For St. Paul’s residents, transition presents socioeconomic challenges

I grew up in Tidewater Park, now the mostly demolished Tidewater Gardens.

My mother, grandmother and I lived in a three-bedroom home on Mariner Street. When my grandmother died, my mother and I moved to a two-bedroom apartment on Charlotte Street. During that time I attended Norfolk Public Schools, including Ruffner and Booker T. Washington.

Throughout those years the community offered typical neighborhood staples within walking distance — a grocery store, a drug store, clothing stores, a bank. As an adult, I’m now pretty certain I lived in concentrated poverty, but it was hard to tell at the time.

My needs were met. And so were the needs, at different levels, of those around me. However, as time progressed, long-standing rumors of our neighborhood being demolished got louder. The whispers became more menacing and apparent.

Visually, construction of a mall on Monticello Avenue with banner department stores, like Nordstrom, were erected. Neighboring communities, Roberts Park and Bowling Park, were demolished and turned into a mixed-use community now known as Broad Creek.

Red flags.

Subsequently, some Tidewater Park residents with the means made quiet exits. Our longtime Mariner Street neighbor relocated to an apartment in the Youngs Park community, and then a new townhouse community on Church Street. Additionally, Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority began offering homeownership classes.

My mother, who moved to Mariner Street from Maltby Avenue with her five siblings in the 1950s, took advantage of them.

She worked as a certified nursing assistant at St. Mary’s Infant Home, less than a five-minute walk from our apartment, had never had a driver’s license and made less than $30,000 annually.

After working and earning my master’s degree in New York, I returned to my mother’s home in 2007. She was in the throes of finishing her first-time-homebuyer’s course and soon after moved to a new townhouse community in Huntersville. After more than 25 years as a renter, she was a homeowner!

We left the neighborhood excited about her future, but nervous about those who remained. Those we physically left behind, who had been there for decades, we considered dear friends and family.

The hard truth is, many of them didn’t have what my mother had: some sort of inkling of, “Hey, maybe I can do a little bit better. Maybe I should try to do a little bit better. Maybe I should try to make a move now, before I get stuck.”

I’ve always known my mother to be a keen decision-maker, stubborn and a realist. She worked the same job for more than 40 years and took lunch to work every day. Her ways are her ways, her thoughts are her thoughts, her goals are her goals — period.

But though she’s never been a big fan of change, she knows when it’s time. Socioeconomic disparities rob some people of time, however.

According to the American Psychological Association, socioeconomics is “… the position of an individual or group … determined by a combination of social and economic factors such as income, amount and kind of education, type and prestige of occupation, place of residence, and — in some societies or parts of society — ethnic origin or religious background.”

If a person’s position or view affords them only one perspective or experience, can we expect them to automatically amend, independently, to change?

Change fraught with the uncharted terrain of brazen independence, new landscapes and new social spaces can be daunting. If a person has been in the same socioeconomic space for years, generations even, change can be traumatic and hard to embrace, particularly when it’s most necessary.

Let us have patience with the St. Paul’s residents, as many of them look to abandon a lifestyle they haven’t shed. Though the signs were there, and assistance, the socioeconomic strength was not.

Residents can still seek help and relocation assistance with NRHA.