Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 29, 1990 TAG: 9007310330
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: C-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
A crystal tower housing poverty programs? A community-action agency amid office buildings, stores and restaurants? It seems incongruent. But the eight-story Campbell Street building is a modest structure. And there are many pieces that don't quite fit in this puzzle, now resolved, of where TAP would relocate after being burned out of its old headquarters last December.
One large piece still left out is the Henry Street district across the railroad tracks from downtown. It had been TAP's first choice for a new home.
With federal and state funding still diminishing, the anti-poverty agency understandably wants a higher profile with the city and Roanoke's business establishment. Yet TAP is moving to Campbell Street primarily because its willingness to anchor a revived commercial and entertainment district on Henry Street was not supported.
Maybe it's time to consider where TAP's move downtown leaves Roanoke businesses, middle-class residents, city government - and Henry Street.
Some downtown businessmen seem unsure what to make of their new neighbor. They should consider that TAP not only will bring jobs, payroll and customers downtown. For years the agency also has provided early-childhood education and adult job-training. It's a bulwark against the prospect of an uneducated, ill-trained and unproductive work force, and against the need for companies themselves to provide more training.
TAP's move downtown will prove serendipitous if more Roanoke Valley residents are thereby exposed to its programs and clients. For more than two decades, the agency operated out of an old flour mill next to the railroad tracks, while much of the poverty it has dealt with has remained hidden in secluded areas of the city.
Misperceptions are legion. Many people, for example, assume TAP's clients are mostly black. In fact, two-thirds of the low-income people in the region it serves are white. About half the disadvantaged children in Roanoke city schools are white. In any case, poor people are members of this community, too, and with as big a stake in economic development as anyone. Higher TAP visibility could be educational.
For city officials, too. They rejected a TAP plan for Henry Street that would have required $2.1 million in city funds to help finance the revitalization project. Whatever the merits of that plan, local governments should remind themselves from time to time that TAP brings about $6 million in outside resources to the Roanoke Valley every year. That money is spent on programs, such as shelters for the homeless, for which government should be ultimately responsible - and which would prove far greater a burden on municipal finance if TAP weren't operating them.
Henry Street revitalization is, of course, set back by TAP's move downtown. Total Action Against Poverty had offered to help with an effort begun long ago to redevelop the district. TAP's plans for a music center at the former Dumas Hotel are proceeding. But plans to install commercial business space in front of a TAP Henry Street headquarters are dead.
It may not matter. Stores and restaurants there likely would not prosper without a convention and trade center next door. The uncertainty and costs surrounding the convention-center project are big reasons why the city balked at TAP's funding request.
Still, it's too bad Roanoke has missed the opportunity for TAP to attract close to $1 million of its own money along with private-foundation support for Henry Street revival. The project is particularly important to Roanoke's black community, which in the past has had less than top priority with city government, and has had to give up land for other city projects.
Whether or not a convention center ends up supporting Henry Street's resurrection, and the hope must be that it will, no one should forget that TAP also is an asset - indeed, an even more necessary piece of the local economic development puzzle.
by CNB