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Cover Story: Social Equity and Chattanooga’s Renewal
Written by Beverly A. CarrollJuly 30, 2009 – 10:10 am
Urban gentrification can become the dark underbelly of neighborhood renewals, displacing low-income residents and renters out to poorer, more blighted homes.
In 1985, the realtor taking a young couple and their new baby to look for their first house avoided calling North Chattanooga by name. Out of the three neighborhoods she took them to, the most affordable house for their combined annual income of $33,280 was the two-bedroom, one-bathroom $28,000 bungalow in what the realtor referred to as “the Riverview area.”
Today that neighborhood goes proudly under its old and new names: North Chattanooga and North Shore. No longer a neighborhood of “starter” homes, home prices are equal to or surpass those in the established, wealthier neighborhood of Riverview it tried to impersonate decades ago.
Along with North Chattanooga, other urban neighborhoods that have experienced a similar surge in renewal—St. Elmo, Southside, Jefferson Heights, Highland Park, M.L.King Jr., downtown Chattanooga—are all in varying stages of transformation into trendy hot spots. The proximity to a revitalized downtown area has fueled a movement drawing affluent people to these neighborhoods, transfusing new life into decaying, dilapidated communities.
But that boom, which has turned some property owners into landed gentry, has brought a dark lining along with the silver cloud. Many people who lived in those charming bungalows, cozy Victorians, and Mission-style homes received a bill for the neighborhood improvements that they found they could not pay.
Despite a reluctance to openly discuss the topic, city leaders, builders and realtors and residents agree that gentrification—the name for the dislocation of residents pushed out of their neighborhoods by hikes in property tax and rents, or selling out too soon—has been a byproduct of revival in most of Chattanooga’s urban neighborhoods.
Though many public and private agencies have worked to avert the negative consequences of gentrification, residents are still being pushed out of communities where they grew up, raised their children, and planned to live out their lives.
“When development comes through, it tends to raise those property values and pushes out the lower-income folk,” says Steve Hasse, an architect with Franklin and Associates, and chairman of the steering committee responsible for bringing the American Institute of Architect’s Sustainable Design Assessment Team (SDAT) here. Awarded through a competitive process from AIA’s Communities by Design, the grant is in anticipation of the estimated 20,000 jobs and subsequent changes that will follow the $1 billion VW assembly plant set to open here in 2011.
“The impact of VW will be like absorbing a small town over a seven-county region,” Hasse says. The role of the SDAT study is “to establish some guidelines as far what directions we need to move forward,” he says.
Comprised of a group of experts in environment, transportation, planning and regional cooperation, the team is designed to work as a “catalyst, convener, and source of information that helps AIA members work with citizens, businesses, public officials, and other stakeholders to envision and create more livable communities,” according to the AIA website.
“I don’t think it’s really going to address this issue [of gentrification] specifically,” Hasse says. But the final SDAT report will build on the city’s commitment to sustainable communities, a commitment to meet the needs of today’s citizens without sabotaging the ability of future generations to meet their needs.
As the region weighs how to face the challenges of social equity, the need to address the fallout from urban renewal will manifest itself, Hasse and others, say. “You are pushing the low-income folks out of where they have services and conveniences to some place where most likely those things don’t exist,” Hasse says. “If they did exist, there would be more demand for the neighborhoods they are moving into.”
There goes the neighborhood
Good as the news about urban renewal is, the ensuing hoopla has drowned out the voices of many original urban residents, who as recently as 10 years ago, lived in blighted areas where drug dealers and prostitutes patrolled the streets. Living on low- or fixed-incomes, some residents in the M.L. King, Main Street and Southside areas at first welcomed the interest in their neighborhoods.
“The neighborhood improved, they took the drugs and prostitution out and put up affordable apartments,” said Rodney Simpson, an 18-year-resident of Jefferson Heights, a jewel of a neighborhood tucked off East Main Street along Jefferson, Washington and 16th and 17th streets.
But the improvements turned into a runaway train that carried off elderly and poor residents, who sold their property with promises they would be given “first dibs” upon returning to the new and improved neighborhood—only to find their streets lined with $200,000-and-up houses when they returned. A recent drive through the cheerful community displayed tidy, new houses with old-fashioned “post” boxes at the end of walkways leading to new sidewalks. Around the corner from the newly landscaped park, which is surrounded by new two and three-story homes, a $350,000 house is under construction.
“When I moved here in 1991, the neighborhood had elderly people and middle-aged residents who were raising up grandkids,” Simpson, 55, says. “Most of them were on welfare or SSI. About 80 percent to 95 percent were renting and subject to landlords. When people started grabbing up the property, it left the people living there no choice but to move.”
A number of private not-for profit groups, such as Chattanooga Neighborhood Enterprise, initially provided programs that helped residents secure mortgages to stay in the neighborhood, Simpson says. But for people on fixed incomes, or even making as much as $45,000, buying a $100,000 home was out of the question, he says.
Other urban communities undergoing renewal haven’t managed to escaped gentrification either. It’s a product of the private market and the American way of building personal wealth through homes, Chattanooga City Council member Manny Rico says.
“Some of that has happened in St. Elmo,” Rico says of his district. “It’s a Catch-22. They were there when (new residents) moved there. You don’t want to stop progress but what do you do with those people?”
Realtor Jim Lea, of Jim and Monique’s Team with Keller Williams Realty, says there is an upside to gentrification, a term he dislikes because of its negative connotations. “Over and over, we’ve seen improvements to the overall community. The original residents, they want the same things you and I want,” he says.
When people are vested in their homes, they care about their surroundings, Lea says. Safety improves, crime drops, schools improve. “Residents will call the police, they go the council meetings to advocate for better conditions,” Lea says.
Building a solution
Education is key, according to Lea. Some residents sold out too soon, not realizing enough profit on their property to improve their next living situation. Renters who were able to become homeowners failed for many reasons, including being unfamiliar with the responsibilities of homeownership. Lea cites Individual Development Accounts, a federally funded program as a model of what he thinks could work here.
“It’s to help long-term renters buy homes,” he says. “It needs someone with deep pockets and who is willing to take on the administration of the program and apply for the federal dollars. But it’s a great program.”
The successful applicant commits to saving a specific amount of money every month for a set amount of time, ranging from one to three years. The program provides a match for the savings, from a one-to-one match up to a three-to-one match. During the time the renter is saving the down payment, he or she participates in a training program that covers everything from balancing a checkbook to understanding building warranties and why air filters need to be changed every three months.
“People who didn’t grow up in a home don’t have that sense of ownership,” Lea says. “They don’t know how to maintain their homes and they can become rundown.”
The Rev. Floyd Whiteside, pastor of Mount Carmel Baptist Church on 16th Street, says the city government should assume some responsibility for displaced persons. The programs currently in place are not working, he says. “One of the things I see as far as the community goes, the city should be planning affordable housing,” Rev. Whiteside said. “We’ve had people in this neighborhood try to buy houses and they can’t do it. Not everybody can make $75,000 to $100,000 a year.”
Councilman Rico wants to see more people repeat the pioneer act that has improved St. Elmo, M.L. King, Main Street and other neighborhoods. He suggests displaced home buyers look in East Lake, Ridgedale and other neighborhoods that are in the same condition today’s desirable neighborhoods were in years ago.
“It’s gonna take normal working people to say, ‘I can buy this fairly reasonable and I can fix it up,’” Rico says. “They are going to have to realize they can get more bang for their buck, they can get that starter home in East Lake. If people were smart like us older people, they would realize they can buy their first home and then move up. But everybody wants more house than they can afford.”
Simpson, who built his Jefferson Heights home in 1996, says he views gentrification as a cycle, fueled by money. Them that has, gets, he says.
“Used to be all the middle- and upper-income people wanted to leave the downtown and go to the suburbs,” Simpson says. “Now they want to push all the middle- and low-income people out to the suburbs so all those people can come back into the city where it’s closer to everything. It happened in Chicago, where I’m from. They tore down the housing projects where I lived and put up $450,000 houses.”
Builder David Jones, partner in Tri-Co. Services, owner of an apartment complex in Jefferson Heights, says builders should be conscious about the impact they have on a community.
“There’s no doubt some of these people have been displaced,” Jones said. “The market is amoral. But that’s where nonprofits can come in. There needs to be some place for [the residents] to go.”
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8 Comments »
An interesting artical….I recall telling a lady down at the chamber of commerce back in 1989. if I had MY WAY, I’d gentrify all of east chattanooga where I grew up, east lake, ridgedale, bring in the bulldozers and level the whole stinking, blighted mess, and turn Chattanooga into a Las Vegas Tourist Trap, much like Pigeon Forge, Gatlinburg and the way they’re gentrifying east Boss Hogg Knoxville’s blighted communities today, rather than build those el cheepo flakeboard McMansions you speak of, just too raise real estate taxes for corrupt politicans coffers.
I’m a 67 year old chattanooga street kid, grew up on Ocoee Street in the avondale section of east chattanooga, but moved to Knoxville and later Cincinnati Ohio too make my fortunes in an more progressive culture, free from bible belt pentacostal and southern baptist religons, that is responsible for all the intellectual poverty of mind and wealth. The philosopher plato’s not so NOBLE lie of all religions…Christianity is a perversion of pure morality that constitutes the anti-christ, so said Thomas Jefferson and all our founding fathers. This is the dark underbelly of the beast that stands in the way of progress in senic Chattanooga….
Councilman Rico has the right idea if it were only true, when he says, “It’s gonna take normal WORKING people to say, “I can buy this fairly reasonable and I can fix it up.” Problem is, in this lost culture of parasites and useless eaters, there’s no normal people left. Now I bought an small nurseing home out in east brainard for 25 grand back in 89, sheriff’s auction, guy who ran the nurseing home went to prison for messing round with little boys, turned it into a seven bedroom McMansion with ten grand and noze too the grindstone sweat equity labor….it can still be done….I bought a two bedroom, one bath, TVA era wood frame on four acres in a block watch upscale community outside knoxville in the county, it was abandoned and condemned, took 16,000 dollars, and made a tranquil paradise, taxes only 168.00 a year….
Enjoy it while you can, watch GOD TV on cable at all the religious nuts and idiots, quivering, shouting, talking in them so called unknown tounges, like they used to do at The Chastian brothers pentacostal churches in avondale, ridgedale, the old serpent handleing believers till the government outlawed that crap in 1946, but it still goes on, it’s just culture, the sheeple can rape, steal, kill, and justify anything they feel, by useing that Jesus Myth as a shield for all their wicked desires!!! They’re still go by American’s manifest destiny doctrine…..Religious Thieves….it’s incorperated since 1994 in tennessee state law thanks too that scoundrel Bill Frist and HCA, to protect these self referring thieveing doctors against malpractice, they got a license to kill with the governments blessiongs….depopulaton control is the name of the game….you can’t take it with you, they’re gonna grind up your old dead bodies into hamburger to feed the lower castes left behind….it’s just wealth distribution, remember Tennessee Ernie Fords song, 16 tons?
You owe your minds, bodies and souls, to the company store…..of the united states of america, the land of pirates. As the scholars say up at the freedom from religion foundation, “There is little difference between organized religion and organized crime. They’re both running scams. Exploiting the irrational passions of the gullible fools in order to filch power and wealth unto the elites and priests….but the retribution of karma will get ya all in the final analysis……
This has been a public service message from the Smoky Mountain Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, bio listed in marquis who’s who in the midwest and american editions….speaking my golden moonshine wisdom daily on Rick Igou’s Nooga.com forum board under my screen name Captain Marvel……have a nice day……lol
Not all those being run out of these neighborhoods were renters. Many were actual homeowners. So that’s a lie when they say only renters were or are being displaced through gentrification. Many original homeowners have been hassled and harrassed too by neighborhood groups who have been known to incorporate the assistance of local police to harrass long term homeowners who have lived in their homes for several years.
Yes, there are exceptions, and what you’re saying is TRUE, there are some homeowners and business’s that are hassled and harrassed, I was the manager of the Cincinnati Trailer Park for 12 years, an obvious eyesore to Norwood a township of Cincinnati with a 150 trailers about seven miles from downtown Cincinnati, we got harrassed by the health department of Norwood for years, and Alex Sydner an old jew who owned the Victory Park Nurseing home, who’s property abuted ours, bought the health commissioner a 40,000 dollar motor home, for his help in closeing the trailer park down so Alex could buy the five acres our trailer park was situated on, so he could expand his nurseing home!!! As Winston Churchill once said, Democracy is Mob Rule, The ones with the gold makes the rules, it’s not perfect, but it’s better than all the rest!
The issue is JOBS, which create tax revenues, and progress, which ole backwards Chattanooga desperatly needs…..Well thought out gentrification can be accomplished, there’s plenty of nearby land available in outlying places like Dunlap Tennessee, Falling Water, Soddy Daisy, create an intentional community like Steve Gaskin’s farm up in Summerville Tennessee, there’s over 50,000 such intentional communities in america today, where the poor can live high on the hawg and be taken care of in a commune type setting….They’re all over the place in tennessee, georgia, alabama if you look em up on the internet. Already established.
It’s definately a Catch-22 situation…great for the neignborhoods (my daughter attends Battle Academy on the Southside), great for the people who can AFFORD to live there, great for the city…BUT…I lived in one of the neighborhoods I suspect is where a lot of the displaced moved. I moved out in March due to an increase in petty thefts and property crimes. It’s a shame decent people lost their homes and other decent people had to put up with an increase in slime moving in around them. Which brings you back to the question of what’s the lesser of two evils? As for residents being run out of their homes, I have personally seen the codes enforcement office turn a blind eye to all kinds of things only to hassle elderly, poor home owners – and this was in East Chattanooga. Maybe they know something we don’t about future plans for that area and the kick backs are starting for them. In any event, no matter how good development is for a city, someone will always lose.
To Don Woods – What does someone’s religion have to do with what happened at the trailer park.
Well Dana, you make it sound like poor elderly home owners are so rightous, and you’re pointing the finger of accusation at the authorities and code enforcement officers as the evil ones. That’s very unfair.
Being poor and elderly has nothing too do, with keeping your grass cut and hedges trimmed, I went back to look where I grew up on Ocoee Street, that runs between North Orchard Knob and Shouler ave back in 89, it looked like a JUNGLE, yards were all grown up, houses were in disrepair, old cars on blocks sitting in yards, talk about an eyesore!!!
We only had reel type lawn mowers when I was growing up, my grandad worked for the southern railway, times were hard for us too, but at least we kept our yards mowed, hedges trimmed, house’s painted, I drove on up too see Hardy Jr. High School, they were tearing it down, in it’s place was this ugly el-cheepo pre-fab thingee, the boone and hysinger projects had iron bars around the dirt yards, where they used to be neat and clean with grass growing, I cringe just like every other white person, when the black people pull out that race card and call me a racist bigot, as their excuse, and that’s the problem, When the blacks moved in from what we used to describe as N-Town up at North Orchard Knob and 3rd street specifically, after the white people moved out to the burbs, that’s when the neighborhood went to hell in a handbasket.
It’s the same way in Cincinnati and across america, Affirmative Action Mandates provided an EXCUSE for black folks, When you are protected by a mandate, it makes one LAZY, and that’s why our manufacturing jobs were shipped to third world countries, you can’t discipline, nor FIRE lazy blacks who intimidate managements knowing management can’t fire them or write them up, it’s communism, and some call it socialism, call it what you will, socialism is great till you run out of other peoples money!!!I talk with justbrenda, an 70 year old black lady who lives in St. Elmo on the nooga.com forum board each day, I’m part black and cherokee, there’s not a racist bone in my body, but when she talks about there ain’t no gangs in Chattanooga, or she runs her rants on the whole of the Chattanooga Police Force because she felt slighted by one particular cop, from the past, I call her down, because gang activity, has always been one of the major problems in Chattanooga, organized crime, she refers too my descriptions of gang activity, as the three piece suit crowd of white boys, the corrupt politicans and business people, of which there’s truth to that for sure, but as I told her, there’s also that element both black and white trash, who would just as soon blow you away for a hundred dollar bill and not think twice about it…In my opinion, if these so called poor folks have got money to buy booze and drugs, that they get on the welfare dole, then they’ve got money too fix up their houses, whether they be homeowners or renters whatever….I wouldn’t ask anybody to do something that I ain’t done for myself, I take pride in where and how I live, my older sister lives in east lake, I listen to witchydemonwoman and my sister wail on about all the crime and prostitution, crack heads, dopers ruleing the streets at night, being poor doesn’t mean you can’t be neat and clean, we have representitive democracy in america, pure democracy is MOB RULE, that’s why we elect representitives as a form of checks and balances too hassle the ones who don’t want to conform to the rules!!!
Chattanooga is the PITS, itls like the wild west down there…in 89, I observed the police cars with the vinyl signage adorning the sides of their cars saying “Live Not In Fear” and the SWAT teams in military garb, with pistols strapped too their legs, helicopters staged at the airport, and that’s why I prefer to live In Knoxville where it’s more progressive…in the final analysis, you can blame most of it on the evils of religions, the freemasons secret society and the klan, which is one and the same thing, there’s enough blame to go around….makes a person sad as well as mad, when it’s quite obvious too rational people, in a civilized society, the only thing you can do is gentrify the whole stinking mess and start over….you can’t please everybody, so’s we might as well please ourselves!
I dream of Las Vegas in Chattanooga, bring on the casino’s, the danceing girls, nightclubs, the glitz and glitter, built around the themes of that most romantic & nostalgic civil war, That’s a draw that brings over 10 million tourists a year down Chattanooga way, that would create tens of thousands of good paying jobs and tax revenues, public/private partnerships, which would be a heck of a lot better than those el cheepo flakeboard McMansions that would only bring in a little more tax money to corrupt politicans, school boards and teachers unions….that turns out idiots in social promotions run amuck. Education and Life skills training by psychobabblers and pointy headed intellectuals is not what’s needed, what’s needed is JOB CREATION, and people going back to work, noze to the grindstone, get a little dirt underneath those fingernails….never hurt me, that’s why we call it WORK…..in my curmudegonally opinion, not that it matters….ha ha….I’m retired, I’ve served my time in hell!
Too Gregg Juster, I was useing the trailer park as an anology of what happens in gentrification, Alex Sydner the owner of the Victory Park nurseing home was a talmud believeing jew, they are the real bloodsuckers, they believe all gentiles are sub-human, America is not a Judeo/Christian Nation, America is a pagan nation, it’s the dispensationalists who try to rewrite history, Religions has everything too do with this evil tyranny that’s been foisted upon the minds of men since the dawn of time, it’s the big lie, people that lie too themselves, become unable too reckonize the truth about themselves, I give you the greatest philosophy that explains this…lol
“All Those Backward Bible-Thumpers….”
(Can Just Kiss Our Tissue Mass)
“The important thing is to stop lying to yourself. A man who lies to himself and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself as well as for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love and, in order to divert himself, having no love in him he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest forms of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal, in satisfying his vices. And yet it comes from lying—lying to others and to yourself.” -Dostoevsky (Brothers Karamozov)
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“We have elevated adolescence to a central value of our culture, and we are driven by the restless longing to escape boredom. Consider the irony of it all. At a time when we do see increasing access to the pleasures and provisions of the system, and with an ever-increasing array of products, goods and services to benefit from, we see people not more satisfied but less.” -Stuart McAllister
Promises
We moved here 2 1/2 years ago through ArtsMove. We are still glad we did. However, we are running into broken promises about the Southside redevelopment. (I am glad Beverly Carroll brought the discussion to print. We have been having it in the neighborhood.)
Turns out several people who left Jefferson Heights were told there would be housing built across from the Park that they would be able to afford to live in. Every one knew those folks would not be able to afford $350,000. Yes, developers need to recoup their money and make some. But, there are grants available to help folks get into housing. A previous version of Chattanooga Neighborhood Enterprise promised mixed income housing including Section 8 rentals would remain on the Southside.
I specifically asked the ArtsMove folks if this area was going to turn into a place where artists could no longer afford to live. I was told it would not. Affordability, sustainability, diversity were part of the plan. Several of us in the neighborhood talk about how glad we are we bought when we could afford it as we would not be able to now. Some are wondering if they will be able to afford to stay.
I left the suburbs to move to a diverse, interesting community. Each day the Southside looks more like the ‘burbs. The Mission is gone. I miss chatting with those guys on my walks. Tienda Jelisco is gone. I miss the food and the people. I hardly need to learn Spanish now. I long for a pizza joint where the families here can afford to go hang out together regularly. And while I want the local businesses to make it, I hate that we are paving Paradise with parking lots for more and more folks to drive in to spend. Could the shuttle and the carriages bring them?
A suburbs downtown is not what we were promised.
Brandy Davis