Alice James perseveres in the face of rising property values
The backhoe rests its weary arm atop the dented earth on this patch of Annapolis that developers are calling “Parkside Preserve” for its proximity to Quiet Waters Park.
There is irony in its pretense at preserving anything, considering stacks of limbless tree trunks are all that remain of the woods on this offshoot of Forest Drive where four generations of Alice James’ family have called their “well-kept family secret.”
They once owned most of the acreage along Annapolis Neck Road, where they harvested apples and pears and bucketloads of grapes. It still feels a little bucolic here at the end of the road, where her little one-story house sits atop a small hill with a gravel driveway.
A few blue jays and a dozen chickadees alight from a tangle of old grape vines when a rare and misguided car pokes along the pot-holed side road and turns itself around on the dead end.
Now, on the eve of her 85th birthday, Alice James chuckles when she recalls the pressure she has faced over the years to sell out to the encroaching “preserve.”
“I told that man, ‘Don’t call me anymore,’” Alice said, sitting in a deep armchair, a flowered throw across the back, her long, elegant brown hands folded in her lap. “He told me that he could give me enough money to relocate. I said, ‘How are you going to give me enough money to relocate? You don’t know where I want to relocate —
I decided I wanted to relocate. But I like where I am. So don’t call me no more!’”
Then there was the con artist who came to her door saying the property was his and that she had to vacate immediately. She sent him away as well, telling him, “I’m old, but I’m not crazy.”
She and her eldest son, Charles James, 66, both laugh again recalling another huckster who arrived, asking her why she didn’t want to sell her home when the person on the right side of her house was selling and the person on her left was selling.
“I told him, ‘You’re lying,’” she said, “On the one side of me is my cousins and I know they’re not selling, and on the other side is Quiet Waters Park. I said, ‘Don’t bother me!’”
In many ways, the Jameses’ face-off with encroaching development is the same story that is being told and retold around the country and for generations of Annapolitans. Land and space that has been devalued for years due to segregation becomes desirable, and people of color are pressured out. It’s why only a small portion of the land once held by African Americans in town is still owned by African Americans.
I’m part of that story. Twenty-five years ago, my husband and I were the newcomers who came to Annapolis, bought a first home in a predominantly black neighborhood for a racially-devalued price, lived there for three years, then added a coat of paint and advertised the cramped attic as a “writer’s nook” and managed to sell it for almost double the price.
Like a lot of people around here, I couldn’t afford to live in Annapolis now if I hadn’t benefited from decades of racist housing policies that left some neighborhoods’ home values stagnating and others soaring.
A 2018 study by the Brookings Institution found owner-occupied homes in black neighborhoods are undervalued by $48,000 per home on average, which is part of what makes Alice James’ home so attractive to buyers today.
James once lived with her aunt and her four children in the house adjacent to my starter home on Lafayette Avenue, right across from what is now the 7-Eleven. We shared a wall with her eldest child, Sandra James. We welcomed our first son home in that house and tucked love notes to future owners behind every new sheet of drywall we installed because we loved living there — and that, in turn, made us love Annapolis.
When I mention my old address to Alice, her eyes light up as she lists a whole litany of families who used to live alongside her in the 1970s, before she built her Annapolis Neck house in 1979. One by one, we ticked off names of mutual acquaintances and realized that, of the old guard, only one black family on the street remains. And they are increasingly alone on their side of West Street.
Charles James said he gets emotional when he passes his old downtown family home and remembers all the children who grew up with him on Lafayette Avenue, all scattered now.
By many measures, it can be seen as progress that in city after city, maps of racial change show predominantly minority neighborhoods near downtowns growing whiter, while outlying neighborhoods that were once largely white are experiencing more racial diversity as more people of color buy into the suburbs.
“A lot of those people were offered what seemed like a huge amount of money at the time. A lot of the blacks were pushed out of the city, years ago, to places like Arundel on the Bay, Oyster Harbor and Highland Beach. Now they are gated communities and you can’t get in there.” Charles James
Certainly, the Jameses’ property is appreciating now, but it comes at a price to our cultural landscape.
Charles James has seen plenty of cautionary tales, but he is, more than anything else, “a realistic person.”
“A lot of blacks have been pushed out of their homes,” he says, listing streets like Lafayette, Pinkney, Cornhill and Fleet, which he remembers as being predominantly black, as having gone through the same pressures his mom is now experiencing.
“A lot of those people were offered what seemed like a huge amount of money at the time. A lot of the blacks were pushed out of the city, years ago, to places like Arundel on the Bay, Oyster Harbor and Highland Beach. Now they are gated communities, and you can’t get in there.”
The thing is, Alice James plans to live in her house until it is just about time to die. And then she wants to die in a hospital, so that the house will continue to only hold good memories for her large extended family.
Those memories are her legacy, as her grandparents’ orchards were theirs. Like her daughter welcoming us as neighbors in 1995, Alice James welcomes whoever comes to populate the other end of the street and beyond, if ever the city and the developers can finalize the plans and get that demoralized backhoe moving again.
“It will be different,” she says, accepting the promise and the peril of economic forces beyond her control.
Some of those forces may be powerful enough to reverse hundreds of years of segregation and give whites and blacks an opportunity to share streets and yards, walls and walkways. Some of those forces will try to take advantage of the economic shift and bury the dream of middle-class homeownership in their wake.
“Sometimes money just buys you grief,” Alice says. “It’s not for me. I want to live a peaceful life. Right here.”