Urban Renewal in Virginia

In May 1935, the Roosevelt administration created the Resettlement Administration to move low-income farmers from eroding or overfarmed lands. It was authorized to use eminent domain to acquire property for its Recreational Demonstration Area (RDA) program, which sought to develop large sites of inferior land within fifty miles of major population centers into campsites to provide recreational opportunities for poor city children. Nestled among thousands of acres of woodland approximately thirty miles from Washington, D.C., Batestown and Hickory Ridge were transformed into the Chopawamsic RDA.

Batestown and Hickory Ridge were seen as what the Washington Star categorized as a “rural slum.” Program officials did not understand the communities they were trying to "reform" or the landscapes on which they were built. Residents who fought condemnations in court lost their savings, leaving the majority with no option other than selling. RDA staffers purchased seventy-nine properties for $138,939, which was $40,000 less than the appraised value and a bargain even by the project’s calculations.

The Civilian Conservation Corps transformed country roads into hiking trails and built cabins on former homesites, and the Chopawamsic RDA opened in 1936 for white campers. Separate facilities for Black campers opened the following summer. Yet the Chopawamsic RDA closed just five years later, when stewardship was transferred to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to train military intelligence officers during World War II. The OSS expanded the site, and forty-four holdout households were evicted with only two weeks’ notice. After the war, the Chopawamsic RDA reopened as Prince William Forest Park.

The African American community of Queen City/East Arlington was razed to make room for the Pentagon and related transit corridors.

The Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority (NRHA) was created in 1940 as city’s primary vehicle to marshal federal funds. By the end of World War II, slum clearance and urban renewal were central to the NRHA’s mission. A 1949 study of downtown Norfolk concluded that “large scale redevelopment is the only chance the city ever has had to accomplish a drastic modernization of its heart.”

In late 1951, the city broke ground on the first urban renewal project in the United States, known as “Project One," immediately to the east of downtown Norfolk.

This 1909 map of Norfolk shows the dense street grid in the area that would become Project One. After decades of neglect and disinvestment, by the late 1940s this segregated community exhibited some of the most squalid, blighted conditions in the country.

The Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority (NRHA) photographed the existing slum conditions, and later the process of redevelopment.

Unlike later redevelopment projects in Norfolk, Project One partially focused on providing new housing for the displaced African American population. Although Project One resulted in a net increase in housing for African American families, their housing was concentrated in segregated low-rise public housing developments known as  Young Terrace ,  Calvert Square , and  Tidewater Gardens .

Ultimately more than a third of the land cleared for Project One was transformed into highways and industrial land that created a physical barrier that isolated the new public housing projects from nearby white neighborhoods, maintaining the lines of residential racial segregation.

Following the completion of Project One, the city launched a new and ambitious urban renewal plan that would ultimately lead to the razing of the city’s last racially integrated neighborhoods, including Broad Creek Village, Atlantic City, Lambert’s Point, and East Main St, while simultaneously "protecting" Ghent and other white sections of the western portion of the city from Black residents.

Broad Creek Village was a 584-acre wartime housing project built upon farmland just outside of the city limits to house 2,600 war workers.

Originally a whites-only neighborhood, the integration of the U.S. military in 1948 resulted in Broad Creek Village becoming more racially integrated than most neighborhoods in Norfolk. And while the WWII-era housing was cheap and meant to be temporary, the community was anything but a slum.

When city leaders began talking about slum clearance in Broad Creek Village, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Homeowners and landlords were disincentivized from investing in properties, the neighborhood quickly became blighted, and slum clearance was thusly justified. In 1956 the city of Norfolk purchased Broad Creek Village, and by 1958 all buildings had been vacated and demolished. The property sat vacant until it was ultimately redeveloped into the Norfolk Industrial Park.

Across the city, Lambert’s Point was one of the only racially integrated neighborhoods in Norfolk. By 1950, African Americans constituted about 40 percent of Lambert’s Point's population.

By 1960, Lambert's Point Black population was concentrated between 25th St. and 48th St., an area that was over 80 percent African American.

The purpose of the hearing is to consider a proposal . . . by Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority . . . to acquire land in the project area; to demolish or remove buildings and improvements; and to make the land available for development or redevelopment by Old Dominion College. . .

The predominantly African American sections of Lambert’s Point were singled out for slum clearance and ultimately razed to clear space for the expanding Old Dominion University. Throughout the 1950s ODU continued expanding its footprint, overtaking nearly forty square blocks of the historically African American Lambert’s Point neighborhood.

This georectified NRHA map shows the redevelopment area and deadlines for Old Dominion University's expansion.

Today, the primarily African American residential section of Lambert’s Point has been reduced to the most environmentally marginalized blocks south of ODU's campus and immediately adjacent to the Norfolk Southern rail yard and coal terminal.

Redevelopment in Atlantic City resulted in 1,000 homes being demolished to make way for the construction of Norfolk General Hospital and an expansion of surrounding transportation arteries and tunnel facilities. No new housing was constructed to accommodate those who were displaced as a result of Atlantic City’s redevelopment.

Altogether, Project Two cleared close to 800 acres of land for clearance and displaced an estimated 20,000 people—almost a tenth of the city’s population. Historian Forrest White argues that the targeting of these racially integrated areas was about more than controlling urban blight:

“It aimed to wipe out all of the city’s transition neighborhoods where indistinct color lines had failed to produce two distinct neighborhood school communities, one black and the other white.”

Perhaps the most notorious urban renewal project in Norfolk was the redevelopment of East Ghent beginning in the late 1960s. Situated just north of downtown Norfolk, East and West Ghent were originally developed in the 1890s by the Norfolk Company as an upscale, white planned community.

During World War II, temporary war housing was built in sections of East Ghent, which deteriorated rapidly in the years after the war. With the acceleration of white flight in the 1950s, white families increasingly abandoned East Ghent for the newly developing suburbs further away from the central city. By the early 1960s, African American families, displaced from other parts of the city as a result of Project Two, began relocating to East Ghent.

East Ghent’s population shift was so pronounced that in the 20-year period between 1950 and 1970 the racial make-up of the neighborhood entirely flipped from white to Black. According to the U.S. Census, in both 1950 and 1960 East Ghent was less than 2 percent African American, but by 1970 the same city blocks that comprised East Ghent had become nearly 90 percent African American. Colonial Avenue was as stark a color line as any in the city, dividing East Ghent, which was 90 percent African American, from West Ghent, which was 97 percent white.

In 1969, the federal government approved the East Ghent Renewal Project, and soon thereafter the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority began notifying Black residents that their properties would be acquired through eminent domain.

As seen on this 1889 map of Richmond, Apostle Town was named for its main streets of St. Peter, St. Paul, St. John, St. James, and St. Stephen. Many Black residents owned and inherited properties in Apostle Town, which was home to notable figures like the entrepreneur Maggie L. Walker and religious leaders William Troy and John Jasper.

As seen on this 1942 Bartholomew & Associates map of the "Location of Negro Areas" in Richmond, by the mid twentieth century Jackson Ward comprised Richmond's largest and most vibrant African American community.

In 1941 Apostle Town was bulldozed and in its place the city and housing authority constructed a 300-unit public housing project called Gilpin Court. The project displaced 250 Black families from their homes, who were given less than four months to vacate their properties.

In 1954, the Virginia General Assembly created the Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike Authority and granted it the power of eminent domain. Construction of the turnpike bisected Jackson Ward, effectively dividing it into two separate neighborhoods—North and South Jackson Ward.

The construction of the Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike geographically isolated Gilpin Court and the rest of North Jackson Ward from South Jackson Ward and the rest of the city. Gilpin Court was expanded in 1957 to house residents displaced by the continued expansion of the Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike, and the following year  Fairfield Court  and  Whitcomb Court  were opened east of Jackson Ward to house additional residents displaced by highway construction.

The plan recommended the destruction of five majority-Black neighborhoods: Vinegar Hill, Cox’s Row, Garrett Street, Gospel Hill, Kellytown, and part of Fifeville. It also recommended that the city develop a “minimum-standard housing ordinance” and implement “public housing and urban renewal.”

Black residents had begun buying property in Vinegar Hill as early as 1870, and the area quickly became a vibrant Black neighborhood just west of downtown Charlottesville. By the early twentieth century, Black entrepreneurs had created a thriving business district along  West Main Street  (as seen on this 1920 Sanborn fire insurance map).  Jefferson High School  was one of just six accredited Black high schools across the state, and there were multiple Black churches in the area. Vinegar Hill continued to grow throughout the twentieth century, becoming a vibrant cultural and economic hub for Black residents.

West Main Street's Black businesses were immediately adjacent to the white businesses in downtown Charlottesville on East Main Street. These white business owners feared that a new shopping center slated to open two miles away would hurt them economically.

“There is little doubt that the longer redevelopment of Vinegar Hill is delayed, the more opportunity there is for expanding outlying shopping and business centers at the expense of downtown Charlottesville.”

It was estimated that the city could increase East Main Street's annual business revenue by nearly $9 million by demolishing Vinegar Hill.

In 1958, the federal Housing and Home Finance Agency approved the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority's slum clearance proposal for Vinegar Hill. CRHA also received a $35,000 loan from the federal Public Housing Authority to draw up plans for 200 public housing units, some of which were intended for low-income, displaced Vinegar Hill residents.

(On the map: "Demolition Map for the Vinegar Hill Area")

Soon thereafter the CRHA conducted a parcel-by-parcel appraisal of Vinegar Hill, finding that Vinegar Hill had 463 Black residents, and 44 white residents, and an estimated market value of $1.8 million. The thirty-five Black-owned homes in the neighborhood were, according to this appraisal, “the best residential buildings in the area.” At the time, other housing options for Black residents were limited by a lack of financing and a “reluctance to sell to colored on the part of the people in white neighborhoods.”

While public housing was initially planned for displaced Vinegar Hill residents, white opponents of public housing feared the proposed projects could lower property values and lead to school desegregation.

In 1962, the CRHA began purchasing properties in Vinegar Hill under eminent domain. In early 1964, bulldozers and wrecking cranes began demolishing homes, businesses, and the Zion Union Baptist Church.

After the neighborhood was leveled, the city created renderings of a large hotel and convention center proposed for the area and published promotional materials to attract developers.

In 1970, Citizens Commonwealth Corp. purchased 60,000 square feet of Vinegar Hill to build a six-story office building. Later that year, the CRHA sold another portion of Vinegar Hill to a car dealer for a parking lot. Citizens Commonwealth Corp. bought much of the remaining land, only to sell it back to the city after development plans fell through. By the 1980s, the city had resold most of the land, which was ultimately developed into a grocery store, a federal courthouse, and a taxpayer-funded hotel.

Because Jim Crow rules forced Black residents of all means onto the same tight streets, the class diversity visible in their housing—stately brick homes next to ramshackle rentals—was strikingly different from Roanoke’s white neighborhoods, which were arranged neatly by income level.

The first area targeted for urban renewal was the Northeast neighborhood, a largely Black residential area without political power at a time when the Black vote was constrained by the poll tax. A 1953 survey conducted by the Roanoke Redevelopment and Housing Authority (RRHA) concluded that 76 percent of the 438 residential structures in the neighborhood were “substandard” and 248 were completely “dilapidated.”

In 1955, the Roanoke City Council cleared the way for the Commonwealth Project, which would ultimately raze over 80 acres of homes, businesses, and schools in order to widen Williamson Road and make the remaining area available for private and commercial development.

A decade later construction began on Interstate 581, connecting the city to Interstate 81, about five miles northwest of downtown.

In 1971, the Roanoke Civic Center opened its doors. By that point hundreds of homes had been bulldozed to create two new thoroughfares and the Roanoke Civic Center.

The Commonwealth Project was followed in 1964 by the Kimball Project, which destroyed most of the remaining homes in Northeast, displacing an estimated 305 families, to make way for a new main post office, a Norfolk & Western Railroad computer center, and Roanoke Gas Company offices.

Charles Meadows, a Norfolk & Western Railway worker, invested $20,000 in a four-bedroom brick home at 604 Patton Avenue. He and his wife, Carrie Meadows, raised their five children there. By the 1960s, when urban renewal arrived on his block, the city offered him $7,800 for the house. Once the Roanoke Gas Company bought and redeveloped Meadows’s property, values zoomed to $67,000 per acre. A few years later, once his street was razed, graded, and repurposed, the eight acres that had comprised his neighborhood were assessed at $2 million.

In the end, all of Northeast’s hills, trees, and streets were leveled and replaced with a civic center, highways, a car dealership, chain motels, a McDonald’s, and acres of parking lots. Since burning was quicker and cheaper than demolition, firefighters set approximately 100 homes ablaze, two or three at a time. When it was clear that Northeast was gone for good, “A lot of people died heartbroken,” said Meadows. “The older ones just somehow couldn’t take it.”

Following the leveling of Northeast, Roanoke turned its gaze to the Gainsboro neighborhood in northwest Roanoke. Redevelopment focused on  Henry Street  and the surrounding blocks, a commercial and entertainment district that was the economic and cultural center of Black Roanoke. The area was home to movie theaters, auditoriums, restaurants, gambling houses, nightclubs, and social clubs. Fans came from near and far to hear Duke Ellington, Fats Domino, Nat King Cole, James Brown, and other famous musicians. The neighborhood also housed medical and law offices, hotels for Black travelers, the newsroom of the Black-owned Roanoke Tribune, and the studio of pioneering Black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. Gainsboro was also home to Burrell Memorial Hospital, one of the best-equipped Black hospitals in the South, and the Burrell Pharmacy, one of the earliest Black drugstores in southwestern Virginia.

And in 1952, the city of Alexandria annexed semi-rural land to its west, which included the two thriving and interconnected Black communities of The Fort and Seminary. In 1954 the entire community was condemned based on the condition of a handful of properties, and the city approved funds to redevelop The Fort into Fort Ward Park, an amenity for nearby whites-only suburban residential developments.

Alexandria’s largest, costliest, and ultimately final urban renewal project, The Dip, could have turned out much in the same way: economic development for white communities at the expense of the demolition of Black homes and the displacement of Black residents. This project sought to redevelop The Bottoms, a southside neighborhood named for its marshy topography that had been home to a Black community since 1798.

But unlike nearly all other urban renewal projects across the state, by the time The Dip's redevelopment was completed in 1984, the area’s 690 largely Black and low-income residents still called their longtime neighborhood home. This was a consequence of several coalescing forces: Alexandria’s urban renewal battles of the 1960s, coupled with the political empowerment of Black residents following the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the abolition of the  poll tax , upended how the city approached planning.

By this time Black organizers had joined the highest ranks of the city’s development decision makers. Melvin Miller, president of the Durant Street Civic Association and vice president of the local chapter of the NAACP became chair of the ARHA in 1970. The same year his neighbor Ira Robinson became the first Black member of the Alexandria City Council since Reconstruction.

In 1972, after estimates indicated that most Black residents slated to be relocated for the project could not afford mortgages in the redeveloped housing, the city flipped the three-to-one ratio of owners to tenants.

In 1973 the project was paused, and city administrators turned their attention elsewhere. They proposed to extend the Old Town Historic District to include parts of Uptown. Longtime Uptown resident Eudora Lyles organized her neighbors to pressure the now integrated city council to reject the proposal, arguing that historic designation would attract outside investors and result in the displacement of existing residents.

In the late 1970s, funds for The Dip were released and the project resumed. City officials applied these new insights and redeveloped The Bottoms without displacing Black households. Lifelong Alexandrians who feared being priced out of the city’s market were able to buy or rent new homes in The Dip due to the project’s scale, range of prices, ample subsidies, and prioritization of neighborhood residents for occupancy.

“Many African-American families and businesses were forced to relocate from long established communities with no clear path to economic prosperity in Roanoke. [The city extends its] sincere apologies and regret for the pain and loss to the current and former residents of the City’s Urban Renewal districts for the actions of our predecessors in carrying out an Urban Renewal program, [and is committed to] work towards better outcomes moving forward.”

Today Jackson Ward is the site of a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development-funded Reconnecting Communities Grant, which the city is using to study the feasibility of reconnecting North and South Jackson Ward.

"The Reconnect Jackson Ward project will reconnect Jackson Ward and surrounding neighborhoods, separated by I-95/64, through the creation of freeway lid that could contain new development, transportation connections, and public spaces. Reconnect Jackson Ward provides a unique opportunity to reconnect the history and culture of Jackson Ward to the Richmond community."

And in Norfolk, the Redevelopment and Housing Authority (NRHA) has returned to the site of Project One—the first urban renewal project in the United States—where it recently broke ground on the St. Paul's Transformation Project.

Once again armed with HUD funding, in early 2021 the city began bulldozing Tidewater Gardens—one of the very same public housing developments that it built as a part of Project One.

Symbolic of the end of urban renewal and a long-term shift away from public housing and toward individual housing vouchers for low-income residents, Norfolk plans to raze all three Project One public housing developments—nearly 1,700 units in all—replacing them with a newly privatized, mixed-income apartments and townhomes. Echoing urban renewal projects of generations past, the number of units set aside for low-income residents will be considerably lower than the total number of public housing units razed.