Metro Pulse/Color Conscious/Leveling the Playing Field

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Will HOPE VI work for African American Knoxvillians?

by Attica Scott

"It is one thing to throw people from different worlds together in a classroom or an Army boot camp and yet another thing to make them feel a connection that produces a sense of community and mutual commitment. More is needed than proximity."
—Christopher Edley, Jr., 1996

After living in Knoxville for 10 years, I have come to wonder whether or not our so-called community development efforts are truly producing "a sense of community and mutual commitment." As a person of color, I see some benefit of these efforts in my community, but I have to question if what's being done is paternalistic or does the Knoxville power structure truly attempt to engage people of color in these efforts. One example of an activity that seems to be more paternalistic than truly engaging is the HOPE VI Project being built by KCDC, the local housing agency.

HOPE VI is an effort to revitalize the Mechanicsville community by demolishing the College Homes housing development and replacing it with single family and duplex units. No, this is not urban renewal or removal revisited, although if it looks like a fish and smells like a fish... The overarching goal is community revitalization.

In some cities like Louisville, Ky., this program works. In Louisville, 1,100 units of housing for the Park DuValle housing complex were redesigned. The requirements for moving into these units are relatively strict. I know people who are now living there and others who have been on a waiting list for nearly a year. Those on the waiting list are there because they do not meet the requirements of either being a single family, having an income below a certain level, or having a documented need for the housing. Will the HOPE VI project work in Knoxville? I don't know.

I was a member of the HOPE VI Revitalization Steering Committee. During that time, I witnessed the process not working from the beginning. There was only one active resident on the Steering Committee. There were residents who wanted to move and residents who did not want to move. One individual could not possibly have represented both sides.

In my opinion, it is during the initial stage of any effort that mutual respect, support, and trust is developed. Unfortunately, I did not see that mutuality happen in Knoxville. What I did observe were the developers and planners constructing their own design and presenting it to stakeholders and residents for "buy in." I also noticed that once the Steering Committee was dissolved after the funding had been received, KCDC developed an Advisory Committee that initially had no resident involvement. It was because of the outspokenness of members of the Advisory Committee that residents were eventually added. Hopefully, this Advisory Committee has the power to monitor and evaluate this project.

We have already seen families displaced with little regard to the community that was built over the years in the College Homes housing development. For some, elitist notions of what a community is prevented them from realizing that housing developments are communities. For others, our experience that a "project" is just another word for "experiment" makes us believe that the people living in College Homes were guinea pigs to again be experimented on until a project is found that truly empowers residents through economic development, home ownership, and supportive services.

There are skeptics who feel strongly that the negative statistics used to gain the federal funding for this HOPE VI project were drawn from African Americans who will probably not be able to move back into the homes that are being built. This may be paranoia, but the perception of some is that it is the practice of Caucasians to write grants using these negative statistics, promising that African Americans will reap the benefits, and then we don't have access to those benefits. I hope to be proven wrong in this instance, especially since less than half of the former residents have applied to move into the new housing. Together, our community must explore what barriers are preventing people from applying for the new housing. This may be difficult with so many of the former College Homes residents dispersed throughout several KCDC-operated housing developments.

To address some of these concerns, the Knoxville Branch NAACP is holding its second annual community and economic development summit. This is a shameless plug because I am an executive board member of the NAACP. The summit will be held at the Chamber Partnership on Aug. 11- 12. It will focus on community monitoring and evaluating of HOPE VI and Empowerment Zone projects and several African American development initiatives. If you are interested in what some groups and organizations in the African American community are advocating for and developing, we invite you to the summit, an event to level the playing field.