THE UNIVERSITY wrests control of a predominantly black neighborhood and gentrifies it, driving the black residents out, making it impossible for the poor to find housing and destroying the social fabric of a community. University students, blinded by their own privilege and wealth and indifferent to the fate of Charlottesville residents, stand by and watch. The exploitative politics of class and race prevail once again. This was the implicit storyline underlying last Thursday's discussion panel of the short documentary "Fifeville." The documentary was produced by Studio Art Prof. Kevin Everson and Religious Studies Prof. Corey Walker about efforts of private developers to "gentrify" the predominantly black and lower-income Fifeville neighborhood, which lies adjacent to the University.
The reality, of course, is more complex. Two of the four black Fifeville residents interviewed by Walker and Everson supported the Fifeville development without much reservation, believing the development would curb the crime and drugs which once ravaged Fifeville. Two other residents expressed vague reservations about the development, but stopped well short of saying that they wished the development would stop. This did not stop the three panelists, Everson, Walker and Landscape Architecture Prof. Ian Grandison, none of whom have any ties to Fifeville, from rather stridently denouncing the development as an elitist land-grab.
Even worse, the organizers of the event, who nominally stressed the interconnectedness of the University with the Charlottesville community, do not seem to have made any effort to get actual Fifeville residents to attend and to allow their voices to be heard in an unmediated fashion. The handful of Fifeville residents who actually attended raised this point rather strongly, noting that out of the substantial crowd only four were actual Fifeville residents, and that the organizers of the event did not make an effort to promote the event in Fifeville. As one of the Fifeville residents who attended noted, holding such an event without making any effort to attract actual Fifeville residents only reinforces the division between the city and the University.
The propriety of local development initiatives has been a hotly contested issue not only in Fifeville, but across the nation. Too often in these debates, the opinions of the local residents, who must actually bear the brunt of the changes, are ignored or slighted in favor of an overarching ideological perspective.
The problem in low-income neighborhoods is their tendency to depopulate. For a myriad of reasons, poor neighborhoods are often shabbily maintained. The result is that the residents, white and black, tend to move out as soon as they have the opportunity to do so. This means that the ghettoes of inner cities contain swaths of abandoned buildings given over to crime and drugs.
The tendency of responsible governments is to try to improve these areas, often by bringing in large-scale development. Some such initiatives have not succeeded in the past, especially when they displaced non-blighted neighborhoods and were imposed without much community input. The most notorious example of this was Detroit's Poletown project, where the city destroyed a viable neighborhood in order to build an auto factory. Detroit did not measurably improve as a result. But often there simply is no way to improve blighted areas which does not involve making the area more affluent, and this necessarily involves driving out the current residents. It is grossly unfair to imply, as some of the panelists did at the Fifeville discussion, that this process necessarily includes a racial dimension. The Poletown development, for example, involved the efforts of a black mayor to displace the residents of a predominantly white community.
The libertarian, "property rights" opposition to redevelopment falls into the same errors. The response to the Supreme Court's decision in Kelo v. New London, which held that takings of private property for economic redevelopment are constitutional, was largely negative, influenced by an absolutist view on property rights which supposedly derives from the framers. The framers, of course, valued property rights, but they valued local self-government even more, and the Kelo decision properly noted that the Court should defer to the decision-making of local governments who approve redevelopment initiatives with community input.
Often, the residents of blighted neighborhoods are the most enthusiastic proponents of redevelopment. This is true of Fifeville, where one of the main leaders of redevelopment is none other than an African-American Fifeville native, Joe Mallory, who wants to reclaim the area from the real vices of crime and drugs. Community leaders are aware of the risks of redevelopment, but often justifiably believe that it is worse to do nothing and allow their neighborhood to become the next Detroit. Outsiders who would denounce projects like Fifeville might try to actually ascertain the views of the affected residents before speaking on behalf of their presumed interests.
Noah Peters' column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at npeters@cavalierdaily.com.
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