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Show art by Adrian Wood, courtesy of Wading Between Two Titans
We return to Norfolk, Virginia, where flooding and rising sea levels threaten residents, and the climate plan for the city could perpetuate harmful patterns of segregation and environmental racism. With the help of the podcast Wading Between Two Titans, we’ll take a look at how urban redevelopment is pushing out low-income and Black residents and what happens when communities are displaced due to climate gentrification.
Featuring: Wading Between Two Titans Team:
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TRANSCRIPT
Producer’s Note: This show features an abridged version of episode three of the podcast Wading Between Two Titans, which first aired in 2023.
Lucy Kang: You’re listening to Making Contact. I’m Lucy Kang.
On last week’s episode, we were introduced to the podcast Wading Between Two Titans, which explores the intersection of sea level rise, housing and racism in Norfolk, Virginia, a city with the fastest rate of sea level rise on the East Coast.
On today’s show, we’re going to stay with the podcast mini-series, which is brought to us by the University of Virginia’s Repair Lab and producer Adrian Wood Wood. So up next, we’re going to bring you episode three of Wading Between Two Titans, which talks about how urban redevelopment in Norfolk is displacing low-income and Black residents in a case of climate gentrification. I’ll let Adrian take it from here.
Mr. Vernell: How old you think I am?
Adrian Wood: How old do I think you are?
Mr. Vernell: Yeah, guess my age–
Adrian Wood: 25.
Mr. Vernell: I wish I was!
Adrian Wood: 26?
Mr. Vernell: No, ma’am. I’m 70– I’m 70– I’m 78. 78 or 79, one of ’em.
Adrian Wood: When I met Mr. Vernell, he was wearing a cabbie hat over his curly white hair and a big smile that showed two gold teeth.
Mr. Vernell: I’m a Gemini. Born 1944.
Adrian Wood: He’s had four strokes, which makes his speech a little hard to understand sometimes, but his eyes still sparkle. Mr. Vernell lives in the St. Paul’s quadrant in downtown Norfolk.
How long have you been living in this neighborhood?
Mr. Vernell: 35 years. I been living over there 35 years.
Adrian Wood: And when you look around where we’re driving through, what has changed since 35 years ago?
Mr. Vernell: Ain’t nothing changed but the weather. I seen so much stuff happen in this park. Yes, ma’am. I been here long time.
Adrian Wood: Public housing communities used to be called parks, so older Norfolk residents like Mr. Vernell often refer to them that way. All three of the parks in St. Paul’s quadrant look almost exactly the same – lines of brick apartments that face each other, two stories tall, each with matching windows, doors, and AC units.
It’s a total of upwards of a thousand units, and it’s easy to get lost in the identical row houses for an outsider like me. Vincent Hodges, a social worker and organizer, drove me and Mr. Vernell around all three of the public housing parks in the St. Paul’s quadrant.
Vincent Hodges: …when we roll through here. What do you think, Mr. Vernell? You think that’s a good idea? Go over there?
Mr. Vernell: Let’s go through all of, let’s see ’em. See what’s going on. All these parks!
Vincent Hodges: Tidewater Garden, that whole area floods out really bad.
Mr. Vernell: Yes, it do.
Adrian Wood: St. Paul’s is made up of three public housing communities, Young’s Terrace, Calvert Square, and Tidewater Gardens. About three weeks before this recording, Tidewater was demolished.
Mr. Vernell: I can’t believe all this gone! I ain’t been there for so long. I ain’t know all these house gone, man. Tear ‘em down.
Vincent Hodges: Yes, sir. Took them down just like that.
Mr. Vernell: God knows, man!
Vincent Hodges: I know. It’s sad, right?
Mr. Vernell: It sure is. That’s sad, man!
Adrian Wood: Tidewater Gardens had been in disrepair for decades as a result of intentional neglect and disinvestment in public housing from local, state, and national levels. It notoriously flooded the worst out of all of the public housing parks in St. Paul’s, but flooding is the baseline here.
Vincent Hodges: It’s like two days after the flooding comes and you can get over to the neighborhood and say, “You okay? Were you able to get some sandbags? Yeah, it might be environmentalism, but it can’t rain all the time, and then it’s gunshots.”
Adrian Wood: When it comes to safe, healthy, and affordable housing, residents of St. Paul’s have more to deal with than just flooding. Environmental hazards are piled on top of a heap of other issues, violence, hunger, and the ever-present chance that their apartments will be destroyed. For Mr. Vernell, it seemed like a shock to see his former home in Tidewater Gardens reduced to just a field marked with puddles of water from the previous night’s rain.
Did you’ve family in Tidewater – friends in Tidewater?
Mr. Vernell: Oh, yes, ma’am! I used to live over here.
Adrian Wood: In our last episode, we introduced Vision 2100, an urban planning document that divvies up Norfolk neighborhoods based on their value as future sites for home, work and play, given which parts of the city are projected to be underwater in the next 75 years. On the Vision 2100 map, many formerly redlined neighborhoods like the St. Paul’s quadrant are now being identified as ripe for gentrification. Meanwhile, wealthier, whiter areas along the coastline will become uninhabitable due to climate change-fueled sea level rise.
Vision 2100 follows a pattern called urban renewal. Urban renewal displaces poor people, usually people of color through construction projects that aim to increase property values and therefore income taxes for the city. They also clear areas to create space for economic drivers like Starbuckses and art galleries and stadiums that boost appeal on the real estate.
In this episode, we will hear how current processes of redevelopment in Norfolk echo historic urban renewal projects, projects rooted in white anxiety about poor Black people. For residents like Mr. Vernell, who was born and raised in Norfolk, these processes are uncomfortably familiar.
The St. Paul’s redevelopment project will lead to the displacement of Black residents from the city’s center to the benefit of real estate Investment and affluent newcomers to the city. The project embodies public-private partnership in the form of housing choice vouchers. You’ve probably heard of Section Eight, a program that uses government and private investment to help cover the cost of housing.
Section Eight vouchers are being offered to the displaced residents of St. Paul’s as one tactic within an overall strategy called deconcentrating poverty.
Deconcentrating poverty means forced relocation. In the case of St. Paul’s, Deconcentrating poverty is also tied with government neglect of poor people and the demolition of brick and mortar public housing in favor of private housing that the public partially pays for. Deconcentrating poverty embraces the market and rejects taxpayer funded units.
This is a hot topic of conversation at Norfolk City Council meetings.
Chip Filer: De-concentrate poverty…
Unknown: De-concentrate poverty…
Unknown: Deconcentrating poverty…
Monét Johnson: If one more person says “deconcentrating poverty” to me, I’m gonna lose it. Deconcentrating poverty, that whole concept is rooted in racism.
Adrian Wood: Monét Johnson is the lead housing and environmental organizer for New Virginia Majority. During this interview, she had actually lost her voice due to the stress of her work. Monét often works advocating for residents of St. Paul’s. As residents of public housing, their landlord is a government agency called the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority, the NRHA.
Monét Johnson: With everything that the NRHA does, I think they’ve sort of become like a one trick pony in which it’s like, just displace people, we’ll figure it out later.
Adrian Wood: Do you feel like the literal changing landscape of Norfolk with processes like sea level rise contribute to the NRHA working in that way?
Monét Johnson: No, I think that they’ve just innately been terrible to Black people, to be honest. I think this is just the newest excuse. And even if we were to talk about deconcentrating poverty, why is it always pick up the Black people and the poor people and move them somewhere else as opposed to making where they live more desirable?
Adrian Wood: As an urban renewal project, deconcentrating poverty stretches back generations. In Norfolk, most of these projects have been stewarded by the NRHA. Established in 1940 as a housing authority, the NRHA would become the primary entity responsible for redevelopment and resulting displacement that is now notorious in the city of Norfolk.
Let’s review the NRHA’s track record. 1955.
Paul Riddick: Our mayor back then was named Fred Duckworth.
Adrian Wood: You might remember Paul Riddick, who was two months from retiring from Norfolk City Council at the time of this recording in September 2022. He was remembering his childhood in the fifties in the Atlantic City neighborhood.
Paul Riddick: It was a community. Working class Blacks slash poor Blacks, working class whites slash poor whites.
Adrian Wood: Atlantic City doesn’t exist anymore. Mayor Duckworth used the city’s power of eminent domain to seize the entire neighborhood and handed over to the NRHA to be redeveloped.
Paul Riddick: But records showed that he tore down 3,500 homes and apartments to keep Blacks from going to school over there. When Duckworth tore down Atlantic City, we were dispersed. Yeah. It was 927 West Olney Road. That was Atlantic City.
Joel Carlson: Hello. This is Tidewater Viewpoint. And I’m Joel Carlson. A quick look at Norfolk’s plans for redevelopment of…
Adrian Wood: 1959.
Joel Carlson: A downtown area…
Adrian Wood: The city of Norfolk was recognized by the US government for their slum clearance projects. Eloquent prayers and speeches inaugurated the NRHA’s plan for redevelopment.
Announcer: This ceremony signalizes the start of that downtown project. I said it represents a kind of a D-Day. Fortunately, however, the attack we’re now making is one that cannot be repelled.
Adrian Wood: An attack that cannot be repelled? What do you think they’re attacking? What do they think they’re attacking?
Announcer: This is not a funeral. It is really resurrection. First, I would like to read a…
Adrian Wood: 1968. The Scope Arena is built in downtown Norfolk when NRHA director Larry M. Cox misappropriates funds from the Federal Housing Act, funds that were intended to support construction of affordable housing in the city. Blocks of downtown, where many Black communities were rooted, are razed.
Joel Carlson: … with Mr. Lawrence M. Cox, the executive director of the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority. The slums, as I understand it, are concentrated in the area that is planned for redevelopment in this project. Is that right?
Larry Cox: That’s correct. No land in this area will go back to residential uses. And this will rid the city of a large segment of blight.
Adrian Wood: 1969. Perhaps the NRHA’s most notorious hit: the redevelopment of Ghent.
Paul Riddick: Before they decided to redevelop Ghent, they sold those homes in Ghent, while they had a lifespan or maybe four or five years, to Blacks. Well, then they decided – meaning the redevelopment housing authority and the shadow government – they started going in and buying these homes, telling the Blacks that they gonna be able to come back – this is redevelopment housing authority – gonna be able to come back. Well, they could go back, but they weren’t told that they going to need $300- or $350,000 to go back.
Adrian Wood: Black residents who left East Ghent were not able to return to their homes because they couldn’t afford the new houses in the area. The housing authority didn’t really care where they ended up, and many families were pushed into neighborhoods with a higher concentration of poverty.
Mr. Vernell used to live in Ghent with his family.
And did you live with your family?
Mr. Vernell: Oh yes sir, my mom and dad and my sister and brother. Them tearing it down – like they get all these big houses. That’s what it did.
Adrian Wood: They all got displaced when the NRHA redeveloped it. Just like their neighbors, Mr. Vernell and his family were told that they would be able to come back to Ghent. But they weren’t told that they wouldn’t be able to afford the steep prices on the fancy new houses in the redevelopment.
Residents of Tidewater Gardens are facing a similar offer from the NRHA – one that eerily echoes what happened to Mr. Vernell and his family decades ago.
Mr. Vernell: Yep!
Vincent Hodges: Came here, tore everything down, kicked Black folks out.
Mr. Vernell: Sure did! Told us we could move back. Told us we’d move back, the rent too high. Told us we could come back.
Vincent Hodges: And that’s kind of the same thing that they’re telling these folks is like, yeah, you have a right to return. If you can afford the rent.
Mr. Vernell: Yeah, sure did!
Vincent Hodges: If you can afford the rent.
Mr. Vernell: Nope, sure couldn‘t. They knew what they was doing.
Adrian Wood: They knew what they were doing.
Salima Hamirani: I’m just jumping in to remind you that you’re listening to Making Contact. If you like today’s show and want more information, or if you’d like to leave us a comment, visit us at our new website, focmedia.org. There you can access today’s show and all of our prior episodes. And now, back to the show.
Adrian Wood: Once the neighborhood is torn down, what happens to the people who used to live there? The idea from the housing authority and the city is this. Those people will move into nicer neighborhoods using Section Eight vouchers to cover most of their rent. The goal is to create more mixed income communities. This is a popular goal among both residents and city council. Residents of St. Paul’s have expressed their desire for mixed income communities in public hearings. But the strategy of deconcentrating poverty is what hurts.
Monét Johnson: Their theory is that the issue is not that people have actual systemic roadblocks to where they wanna be. It’s just that they’re around too many like-minded people. And so if we break them up, they’ll just magically get into better situations.
Adrian Wood: Deconcentrating poverty as a strategy doesn’t necessarily take into account the kinship networks that support the lives of people living in Young’s Terrace, Calvert Square, and formerly Tidewater Gardens. For example, Mr. Vernell has eight family members who also live in Young’s Terrace. That doesn’t count the dozens of friends, chosen family and neighbors who support him and each other in webs of care that are critical to their survival and central to their lives. People who walk him to the door, who give him a ride to the store, check in on him, even come play dominoes with him, bring him food.
This kind of network isn’t necessarily special, but it is exactly what’s being targeted by proponents of deconcentrating poverty: unconventional family structures that don’t fit the male breadwinner nuclear family mold.
As we drove out of Young’s Terrace, Mr. Vernell asked that we pause and roll down the window so he could say hi to his chosen daughter.
Mr. Vernell: Roll the window down a minute, I’m gonna holla at my daughter – hey, daughter!
Unknown: Mr. Vernell!
Mr. Vernell: Hey, daughter!
Unknown: Love you, Mr. Vernell!!
Mr. Vernell: I love you, daughter! That’s my daughter right there, I wanted to holla at…
Adrian Wood: Just one of many folks Mr. Vernell waved to or said hi to as we drove through the neighborhoods. But this time, in the same breath – in the same minute – Mr. Vernell pointed out a memorial that his daughter was standing next to.
Mr. Vernell: Somebody got killed right there. See on the thing. On the fence.
Vincent Hodges: That’s where the five women were murdered last year.
Mr. Vernell: Yeah. They murdered, the five women–
Vincent Hodges: Or it was three women, women that died.
Mr. Vernell: Yeah. Yeah.
Vincent Hodges: But five women were shot.
Mr. Vernell: Yeah. Right there.
Vincent Hodges: Uh.
Adrian Wood: Yeah.
Mr. Vernell: Yeah.
Vincent Hodges: Two of them were part of the LGBT–
Mr. Vernell: Oh, take a picture with your camera.
Adrian Wood: You can hear it in his voice.
Mr. Vernell: Oh, take the picture.
Adrian Wood: Take a picture of it?
This is important. He wants to make sure that we see it, acknowledge what the memorial means and remember it.
Kinship networks like Mr. Vernell’s exist alongside both extreme and mundane tragedies that punctuate the daily lives of residents. There’s gun violence that has gotten worse since the beginning of the redevelopment project. It’s also challenging for residents to access fresh and healthy food at prices they can afford. Residents who still live in Young’s Terrace and Calvert Square don’t receive adequate attention for maintenance requests, and some of the maintenance issues are severe.
Monét Johnson: So this is not even like maintenance like, “Oh, my screen door is broken.” Like these are serious issues that people don’t care about. People’s bathrooms, they’re all upstairs, so people’s toilets are leaking onto the dishes, downstairs on their dish racks. People don’t care about that. It’s a lot of pretty egregious stuff.
Adrian Wood: The demands residents and advocates are making are pretty reasonable.
Monét Johnson: Safe, healthy and dignified housing. I wish they would’ve started building. I think if I can change one thing, it was, “You should have started building sometime. Move people one time.”
Adrian Wood: It’s not even, “Don’t move us. We’re not going.” It’s just, “Give us somewhere to go, that’s worth going to.”
Residents of the St. Paul’s quadrant cannot stay there the way that it is, that much is clear. But the mode of redevelopment isn’t just about deconcentrating poverty. It also reinforces persistent patterns of segregation and environmental racism across the city, pushing Black people out of the places that are slated to receive the most protection from sea level rise.
Tidewater Gardens floods – flooded – the worst out of all of the public housing communities because it was built over top of a filled in riverbed.
Think Tidewater Park flooded the worst out of the three –
Mr. Vernell: Oh, yes, it do! Yeah, this park the worst. This park here the worse than any of ’em. Cause it’s on the sea level, this park here. That’s what – this one, very close to the river. Hmm. That’s why they get flooded more.
Adrian Wood: With the redevelopment, 44 acres of what was formerly Tidewater Gardens will receive a new stormwater system and a blueway that restores that river that was originally filled in. The blueway is a flooding protection that aligns with and emerges partially from the Vision 2100.
St. Paul’s is in the red zone on Vision 2100’s map, which means that it’s slated to receive some of the most intensive protections the city offers through their infrastructure projects. Before the St. Paul’s redevelopment, the red zone on the Vision 2100 map was demographically proportionate in terms of race to the city of Norfolk as a whole, which means about 60% white, 40% Black. After the redevelopment, accounting for the assumed removal of the Black population of St. Paul’s, the red zone becomes grossly, disproportionately white.
The imaginary crowds who will flock to the market rate apartments at the new St. Paul’s will receive the best of Norfolk’s infrastructure protection from sea level rise. Not the families who suffered through the worst of the flooding, the demolition, or the multiple forced moves from unit to. Because deconcentrating poverty disregards those family’s experiences.
In 2020, the plan for St. Paul’s was to demolish all three public housing communities upwards of a thousand units. But that plan changed after January, 2021, when Monét Johnson was a plaintiff with the New Virginia Majority in a lawsuit against the NRHA advocating for St. Paul’s residents who were being displaced by the redevelopment.
Monét Johnson: Yeah, so that was us. That was our community group, and I think it’s considered like the largest discrimination lawsuit that the city of Norfolk has faced. All of the residents of St. Paul’s are Black people. It’s like upwards of 95% African American over there. The lawsuit was about like the right to return, the right to stay in Norfolk as a Black resident and not be threatened because the land you’re on is now considered valuable.
Adrian Wood: This lawsuit, filed and decided in 2021, alleged that the NRHA was perpetuating segregation through their historic urban renewal rearrangements of Norfolk. The city, through the NRHA, was forced to pay the residents of St. Paul’s a cumulative total of $200,000, and set aside an additional 41 units at the market rate apartment complex across the street from St. Paul’s. It’s called Market Heights.
Adrian Wood: Do you remember a time when it flooded really bad?
Mr. Vernell: Oh, yes ma’am.
Adrian Wood: When was the last time that happened?
Mr. Vernell: Three months ago. Real bad. Now I do. Flooded, couldn’t get out.
Adrian Wood: How long could you not get out of the house?
Mr. Vernell: A day and a half. Had to wait for the water to go down.
Adrian Wood: Water makes existing problems worse. The city announced to residents that the demolition of Tidewater Gardens had released loose asbestos. Residents who were still living in Tidewater units at the time of the demolition were exposed to it before they got moved out. This is Vincent Hodges.
Vincent Hodges: Adrian, like they’re doing construction across the street from one of my tenants, like right there. I mean construction right there. Open asbestos, right there. My dad died of mesothelioma, due to dealing with asbestos on naval ships. We know it’s harmful, at minimum. And we know we’re moving it, at minimum. It’s exacerbated when rains come. We had a series of rains a couple of weeks ago. You could drive into Tidewater Gardens, and the air smelled different. And I mean, noticeably different. Chemicals. Something. Water is taken care of there at the rate of convenient displacement. Water is taken care of at the speed of redevelopment.
Adrian Wood: The speed of redevelopment is negotiated by the powers that plan it: the city council and the NRHA. Their relationship allows both to avoid accountability.
Monét Johnson: It’s like the meme of the two Spider-Men pointing at each other. That’s my job. I go to the city, I’m like, “Can you help these people?” They’re like, “Ask the NRHA.” I go to the NRHA. I’m like, “Hey, can you help these people?” They’re like, “Ask the city.”
Adrian Wood: As of Fall 2022, 618 low income units in chronically flooding Tidewater Gardens have been demolished, to be replaced with a total of 714 brand new units on site. For the families that Monét is trying to help, the ones that are being moved out due to the redevelopment, choices are limited. About half signed up to return to the small percentage of new units that are set aside for former residents. The idea is that they’ll live somewhere else until the new units are built, then come back.
The NRHA offers housing choice vouchers to facilitate this process. They’re also known as Section Eight vouchers. Section eight is the main tactic within the strategy of deconcentrating poverty. The vouchers are intended to supplement rent payments for low income families. About a third of the new units are voucher eligible.
Monét Johnson: The last time I checked the waiting list to get a voucher, not even the waiting list of people with a voucher at apartment complexes, is about 7,800 people. It was closed for a while up until at least March, April-ish, if I’m not mistaken. They opened it for three days and 4,000 new families were on the list. It’s closed again, so we’re at like a 7,800-ish.
Adrian Wood: Most families tried to apply for the vouchers, but only a few were able to get them.
Vincent Hodges has seen the Section Eight system from the inside, alongside some of the residents that he assists.
Vincent Hodges: The voucher system is just so, so insultingly insufficient. And then the injustices that tenants are facing for it – because they’re not being considered for housing. They’re showing up with, you know, Section Eight tattooed all over their application. People are having to apply with other names, you know, anglicized names to try to get approval. It’s crazy.
Adrian Wood: This kind of thing happens all the time. If a landlord wants to reject an applicant because they have Section eight support, they’ll find a way. Whether it’s just making it a hassle for them to get to the rental office or adding extra paperwork or finding something in their record to justify the rejection.
If it’s so hard to get a voucher, where, then, do displaced families go?
Monét Johnson: Oh, so it depends on the family. More likely than not, not Norfolk. Other families have gone to other NRHA neighborhoods with their vouchers where they’re not subjected to necessarily the impending demolition, but the same poor housing conditions, mold, all of that good stuff.
There are people who have moved as far as Oklahoma. And then there are people who just were scared by the continuous notices from the city and were like, I gotta get outta here.
From before the first building was torn down or vacated, they were informed by us, by residents, by others, that there’s not gonna be a place to go with these vouchers. They ignored that when they started tearing things down. They ignored it when they started moving people from one part of a neighborhood to another part. Because they couldn’t find places to go, they ignored it. And now that half the community is gone and there’s only a few families who are subjected to some really, really horrible conditions and are still saying, I don’t necessarily have anywhere to go. It’s still being ignored.
Deconcentrating poverty doesn’t resolve poverty. It just disperses people and makes them less noticeable. Networks of kinship that had offered some kinds of regulation and stability to people get unraveled through processes like these. And the cycle continues because the system continues unless we choose a path that aims to create conditions in which poverty can be healed from, rather than rendering the poor, invisible, and isolated.
Lucy Kang: That’s the voice of producer Adrian Wood, from episode three of the podcast Wading Between Two Titans, from the University of Virginia’s Repair Lab. It first aired in 2022. Since then, it’s been reported that the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority is continuing with plans to tear down Calvert Square and Young Terrace, the two other public housing parks mentioned in the show.
And that does it for today. For now, I’m Lucy Kang. Thanks for listening to Making Contact.
