A Virginia City’s Playbook for Urban Renewal: Move Out the Poor
Norfolk is using federal tax breaks to plow under its historically Black neighborhoods.
A view of the cinderblock row houses that make up the Tidewater Gardens low-income housing development.
Photographer: Jared Soares for Bloomberg BusinessweekThe contours of inequality in Norfolk, Va., a city of 240,000-plus people at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, are clearly visible from atop the 26-story Dominion Tower. The tallest building in town houses its economic development office, a choice spot for officials to show off their city and to encourage visitors to envision its future.
Look west, and you see a 300-room Hilton, a hockey arena, corporate offices for PNC Financial and payment processor ADP, restaurants and bars, a light rail station, and a one-million-square-foot mall. To the east is St. Paul’s, a 200-acre area north of the Elizabeth River that’s home to three public housing developments dating from the 1950s. The pitch-roofed, two-story, cinder-block houses are arrayed in rows like barracks. The two sides of the city are divided by a highway offramp that shoots suburban shoppers right into the parking garage of the MacArthur Center shopping mall and a six-lane boulevard that keeps St. Paul’s residents, mostly Black and mostly poor, a world apart from the downtown.