Westside struggling to stay alive
A neighborhood grocery has reopened its doors. But what becomes of the impoverished area as downtown closes in?
The police stop was about much more than a pack of cigarettes.
Malcolm Johnson and Fredrick Jones rounded the corner onto Grove Street and saw two officers stationed outside of College Hill Courts, the city’s largest and oldest public housing site, around 8 p.m. on May 2.
Johnson, a 23-yearold Westside resident who is black, had seen many young black men stopped on Chattanooga’s Westside and caught a few misdemeanor offenses himself.
But turning around in a high-crime area would only arouse law enforcement’s suspicions, he said.
“I’m going to let them stop me, and I did,” Johnson said May 3. “I have nothing on me.”
Ordinarily, the men said, they would have turned left onto Grove Street to buy cigarettes from the Westside Shop, a lone convenience store in an area that has long struggled to attract a wholesale grocer. The city had boarded up the shop’s doors in late April after prosecutors said it had become a breeding ground for fights, drug deals and other illegal behaviors.
But on that day, the men turned right and walked into College Hill Courts, where Johnson’s cousin said she would sell them tobacco — and where officers often patrol for nonresidents who may bring crime into the housing complex.
That night, two officers stopped them and asked them questions for 30 minutes to determine whether they were a threat, Johnson said.
What was Johnson’s mother’s name? Why was he staying in the Westside? Were either one of them gang members? The men repeated their tobacco story and said they weren’t gang members.
Ultimately, they weren’t arrested.
“It wasn’t always a bad place to live, but we have to look at what changed.”
– SHERMAN MATTHEWS, A UNITY GROUP CHAIRMAN
But standing on the Westside a day after the encounter, Johnson and Jones echoed what many pastors, activists and other community members have said about this majorityblack area: Beneath the daily frustration of police stops, poverty and lack of access to food or education, one factor above all drives anxiety on the Westside — getting pushed out.
You pass a handful of notable landmarks on the way to the Westside.
The Chattanooga Convention Center, Main Street, Riverfront Parkway, U.S. Highway 27. There’s growth and development in all directions for restaurants, hotels and businesses.
But concealed from the city next door are about 3,500 residents who understand what’s coming next.
“People just view this area as investments,” said David Prewitt, 70, who lives in the Golden Gateway Apartments on Grove Street.
Prewitt, the son of a factory worker and a housewife, moved onto the Westside in 1970 after four years in Texas with the U.S. Air Force. For the past three decades, he and several others have watched this stable black community crumble under the weight of development and lack of opportunity.
“It wasn’t always a bad place to live,” said Sherman Matthews, a Unity Group chairman who used to work as a juvenile probation officer on the Westside. “But we have to look at what changed. What created the problems we have now? Part of it I consider land grabbing: The displacement of people in order to gentrify the community and allow more affluent people to move back into the inner city.”
Up the road from Prewitt’s home, the James A. Henry School shut down years ago. So have the businesses. A salon, laundromat, restaurant and Dollar General in the Grove Street retail center all failed. The Westside Shop, which received permission from the courts to reopen its doors earlier this month, is the only operating business now. But it’s also struggled to
obtain fresh food, resorting instead to selling snacks, alcohol, cigarettes and other basic items.
Most of the residents don’t have generational wealth, easy access to nutritious food, or a way out of everyday crime, Prewitt said.
Prewitt pointed to four police cruisers on a recent weekday that lined a culde-sac at the end of Grove Street. Four officers stood in the sun taking notes while residents looked on from their apartment stoops. The police were probably investigating some drug dealers, Prewitt said. A few minutes later, they rolled away. No arrests. And the residents went back to their day.
Why is there such a visible police presence on the Westside?
“Chattanooga police officers patrol based on crime statistics, requests from community members, and officer intelligence. The number of … officers in any given area throughout the city is a result of these three factors,” Deputy Chief David Roddy said in an email.
In their petition to close the Westside Shop, prosecutors said police went to the Grove Street location nearly 300 times between 2014 and 2016 for traffic stops, suspicious persons, and a handful of burglaries, shots-fired calls and drug deals.
Earlier this month, the Westside Shop offered police a rent-free space
at the Grove Street center. Although there’s been no formal sitdown yet, Roddy, City Council District 7 Councilman Erskine Oglesby and the shop’s representatives have been discussing the proposition, police spokeswoman Elisa Myzal said Friday.
Community members who’ve watched black communities shrivel in the name of fighting crime say they are skeptical. They don’t believe law enforcement is the only answer for a ZIP Code in which 66 percent of the population is black and 50 percent are 40 years or older. Nearly 1,500 people live alone and another 376 households are single-parent homes, 2015 census data shows.
Matthews said more police will help. “But also keep in mind,” he said, “the deterioration of this particular area was on purpose.”
Complicating today’s issue is the Chattanooga Housing Authority saying in 2014 that it plans to eventually close College Hill Courts.
“What plans have the city and housing authority made regarding where current residents will go?” asked Helen Burns Sharp, a former city planner director who founded Accountability for Taxpayer Money. “Given its prime location, developers are probably salivating, hoping to redevelop that site
with market-rate housing.”
CHA Executive Director Betsy McCright said she has not yet applied to demolish the 497-unit, which was built in 1940 and hasn’t been expanded since. In the meantime, the housing authority is looking ahead using what McCright calls the “people’s first approach.”
“That means as we build new units around the city, we would offer those new units to College Hill Courts residents who want to move to them,” she said. “And if they choose to move out, it would not be a mandated move — to the extent it’s feasible.”
But feasibility is a major hurdle for the authority. The agency maintains 2,400 public housing units on roughly $3 million in capital funds from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, McCright said. For perspective, College Hill Courts and East Lake Courts on Fourth Avenue need about $50 million and $38 million in renovations, respectively.
With HUD funding significantly decreasing over the years, McCright said, the housing authority has leaned heavily on tax credit programs to finance new projects. In that scenario, private investors put money into housing projects and earn tax credits for a 10-year period, she said.
“We at the housing authority then have to keep property affordable for a
minimum 15-year period,” McCright said. “And then we have the option to own that property and manage it fully as affordable housing. So it’s a way to make improvements and develop properties.”
Some examples of tax-credit programs in Chattanooga are Maple Hills Apartments, The Oaks at Camden Apartments, Greenwood Terrace Apartments and the Villages at Alton Park.
McCright said she couldn’t speak on behalf of the city that deterioration of the Westside was purposeful.
“All I can say is, on behalf of the housing authority, we have done our best to try to maintain the property, because we know of the incredible need,” she said. “We are realists, though, and we know we can’t keep [College Hill Courts] going another 30 to 40 years because it’s aging.”
What McCright doesn’t want is a repeat of what happened with the Harriet Tubman public housing development, which the city agency demolished in 2014, uprooting about 300 families in one fell swoop. The authority also demolished 188 units at Maurice Poss Homes in 2005 and the Spencer J. McCallie Homes between 2001 and 2003.
“That was not the way we wanted to do business, but unfortunately there hadn’t been a lot of planning for that day over the two decades previously,” she said.
Funding construction also is a challenge.
HUD shot down a $38 million authority request in January to renovate Cromwell Hills Apartments. That would have added 50 new units near the Camilla Drive site — and provided a place for some College Hill Courts residents.
College Hill Courts is not the only public housing site on the Westside; there’s Jaycee Towers and The Overlook for seniors. But the money drives the market, Westside residents say, and it’s only a matter of time before they’re pushed further out of downtown.
Johnson said he understands the city needs tourism and that affluent visitors don’t want to see depressing things like “the projects” as they drive off the interstate.
“They want porches and drinks and beautification,” he said.
But many Westside residents are trapped because of poverty, can’t afford their own cars, and have to arrange travel to nearby stores and restaurants because of perceptions about crime, he said.
Residents used to walk or take the bus the 1 1/2 miles to Buehler’s Market on Market Street, but that closed in April.
The best options now are Food City on Tennessee Avenue, 2.2 miles away; Rogers Super Market on Main Street, 3.3 miles away; and Wal-Mart on Signal Mountain Road, 4.2 miles away.
“Crime isn’t just in the projects,” Johnson said, “it’s in the suburbs and middle class, too. You don’t see me coming in and tearing down your suburbs. But you all look at me like, ‘What are you doing out there?’ We’re living human beings, too.”
Just then, a scream cut across the parking lot where Johnson, Jones and Bradley were talking. A young woman yelled at someone on the other side of a brick wall.
Johnson watched quietly until a door slammed shut. The shouting was over, for now. The sun beat down as Johnson continued to stare at something far away.
“There’s already so much tension,” he said.