CRHA Board Chairman Dave Norris identifies modern urban renewal

From: "dave norris"
To: (email list)
Subject: Remarks to City Council re: Prospect
Date: Tue, 06 May 2003

Had City Council been more interested in hearing from the public last night before moving ahead on its Prospect Avenue gentrification project, here are the comments I would have made.

Good evening, my name is Dave Norris and I live at 1508 Green St. in Belmont.

I rise tonight to thank you for appointing me to the City’s new Housing Policy Task Force.   I look forward to working with my fellow Task Force members to produce some substantive proposals for addressing the affordable housing crisis here in our community.

One of the specific ideas that I will be pushing the Task Force to consider is a set of principles to guide the City’s efforts in revitalizing low-income neighborhoods.   These principles will serve to encourage public and private investment in distressed neighborhoods while ensuring that the result of this new investment is community empowerment, and not community gentrification.

At a minimum, I would hope that anytime there are public dollars invested in a neighborhood redevelopment project in the future, there is:

  • a well-defined vision and plan for how the project will uplift the whole neighborhood
  • full involvement by neighborhood residents in the development and implementation of this plan (with groups like the Quality Community Council and PHAR helping to build the capacity of residents to assume leadership in this process)
  • use of the Weed and Seed approach in weeding out known criminal elements, building code violators and irresponsible/absentee landlords and in seeding the neighborhood with community policing, youth programs, training and education initiatives, infrastructure improvements, etc.
  • one-for-one replacement of any affordable rental units lost to redevelopment [when the demand for affordable rental housing is so severe, we've got to at LEAST preserve what small stock we have now]
  • deliberate targeting of new homeownership opportunities to existing neighborhood residents
  • deliberate targeting of new employment opportunities to existing neighborhood residents
  • measures to ensure the affordability of new housing for the long-term (in order to ensure that public dollars remain in service to the public good)

With provisions like these in place, you will see a much different result than we’ve seen in other redevelopment projects, and you will realize a much higher long-term gain on your investment.   Instead of using the redevelopment process to displace and relocate problems, you will be using the redevelopment process to solve problems.   Instead of using public dollars to evict poor families and further restrict housing choices for people who are already struggling to get by, you will be using public dollars to expand housing options, help low-income families build assets and skills, and foster a much greater sense of ownership and pride among neighborhood residents.   Instead of encouraging community gentrification, you’ll be encouraging community empowerment.

Unfortunately, the Prospect Avenue proposal you have before you tonight contains few, if any, of these kinds of provisions.   Furthermore, it adds insult to injury by blaming renters as a class of people for the problems in that neighborhood.   It is easy to stigmatize low-income people and it is easy to stigmatize renters but evicting an entire block of low-income renters is not the answer.   I would challenge you to look into the eyes of each of the families you will be evicting and explain how it is that they are bringing down the neighborhood.   If there are problem tenants and problem landlords, by all means let’s deal with them – but don’t use their bad example as an excuse to make life even harder for others.

I applaud the City and the Piedmont Housing Alliance for your interest in helping to revitalize low-income neighborhoods, but I strongly encourage you to learn from the lessons of Charlottesville’s checkered redevelopment history and make the effort to show that this time, on Prospect Avenue, it can be done right.

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