Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 29, 1995 TAG: 9501310073
SECTION: STREET BY STREET PAGE: 10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
By then, he was Roanoke's chief planner and the highest-ranking black official in the city. He warned that preservation, the city's written objective in Gainsboro, was not happening. Unlike other neighborhoods, Gainsboro was not even eligible for housing rehabilitation programs.
During the project's early years, a colorful mural hung on the wall of a community building. It showed an even better Gainsboro, a sunny and charming neighborhood full of people and shops after urban renewal.
"People went by every day, looking at that vision of the future," Reynolds said. "That kept people going, irrespective of the fact that it wasn't materializing."
Urban renewal made life worse in Gainsboro, not better, Reynolds said.
By slapping on the "urban renewal" label, he said in an interview, government automatically depressed the value of real estate. Banks were less likely to let people use their homes as collateral.
Reynolds said, "It was just as effective as what we think of as red-lining today," the systematic refusal by banks to give loans to neighborhoods they think are deteriorating.
What saddened him the most were the last people bought out by the city. Urban renewal stretched on so long that owners had let their property run down. By the time they left, assessed values were lower than ever, and they didn't get as much money as they would have a few years earlier.
Even worse off, he said, were people whose properties never had been selected for a buyout. "By the time we started rehabilitating those houses, they were in tremendously bad shape. There had been no maintenance."
Reynolds later became assistant city manager and now is Martinsville's city manager.
When he was growing up at 331 Harrison Ave. N.W., solid old homes were all around. "We were living in architecturally interesting houses, and we didn't even know it."
The irony of Gainsboro, Reynolds said, is "we could have left the old homes down there, and not only would people have had safe, sanitary and affordable places to live, but we would have maintained the historic sense of the neighborhood."
The root of urban renewal's misjudgments, he said, was that from Washington on down, "there was nothing in the policy that dealt with people" or what would happen to them and their neighborhoods.
Gainsboro's project was a patchwork of little projects, some just a block or two long, that stretched over more than a quarter-century. "There was no whole," he said, "no big picture."
Urban renewal "changed the character of Roanoke. I don't think the black community of Roanoke is as strong as it was, politically or philosophically, and I think the city as a whole is worse off because of it.
"I mean, Roanoke is surviving and Roanoke will continue to grow and to prosper, but it will not be as strong as it could have been. It will not be as attractive a community as it could have been."
by CNB