Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, January 29, 1995                   TAG: 9501310082
SECTION: STREET BY STREET                    PAGE: 6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

THE LOSS STILL STINGS

"It's a matter of rebuilding the neighborhood with the same people, the same institutions and the same businesses, but in new quarters," Wesley White, who later oversaw the acquisition and demolition of homes for the authority, said in a 1972 newspaper story. "All we can say is, `Give us a chance.'''

By then, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development required each urban renewal project to have a citizens' group, called a Project Area Committee.

The idea was that people living in the area or running businesses there would have a say in how urban renewal was done. But things were changing quickly. Late in 1969, President Nixon reduced funding for the first HUD initiative proposed for Gainsboro, the Neighborhood Development Program.

Former City Council member Mary Pickett says Gainsboro got caught between conflicting philosophies of urban planning: One said save and restore a neighborhood; the other said tear it down and build something else. "Gainsboro people got mixed up in the two theories," she said.

City leaders still pushed for redevelopment, though. Roanoke won a $1.2 million federal grant for Gainsboro in 1972. By then, some in the neighborhood feared that Gainsboro's renewal wouldn't be all that different from Northeast's.

Gainsboro dentist Walter Claytor resigned as chairman of the Gainsboro citizens' group in February 1972. He warned residents that the group was only advisory and did "not have the final say-so as to what transpires in the project impact area." The housing authority and a "rubber stamp" City Council were firmly in command, he said. He advised residents to "direct your energies toward ... protecting your rights and your property."

Any early desire by government to save Gainsboro's old buildings was fading. A Washington consultant hired by the city said in 1973 that only 113 of 699 homes surveyed in Gainsboro were suitable for rehabilitation. Housing rehab had been cut from the federal budget.

Over the years, hundreds of Gainsboro residents sold their houses to the authority and moved to new neighborhoods. The authority ran a social-service program to ease the transition.

It opened an office in the former Fizer Funeral Home on Gainsboro Road and organized a food bank, cookouts, coffee hours, trips to Fairystone Park and other outings for kids. Gloria Martin counseled old people who were being moved out. "We carried them back and forth to doctors. We got very close to them. These were people who had lived there 40 or 50 years."

The residents got three times the money that Northeast families had received. Besides payment for their homes, Gainsboro residents were given up to $15,000 to help buy new ones, plus a few hundred dollars for the move.

Looking back on the Gainsboro project, Lewis Lionberger, on the housing authority's board during the project's years, scoffed at the complaints of people who were forced to move. "Well, I think it was just as good as it could be. They wanted something for nothing, with some cake and pie to put on it."