ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, September 8, 1996 TAG: 9609090058
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: S.D. HARRINGTON STAFF WRITER
note: below
MARION Ferguson has all the necessities in the modest Southeast Roanoke neighborhood where she has lived for 48 years. A bank, a grocery and a drugstore are within walking distance. She knows all the store clerks and bank tellers. The widowed retiree doesn't have a car, but her tidy Bullitt Avenue house - with its fenced-in yard and flower garden - is on the bus line, and it's just a quick ride downtown.
But an important part of her neighborhood has been disappearing - the people who live there.
For two decades, the nearby Evangel Foursquare Church and its pastor, Ken Wright, have been buying up property in the 600 and 700 blocks of Bullitt and Jamison avenues. The church at 612 Bullitt wants to expand and to improve what it calls a troubled neighborhood.
The church buys the houses when owners are willing to sell, usually rents them out for a few years, and eventually tears them down when they become too expensive to maintain.
Only six houses stand in the way of the church's ownership of its own block and the block to the east, an area bounded by Jamison, Bullitt and Eighth Street.
But a cluster of homeowners in the 700 block of Bullitt is determined to keep what's left of the block intact.
The church tore down the two houses that once stood to the west of Ferguson's house. In all, it has demolished five houses on her block. By the end of the year, the church is expected to level the five remaining houses on Jamison, across the alley from her home.
Thursday, demolition crews tore down two houses at the corner of Jamison and Seventh Street.
"As long as I can breathe, [Wright] won't get this one," Ferguson said.
Rosa Courtney has lived next to Ferguson for 13 years. Although the church hasn't made a formal offer for her house, she says someone affiliated with it asked indirectly whether she'd be willing to sell.
"[Wright is] not going to get mine; I know that for a fact," said Courtney, whose husband died this year. "These little properties don't mean a lot to most people, but they're home. We've got our own little community here."
You hear the same from Janeva Parker and her son, Bill, who live next to Courtney. The church offered $10,000 for their family's home of more than 60 years.
It's assessed for tax purposes at $13,500.
"If they do want to buy them, they ought to give people a decent price," Bill Parker said.
Different visions
Right now, the residents see only that houses are being demolished around them. What they haven't seen are the church's plans for the property.
In 1977, Wright's Second Foursquare Church in Southeast Roanoke merged with the First Foursquare Church in the 600 block of Bullitt Avenue. The merged church was renamed Evangel Foursquare Church and has about 350 active members, Wright said.
The neighborhood then was blighted by drug activity and decaying houses, he said, and he wanted to change that.
In 1978, he shared with his congregation a vision. A conceptual drawing showed a 150-unit apartment complex for the elderly, an expanded church-operated child-care center, a religious bookstore and a new sanctuary. There would be ample parking around each building.
Between 1977 and 1980, Evangel Foursquare bought 15 lots in the 600 and 700 blocks of Jamison and Bullitt. At least seven of the properties were residences. After a five-year pause, the church began buying again and has added another 12 properties.
Sometimes the church bought property in its own name. Other times, Wright bought it in his name or the name of Vine and Branch Inc., a company he formed with other church leaders.
Wright said the church was not aggressive in its land acquisitions.
"We've only bought [properties] as they came available. We haven't been in hot pursuit," he said last week.
It may be a while before real development begins. There are no definite plans now other than to demolish the remaining houses along the 700 block of Jamison and pave the land for parking lots.
Wright defends what Evangel Foursquare has done so far. As examples of blight in the neighborhood, he cites two properties owned by longtime Roanoke landlord Frank Roupas that have been condemned and boarded up more than once. One of the houses was recently fixed up and is now occupied. The other is still vacant.
"We are the people who are transforming the neighborhood," Wright said. "I don't know of anyone else who's investing the time and money."
In fact, Wright said the church's goal all along has been to improve the neighborhood.
The church opened a child-care center in 1978, but Wright said that isn't the only way the church has given back to the neighborhood.
"We serve the neighborhood as any church does," he said. "Everything is giving."
The church gives away 50 to 100 turkeys and dinner fixings every Thanksgiving, Wright said. And every year it participates in Clean Valley Day. In fact, he said, one year the church won a citywide award for picking up the most trash.
"Ever since I've been here, I've only worked to improve the neighborhood," Wright said. "I think it has gotten better. There's less crime and drugs.
"I think most neighbors would agree that we've only improved" the neighborhood.
But some residents who live or used to live in the 600 and 700 blocks of Jamison and Bullitt disagree with the approach the church is taking to clean up the neighborhood and say it's Evangel Foursquare that's creating the blight.
"Progress gets in the way," Ferguson said. "He's not interested in a place for people to live. He's just into whatever it is he's wanting to build."
"I think it's terrible," said Roupas, the landlord. "Those nice old homes - they're going to knock them all down."
Family community
Like most of Southeast Roanoke, the 600 and 700 blocks of Jamison and Bullitt traditionally were white and working class.
Eli Meadows, a retired carpenter who lived at 725 Jamison for 23 years before selling to the church this summer, recalls a painter, a steel mill worker and a railroad worker who once lived on his block. Most residents owned their homes, he said. Even the renters stayed a while. One neighbor rented a house for more than a decade.
"It was what I'd call a family community," said Ferguson, who worked as a dressmaker for 23 years at the Kenrose Manufacturing Co. "Now they move in and out so fast you never really get to know them. People just don't stay."
In 1958, the American Viscose Corp.'s synthetic silk plant - which provided jobs for hundreds, if not thousands, of Southeast Roanokers - closed its shops. Another big employer, Norfolk and Western, merged with Southern Railway and moved its headquarters to Norfolk beginning in 1982. With those changes, many of the jobs in Southeast were gone.
Some homeowners found new jobs and stayed. Others moved. When those who stayed died, few young families moved into the neighborhood to take their place, residents said.
Much of the housing deteriorated, and housing prices suffered in Southeast Roanoke and other central-city neighborhoods. Speculating landlords were able to buy houses cheap and divide them into rental units.
Census statistics for 1990 show that in about a 15-block portion of Southeast Roanoke that includes the 600 and 700 blocks of Jamison and Bullitt, almost 64 percent of the occupied housing units were rental. Only about 30 percent of the homes were occupied by their owners.
Eventually everything around Meadows became rental. By the time he sold his property in July, his was the only owner-occupied house on the block. The church owned the rest.
"You couldn't get them to do nothing" to the houses, Meadows said. "[The church] was just letting them go into a slum, and I was right in the middle."
Other residents along Jamison and Bullitt acknowledge that their neighborhood has had its share of problems.
Janeva Parker remembers it being a lot quieter when she and her husband moved to the neighborhood more than 60 years ago. Bullitt was a two-lane road with very little traffic. All that changed in the early 1970s when Virginia 24 was routed through the neighborhood, converting Jamison and Bullitt into buzzing one-way routes westward and eastward, respectively.
In decline
As crime increased and structures deteriorated, some longtime Southeast residents grew tired of the neighborhood's decline.
Mary McPherson was one of those looking to get out. After her husband died in 1982, she inherited the two houses her husband's parents had owned for more than 50 years, including the one she and her husband had lived in.
The realty agent representing Evangel Foursquare Church offered to buy her two houses in 1987, but she turned him down, she said.
In 1989, the same agent approached her again, this time with an offer to swap her houses for two houses in another section of Southeast Roanoke. She liked that idea, and the church bought two houses near Stonewall Jackson Middle School and swapped them for her two on Jamison.
This summer, the church got Meadows to sell, too. For 18 years, he said, the church had wanted to buy his house. Wright first offered the assessed tax value: $10,000. Then he raised the offer to $25,000. By 1991, Meadows' house was the only one on the block not owned by the church. When Wright offered $42,500 this year, Meadows took it.
With the money, Meadows was able to buy a house on 12th Street Southeast for himself and his wife and pay off a mortgage on another house he had been fixing up on Church Avenue Southeast. His son's family moved into the Church Avenue house. They had been renting a house from Evangel Foursquare Church one house down the block from their father.
"I was glad to get out of the neighborhood," Meadows said. "When I moved there in '73, that was a nice neighborhood. Everyone kept their properties up. It was a beautiful place."
Meadows said he feels bad for the neighbors he left behind. He and his wife now have an ivory-trimmed house on a quiet street near Jackson Middle School. The brick house he lived in for 23 years on Jamison Avenue now has vacant lots on both sides, with just some brick and blocks of wood remaining from the structures that once stood there.
Meadows' former home also will probably be torn down soon, but that's fine with him. He was glad to get out of the neighborhood.
The church "just plumb wiped it out," he said.
LENGTH: Long : 193 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. ERIC BRADY STAFF Ken Wright, pastor of Evangelby CNBFoursquare Church, has led the effort to buy properties for the
church's expansion. color
2. Marion Ferguson (from left), Rosa Courtney and Janeva Parker say
they won't sell their homes on Bullitt Avenue Southeast to the
church. color
3. A repair order from a Roanoke building inspector hangs from a
church-owned house. color
4. Map of neighborhood color STAFF