HUD cuts threaten more than housing

Kate Armitage doesn’t take kindly to Millington’s disaster-derived nickname.

“Millington has always been known as Flag City because we’re very patriotic here,” said Armitage, the city’s director of Arts, Recreation, Parks and Communications. “But now we’re known as Flood City.

“We really, really hate that designation.”

Yet had Shelby County waited until this year to vie for money to fix the problem, Millington would have been stuck with that moniker even longer.

That’s because a year after Shelby County won a $60 million grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s National Disaster Resilience Competition, the Trump administration announced it would be slashing $6 billion from that department — and eliminating Community Development Block Grants, or CDBGs, altogether.

The grant that Shelby County won in February 2016 came from $1 billion in CDBG funds. And the lion’s share of those funds — $39 million — will go to the Big Creek Wetland and Recreation Area near Millington to create a new flood plain to stop the creek from deluging its neighborhoods and roads during heavy rains.

What that award illuminates is, contrary to popular imagery, CDBG funds aren’t just used to rehabilitate housing, or to fund community self-help projects, or to supplement Meals on Wheels or to help people survive in cities.

Those funds are also used to help people in counties and in other vulnerable areas insulate themselves against the ravages of nature.

And in Millington, people have been living through those ravages for some time — so much that all it takes is a once-waterlogged landmark or two to jog Armitage’s memory of them.

“Here (at Babe Howard Boulevard and U.S. 51) it flooded so much that this area was used as a boat launch to check on people stranded by the flooding,” she said, during a drive earlier this week through the flood plain area, which spans about 1,400 acres, and surrounding neighborhoods.

Armitage called a relative to be sure of the year of the flooding. She thought it was 1989. The relative said 1986. Close enough. But the flood that clearly stood out in Armitage’s memory was the one in 2010; the year when more than 17 inches of rain fell in 24 hours and caused Big Creek to swell and spill into the highways and roads, and into the Indian Meadows neighborhood.

“That year, we had over 1,500 water rescues,” she said. “Most of them took place in this neighborhood.

“These people lost everything they had. That was the saddest thing to see, people losing everything.”

That $39 million, derived from CDBG funding, however, will help guard against future tragedies near Millington. The rest of the $60 million that Shelby County received will be used for flood prevention at the Wolf River Restoration and Greenway in Raleigh and Frayser, the South Cypress Creek Watershed and Neighborhood Development in Southwest Memphis to relocate families vulnerable to flooding and for resilience research to examine risks from floods, earthquakes and other natural disasters.

Shelby County has already begun environmental work on the Millington project. Yet it’s ironic that the suffering of people in this city from the onslaught of floods, a city where thousands showed up in February 2016 to cheer Trump at Millington Regional Airport, would have been all but ignored in his

to have, but it’s one that, for the sake of the democracy, can’t be avoided, he said.

There was “an absolute backlash” to the election of former President Barack Obama, the nation’s first African-American president and those people people are now in power, Belcher said.

But pointing fingers and calling names is not the way forward, he said. The challengeis to stop playing a zerosum game of if “if I win someone has to lose,” he said.

“We’re losing our democracy when people just try to hang on to power and they start doing things that aren’t normal,” he said.

He pointed to the Republican dominated North Carolina state legislature, which called a special session to strip power from a newly elected Democratic governor.

“That’s not called being a Republican or a Democrat. That’s about people who don’t believe in democracy,” Belcher said. “The browning of America will challenge whether or not we believe in democracy or we just believe in power.”

The luncheon is the first of three major fundraising events for the local NAACP, which will hold centennial events throughout the year, said Deidre Malone, president of the largest local NAACP branch.

“It is an exciting time to be a president of this organization based on all of the activities happening in this country. We need the oldest grassroots civil rights organization active,” Malone said.

Belcher is the author of “A Black Man in the White House: Barack Obama and the Trigger of America’s Racial-Aversion Crisis.”

He served as a pollster for the Democratic National Committee under former chairman Howard Dean, was on the polling team for both Obama campaigns and worked with both Senate and House Democrats as a senior political adviser.

He spoke to a room filled with local community leaders, elected officials and longtime NAACP members and discussed how election numbers showedTrump’s win did not grow the Republican Party. And millennials who rejected Trump but believed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton was the same as Trump hurt her at the polls.

Those young people may not know the history of African-American voters and rejected the “binary lessor of two evils” argument that so many of us have lived with, Belcher said. It’s a position that philosophically, he understands.

But, “I am here and most of the people in this room are here because your grandmother, your great-grandmother, your great-grandfather made really sophisticated choices between the lessor of two evils,” he said. “I wouldn’t be here today without my grandparents being able to navigate a treacherous world, making countless decisions about lessor of two evils.”

It’s a point that hit home with Dr. Cynthia Heard, an associate professor at the Southern College of Optometry.

“He was right. They don’t understand what happened with the civil rights movement, with a lot of things that people have endured and continue to endure,” Heard said. “The statement that he made when he said that our mothers, fathers, grandparents had to live with fine lines all their lives and had to make those sophisticated decisions about the lessor of two evils every single moment of their lives. We think maybe their lives were simple. No they were not. They weren’t at all, because they had to survive.”

Reach reporter Linda A. Moore at linda.moore@commercialappeal.com, on Facebook at Linda Anita Moore or on Twitter @LindaAnita.