ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 14, 1996 TAG: 9604150116
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
note: below
MEMO: ***CORRECTION***
Published correction ran on April 18, 1996.
Budget numbers were incorrect in a story Sunday that implied Roanoke
is spending less on neighborhood upkeep. In the current year, the city
is spending $1,411,045 on paving, a 32 percent increase over fiscal
1993. Expenditures for streets and traffic were substantially more in
1993 than in the current year, in part because of unusually large
equipment purchases. With those items deducted, streets and traffic
expenditures in 1996 were 4.3 percent higher than in 1993.
TEACHER Deborah Jones is acquainted with the best and the worst of Roanoke. Every morning, she leaves her home beside the Roanoke Country Club golf course and drives to her classroom at Crystal Spring Elementary in South Roanoke, the wealthiest part of town.
Home and school are fine. It's what's in between that worries Jones.
"I have to say that when I leave my home in the morning - and I live in Northwest - and I go down Orange Avenue, I get on 10th Street to go across - it's not good; it's not.
"When you go back on Fairfax [Avenue] and Eighth Street, it's not good, and it's a major difference when I leave there and come to work at Crystal. I've had co-workers go with me just back over to Northwest, and it's like, `Why all the trash on the street?' There is more mess there than you would know if you didn't see it."
Deterioration of neighborhoods and the flight of families to the suburbs were among the biggest concerns expressed when The Roanoke Times brought 23 Roanokers together recently to hear their thoughts as they approach next month's City Council elections.
They expressed fondness for their city and pride in its shiny places - the high-tech magnet schools, the City Market, Hotel Roanoke.
But they voiced anxiety about the parts of Roanoke that are off the tourist track.
"It seems to me like a slow deterioration throughout the whole city," said Mike Rhodes, a Northeast Roanoker who builds train cars for Norfolk Southern Corp. "Other than the main area of Mill Mountain coffee shop, it seems like a lot of the city is like that. The neighborhoods are getting more rundown."
Roanoke spends plenty of money on sparkly projects like Hotel Roanoke and its walkway to downtown but not enough on neighborhoods, some Roanokers contend.
"You know, $7 1/2 million for a walkway is wonderful," said Jim Schleuter, a homemaker-dad and part-time teacher, "but you could take that same money and put it into a neighborhood and have amazing results. But nobody really considers that."
"It's not the grandiose" that will really make people want to live in Roanoke, said Petie Cavendish, president of Old Southwest Inc. "It's fixing the cracks in the sidewalk. Roanoke's looking shabby."
Residents spoke of the different Roanokes - the neighborhoods with increasing numbers of rental housing and transient families scattered around the city's four quadrants, and the privileged older sections lined with shade trees and manicured lawns. They said all neighborhoods are not treated the same by city government.
"There are certain neighborhoods in Roanoke that the city is letting deteriorate to the benefit of [real estate agents] and speculators and business," said Jim Crawford, a geographer, carpenter and musician who lives in the Mountain View neighborhood just north of Memorial Bridge. "It creates cheap property where they can come in and tear houses down."
Roanoke's homes are older than ones in surrounding communities. Census documents show that 58 percent of Roanoke homes were built before 1959.
The city is losing people who live in their own homes, the people more likely than renters to keep up their properties. Roanoke's Consolidated Plan, a document prepared to support its applications for federal grants, reported that the proportion of owner-occupied housing in the city went from 57.9 percent in 1970 to 55.7 percent in 1980, and to 52.3 percent in 1990.
Roanoke cannot succeed on the strength of its high-income neighborhoods alone, said Anthony Stavola, president of the Raleigh Court Civic League. "It will not survive with little enclaves like South Roanoke and Raleigh Court, and with everything else going down the tubes. We in Raleigh Court are worried about what's going to happen to Gainsboro. We are worried about what's going to happen in Northwest."
When Rodney Lewis' friends visit, the Northwest Roanoke computer systems specialist has a hard time making Roanoke look good. "My college roommate comes to town, and we drive around town and I say, `I'm not going to take you through this street because you don't want to see this. I'm not going to take you by there because this is pretty embarrassing.'''
Neighborhood decay has been on Roanokers' minds this spring. A winter fire that killed four children and their grandmother in a rented home sped up planning for regular inspections of rental units and penalties against negligent landlords. City Council could receive a proposal as early as next month.
Harold Hodges lives on Day Avenue, an Old Southwest street that has seen more than its share of crime-ridden rental houses. He said it took eight months for police to infiltrate and shut down a crack house behind his property.
"We got in touch with the landlord, and he said he didn't even care what they did up there as long as they paid their rent," Hodges said.
Despite the hardships, Hodges said he appreciates the streets around him. "Some of the homes around here are beautiful old homes. I'm a carpenter, and they're absolutely beautiful. I don't know why the city of Roanoke couldn't encourage more people to buy in town and fix up, instead of driving 30 minutes out of Roanoke and build a $220,000 home. You've already got a $200,000 home here. All you have to do is fix it up a little bit."
Radford Thomas, a Texan-turned-Roanoker who owns a restaurant in Salem, wants action on vacant properties. "There's a lot of houses actually that look like they are condemned, boarded up and been sitting there since I've been in the city," said Thomas, who moved here six years ago. "They ought to be torn down. They're dangerous."
The 1990 census showed 3,354 vacant housing units - 7.6 percent of Roanoke's 44,384 houses and apartments. Most of the vacant properties were rental units; more than a third had been vacant six months or more.
"I just feel that the whole city is deteriorating," said Frank Eastburn, an engineering consultant who lives in Raleigh Court.
"The physical part of the library is deteriorating quite a bit downtown," said Eastburn, who's on the library board, "and to get the city to even fix the roof is taking four years.
``In the meantime, when it rains you'll see 11 big orange buckets sitting on top of tables. If the city brings in a business prospect when it's raining and sees buckets on the tables and plastic over the books...'' Eastburn didn't finish his sentence, but he didn't seem to think it would be a good sign to anyone considering moving here.
Events this year have raised the public's consciousness about neighborhoods. Hearings on the rebuilding of Henry Street - an issue likely to come before council in the months ahead - evoked frustrations with dilapidated conditions in Gainsboro, and City Council recently ordered City Manager Bob Herbert to provide detailed information on 379 requests for curbs, gutters and sidewalks after a news report that many Roanokers have been pleading for decades for such basics on their streets.
The city has reduced spending for services that would make neighborhoods look better. The amount spent on paving has been cut by more than 43 percent - from $1,143,617 in the 1992-93 budget year to $650,000 in each of the past two years. The street and traffic budget has been slashed by more than $723,000 in the past three years, a cut of more than 25 percent.
Residents' fears are grounded as much in the condition of Roanoke's people as of its streets and buildings. They express worries about families moving out of the city, young people leaving town, and teen-age pregnancy.
"Babies having babies," Joan Shannon, a retired General Electric worker, called the young mothers. At 79.6 births per 1,000 teen-agers last year, they were nearly double the state rate of 40.6.
"People, we have to wake up," she said. "We're responsible for these kids. We've got to help them."
Roanokers see affluent families fleeing. "I think our neighborhoods are withering away because everyone is moving out - people moving to Botetourt, North County and Southwest County," Mike Rhodes said.
The city's population has been dropping since 1980, but it has gone up and down for many years. Census figures were 91,921 in 1950, 97,110 in 1960, 92,115 in 1970, 100,220 in 1980, 96,509 in 1990 and, according to Census Bureau estimates released early this month, 95,701 last July.
City leaders say the city and its array of social services for the poor draw low-income people from across Southwest Virginia and keep them here.
The Action Alliance for Virginia's Children and Youth found recently that single women head 31 percent of the city's families, compared with 17 percent statewide. Thirteen percent of families live below the poverty level, while statewide the figure is 8 percent. Nearly a fifth of Roanoke teens are not in school and did not graduate - almost twice the state's 10 percent.
Roanokers say they want all young people, not just gifted students, to finish school, and they want young people to stay here.
"I like my neighborhood a lot," said Pamela Corcoran, who lives in Raleigh Court, "but it very much worries me: There are hardly any young families. I want the city to grow. We need young people who feel like they have a role and a viable future here."
"We don't need to be a Charlotte, but we need to do things to stay on a semi-positive pattern because we're losing a lot of our young people," Rodney Lewis said.
Some city residents see things as mostly good in Roanoke.
Tom Schroeder, a young vice president of his family's small optical company in South Roanoke, recalled the good impressions Roanoke has made on his visitors from bigger cities.
"I ate dinner with somebody from Norfolk at Billy's Ritz last weekend, and they were amazed. Said Norfolk doesn't have anything like that, even though it's a large city. Said they have nothing downtown that's worth going to. It's just dingy and gross. They were just amazed and thought it was wonderful. I even took somebody from Charlotte downtown, and they said the same thing."
Susan Wadsworth, a Raleigh Court homemaker, remembered a special weekend at the Hotel Roanoke.
"One night they had a special deal, and we walked across the walkway kind of like we were tourists. We went down to Mill Mountain Coffee and had breakfast and I thought, `You know, this really has the potential for something great. There are some areas that need to be cleaned up and need to be paid attention to, but it really is very pleasant.'''
"We moved here from Richmond, [where] we had the stereotypical 45-minute commute to go 12 miles simply because we had to cross the river," said lawyer Steven Higgs, who lives in South Roanoke. "And now if I catch every light on the way to work, I have a six-minute commute, and my kids can walk to school....
"What struck me the minute I moved to Roanoke ... is you hear, `Well, we're no Charlotte' or `We're no Greensboro' or `We don't have trash service like they do in Virginia Beach' and `Things would be better if...' and nobody ever sits back to say all the nice things we do have.
"I hear a lot of the criticisms of differences between the neighborhoods, but what I see a lot more [than it] being based on city services, is it being based on lack of any kind of neighborhood peer pressure. People where I live don't throw the furniture out on the sidewalk and leave it out for months because the people next door to them wouldn't put up with it."
Staff writer Dan Casey contributed to this story.
LENGTH: Long : 199 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: headshots of Pamela Corcoran, Radford Thomas, Jimby CNBCrawford and Deborah Jones color.
headshots of Tom Schroeder, Rodney Lewis and Dorothy Harris.