fabric. HIP’s work serves as an important model for peer cities such as Springfield and Kalamazoo, showing how communities can grow with change.
Learn more about HIP here:
https://hip1.org/
Filed under: Small City Stories