ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, April 29, 1996 TAG: 9604290069
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
PETIE CAVENDISH is leaving Roanoke with mixed feelings about the fate of city neighborhoods, which she helped organize into a political force.
Her neighbors say Petie Cavendish started talking about Roanoke's rundown housing practically the moment she moved into Old Southwest.
That was four years ago, and she never stopped fretting over decaying houses in the neighborhoods near downtown.
Wednesday, Cavendish moves to Tennessee, leaving behind initiatives that may strengthen Roanoke neighborhoods and their relations with City Hall. She leaves frustrated with a city government she sees as autocratic, but she is hopeful that Roanoke residents and their government leaders are finally learning how to talk honestly with each other.
By her looks and lifestyle, you wouldn't expect Cavendish to be much of a reformer or government critic. She's a corporate wife with country-club graciousness and an antique-filled house worthy of a feature in House Beautiful. For meetings, she dresses Coco Chanel-style - prim pumps, pageboy, suit jackets heavy with gold buttons. Her husband, a Democrat, calls her "a little Republican lady."
"She is, I think, the typical Southern lady, a gentle, smooth way, a soft voice," said her friend and fellow Old Southwest troubleshooter, Joel Richert. "But underneath that soft voice, she's tough as nails."
Cavendish and her husband, Shenandoah Life marketer Jim Cavendish, rented an apartment in South Roanoke when they arrived here in 1991. Petie Cavendish found South Roanoke too homogeneous; six months later, the couple bought a big brick home on Walnut Avenue in Old Southwest. She needed more hubbub, more diversity.
As a board member of Old Southwest Inc. and its president until early this month, she pulled on her sweats, stifled her overwhelmed olfactories and walked into some of the filthy apartments of Old Southwest. She came out fuming about slum housing and the "whiny little pissants" at City Hall who weren't doing anything about it.
"I think Roanoke is like a lot of cities that have not addressed urban blight and woke up one day and realized the city's gone," she said.
Last year, Cavendish banded with other neighborhood leaders and began pressuring the city administration for regular inspections of rental housing. When she criticized the slowness in writing up a plan, the city added her to the panel of landlords, neighborhood leaders and others that drafted one. The inspections plan goes up for a City Council vote next month.
Ted Edlich, director of Total Action Against Poverty and the main mover behind rental inspection, said it was Cavendish who got him thinking about it as a weapon against housing deterioration when they met at a housing meeting two or three years ago. "She really triggered my imagination, and she's triggered other people's imaginations. I think she's a real model for leadership in other neighborhoods. She doesn't give up."
Cavendish helped form the Presidents' Council, officers of about 20 neighborhood organizations who began meeting last winter to share common problems and solutions in everything from crime to bulk trash pickup. Veteran neighborhood leaders say it's the first time they can recall that elected leaders from South Roanoke, Northwest, Southeast and all over the city breached traditional neighborhood, racial and economic lines to come together for frank discussion.
"She's made us friends in places where we didn't have friends before," said Paula Prince, who just took over as Old Southwest's president. "What she wanted for Old Southwest, she wanted for all the neighborhoods. What she wanted for us, she wanted for the whole city."
Jeanette Manns, president of the Washington Park Alliance in Northwest Roanoke, said she met Cavendish at a City Council meeting and was inspired by her to set up neighborhood summits of people from across the city. "I used to think that people in Southwest had it better than we did," Manns said. "I went over to Southwest and to Petie's house, and they've got problems too; they have just worked on them for years."
Cavendish also was successful in fighting applications for beer and wine licenses at three Old Southwest markets. The neighborhood blamed the sale of cheap alcohol at neighborhood stores for violent crime, noise and litter.
And Cavendish recently was instrumental in preserving green space near the corner of Franklin and Woods avenues in Old Southwest.
Richert hopes Roanoke's neighborhood leaders will be as vigilant as Cavendish was about preserving neighborhoods. "There are a few people with the city who'll try to pull a thing or two now that she's gone," she warned.
"It's a huge loss for [Old Southwest]," Prince said, "but it's a loss for the city. She's good; she's really good. She's a little dynamo."
"We're losing a very good person," said Estelle McCadden, president of the Melrose/Rugby Neighborhood Forum in Northwest. "She stands up for what she thinks is right."
Cavendish finds it painful to be leaving Roanoke, especially in the springtime.
"I think it's probably the most beautiful place I've ever lived," she said this week. She grew up in northern Arkansas, moved here from Lebanon, Tenn., where she started a neighborhood organization ("Same reason: slumlords.") and is moving to Murfreesboro, Tenn. Her husband will be regional marketing director for Shenandoah Life there.
Cavendish's complaint about Roanoke is that she sees no strong leadership or real vision on City Council or in the city administration. "I think it needs a much more participatory political system. We need stronger leadership. We need proactive government."
She doesn't see council members getting out into neighborhoods enough.
"Look at this city," she said. "Look at what it needs. Come to any neighborhood. There are places in my neighborhood that need sidewalks and gutters. Don't just drive by and say, 'This is the way it's always been.' Drive by and say, 'How could we make things different?'''
"I don't necessarily think this city has created a climate for leadership," she continued. "It's been very paternalistic - 'We'll do this for you.' That's not how you create leadership. First of all, the city has to want leadership. It has to believe its citizens have the creativity to solve their problems, and it has to create the opportunity for that to occur."
But she thinks it's coming, now that residents are speaking out. The process of shaping the rental-inspection proposal was a departure from the Roanoke way of governing, she said. "All the players sat at the same table. It wasn't the city driving it. It was actually driven by the citizens. I think this is only the beginning of how it's going to happen here.
"We need leadership that's not political leadership, but that's grounded in neighborhood, grass-roots knowledge. Roanoke is finally beginning to generate energy from within. It won't be easy. I think it's going to be difficult for the powers-that-be to ride a wild horse.
"I think Roanoke's going to be a very different place in the next five years," she said. "It's Roanoke's time. Citizens are waking up to the fact that this is their government."
LENGTH: Long : 123 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: PAUL L. NEWBY II/Staff. Petie Cavendish helped start theby CNBfirst independent consortium of Roanoke neighborhood organizations,
which has helped the groups gain clout with city leaders. color.