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Jan. 18, 2005
Relics of past wrongs
First Ward houses have history city
might prefer to forget
A casual visitor to uptown's First
Ward neighborhood might overlook the nine small houses along
Eighth Street
. If they were noticed, the visitor might wonder how they came to be
there. They're older than the new development around them, and they're
oddly suburban, with large grassy lawns in an area of small, city-sized
lots.
Developer Bobby Drakeford wants to
demolish four of the century-old houses to make room for a 16-unit
condominium project. Some, but not all, of the neighbors object. The
city's planning staff favors the development. The city-county historic
landmarks commission, which last year studied uptown properties, didn't
think the houses were worth designating as historic properties.
But those humble houses tell a
story, one the city and its leaders should not be allowed to forget. They
are there because of the City of
Charlotte
's years of bulldozing black neighborhoods and its callous indifference to
the housing needs of its poorest residents. They are there because some
First Ward residents finally got fed up with the city's brutal urban
renewal of the 1960s and 1970s. They took the city to court. They won. The
city lost. The houses are proof.
In the 1950s and '60s, the city
had plunged eagerly into so-called "urban renewal," using
federal money to bulldoze the black
Brooklyn
neighborhood in uptown's Second Ward. In his "Sorting Out the New
South City,"
Charlotte
historian Tom Hanchett wrote that the demolitions displaced 1,007
Brooklyn
families. "Not a single new housing unit went up to replace the 1,480
structures that fell to the bulldozer," he wrote.
By the '60s, federal officials
threatened to cut off the funding spigot unless the city built housing to
replace what it was destroying in
Brooklyn
and predominantly black First Ward. Thus was born in First Ward, in 1967,
Earle
Village
, a large public housing complex redeveloped in the 1990s.
The First Ward residents' 1972
lawsuit pointed out that cities using federal urban renewal money were
required to relocate displaced residents into affordable units that met
the housing code.
Charlotte
hadn't done that. U.S. District Judge James McMillan ordered the city to
comply. The city dragged its heels. More and more of First Ward was being
demolished. Waiting lists for public housing grew.
The suit lingered for a decade.
Eventually, the judge stopped all First Ward demolitions until the city
met his orders.
By 1979, the city had agreed,
among other things, to build apartments and to move some houses onto
Eighth Street
, mostly from elsewhere in First Ward. It is some of those houses that Mr.
Drakeford's proposal would demolish.
Mr. Drakeford's project should
move ahead. First Ward's destiny is, eventually, to be an urban
environment. Even today, one street of small houses on large lots looks
odd, in the context.
But it would be good if at least
one or two of those little houses survived. They serve as reminders of the
city's once-shameful legacy of urban renewal -- and as monuments to the
courage of those who challenged that legacy and won.
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