Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, October 8, 1993                   TAG: 9403040002
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

PAST SINS

The city of Roanoke, appropriately, is proceeding anyway.

"The remains of the neighborhood is just a fraction of what it once was," observed an urban planner from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was visiting Roanoke this week. Gainsboro leaders had invited him, along with two lawyers and a traffic engineer, to speak Wednesday with state transportation officials and residents.

The urban planner is right. The old, traditionally black neighborhoods on that side of the tracks have been divided and devastated by economic-development and so-called urban-renewal projects. Old grievances, many held with good cause, have not disappeared.

But at issue now in Gainsboro is not the historical sweep of past offenses to black neighborhoods, but a particular road project. On this particular project, the city has gone out of its way to accommodate the concerns of neighbors and reduce the intrusion on the neighborhood.

City officials have changed the road's design, so that whereas 14 homes originally would have been affected, only two will be affected now. These already have been purchased, satisfying the owners, and there is talk of moving them so as to fill in empty lots on the adjacent street in the neighborhood. This will be good for Gainsboro.

The avenue will not be a highway, but a four-lane road only slightly widened, with a planted median strip, and period lighting and landscaping. The loop is necessary, say city planners, to avoid excessive future congestion in the downtown area. It's also needed to serve a reopened Hotel Roanoke and new conference center. These will be good for Gainsboro.

Federal loans mandate that more than half of the jobs at the Hotel Roanoke project will go to low- and moderate-income residents. Guess who will gain many of these jobs: people living nearby. This, too, will be good for Gainsboro.

At some point it should be recognized that the preservationists fighting over, in effect, two homes do so against the interests of the larger community, including interests of predominantly black neighborhoods. Following the closing of Norfolk Southern offices and the Hotel Roanoke, what do they suppose would be the effect of no development on that side of the tracks?

Where good ways can be found to make amends for past sins against Roanoke's black community, they should be pursued by all means, even at considerable cost. But holding back downtown growth and hampering the hotel and conference-center undertaking, with all their potential for jobs and retail spinoffs, is not a good way.

If some people refuse to accept this, and go on fighting the project, seeking moral support from sympathetic lawyers and urban planners and anyone else, that is their prerogative. The city's prerogative is to make every effort to work with the disaffected, and then, failing that, to ignore them.