Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 29, 1995 TAG: 9501310071
SECTION: STREET BY STREET PAGE: 8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Estimates range from $10 million to $40 million.
When asked, no one at City Hall, the Roanoke Redevelopment and Housing Authority or the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development could come up with a total. Most of it was federal money from HUD.
"I don't have the slightest idea. I really don't," said Wesley White, the authority's development director.
City documents and old newspaper accounts of City Council budget sessions indicate that at least $22 million has been allocated for the neighborhood since 1972.
Two officials at HUD's Richmond office said the total is around $25 million, but they weren't sure.
The expenditure of that kind of money is not visible in Gainsboro.
A few new streets got sidewalks, curbing and streetlights, Seventy-nine homes and two small sets of apartments were built. The authority and other agencies renovated some homes, and a community-based group, the Southwest Virginia Community Development Fund, built an industrial park with five small industries.
George Heller, former director of the Gainsboro Neighborhood Development Corp., believes that some of Gainsboro's unspent or "rollover" money carried over from prior years was spent to spruce up downtown or other parts of the city, but he has no proof.
Before he died last year, Theodore Holland, a confectionery store owner in Gainsboro, said in an interview that he felt betrayed by the project. "A lot of the money appropriated for Gainsboro, we never saw. All the money went for transportation, for developers out of Washington, consultants. They took the Gainsboro money and used it downtown." He, like Heller, said he had no proof.
Wesley White said there was no diversion of Gainsboro's money when the authority managed it until the mid-1970s, when HUD switched to community block grants and sent them to City Hall. "Whatever money we got from HUD," he said, "went to Gainsboro." Bob Herbert, who had been with the city since 1979 and became city manager in 1985, said he was not aware of any diversion of Gainsboro money, either.
Where did the money go?
For one thing, several hundred homeowners were paid for their houses and received up to $15,000 in addition to find new ones.
Housing authority records show more than 50 contractors doing all kinds of work on the Gainsboro project.
For years, there was a parade of private building inspectors, assessors, engineers, surveyors, architects, landscapers, lawyers, consultants, pavers, appraisers, sign makers, road builders, home builders and other construction companies that made money in Gainsboro.
Fifteen demolition companies won contracts with the authority in 1979 alone to tear down homes and other buildings.
Seven different consulting firms from Washington, Richmond, Baltimore, Charlottesville and other cities studied Gainsboro and made recommendations about how the project should proceed. At least seven lawyers worked on aspects of the project, including acquisitions, closings and title work.
Major contractors such as Hayes, Seay, Mattern & Mattern, a Roanoke architecture and engineering firm, won jobs for up to $1 million in the 1970s and 1980s.
Dr. Walter Claytor, retired Gainsboro dentist and a member of early neighborhood organizations that monitored what city government was doing, said urban renewal triggered the sale and construction of hundreds of homes, a multimillion-dollar domino effect.
First, blacks were forced from their homes and into adjacent white neighborhoods. Whites then built houses in subdivisions farther from downtown. That fed the purses of developers, bankers, real estate agents, carpenters, roofers, surveyors, the lawyers who oversaw the property changes and everyone else in the real estate and construction industries.
"It was a real industry around urban renewal," Earl Reynolds Jr., Roanoke's former chief planner and assistant city manager, said of such projects nationwide. "But the missing piece was that the black community and the poor people, black and white, they did not get a piece of that economic pie."
by CNB