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Norfolk — The three 1950s-era public housing communities in Norfolk’s St. Paul’s area have long been isolated, surrounded by busy roads and largely cut off from city cross streets. The design is a remnant of racist housing policies that aimed to keep poor and Black residents stuck in their own neighborhoods.
A new $14.4 million federal grant announced Friday could change that, helping to reconnect the area to more pedestrian-friendly city streets once St. Paul’s is redeveloped.
The latest infusion of federal money comes from the Department of Transportation’s Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development (BUILD) program, according to a release from Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, and complements a $30 million federal grant Norfolk secured last year to help jumpstart the massive redevelopment effort expected to take more than a decade and ultimately cost over $1 billion.
The city said the first phase of the road and transit redevelopment plan is expected to start next summer. The $14.4 million federal grant, combined with a $6.2 million local match, will fund a later second phase, which will include walkability, cycling and transit upgrades for the redeveloped area near downtown.
From the 1930s into the 1970s, many public housing communities were built as insular blocks of barracks-style apartments. These neighborhoods largely were cut off from the communities around them, in some cases by putting up physical barriers such as walls and fences.
Less obvious, but just as isolating, were designs that cut off road networks at the boundary of the public housing neighborhoods and surrounded these communities with large roads or highways that were difficult for residents to cross.
That’s true of St. Paul’s — bounded by high-speed, multi-lane main drags on three sides and to the south by an interstate highway. Before the housing authority developed St. Paul’s starting in the 1950s, cross-streets connected the east and west sides of the city. When the housing projects were completed, those connecting roads basically hit a wall when they arrived at St. Paul’s.
This all added up to cloistered, racially segregated pockets of concentrated poverty cut off from the city that surrounded them.
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“They pretty much built a fort around public housing,” Mayor Kenny Alexander said. “The connectivity of this city was disrupted.”
[ Previous coverage: Why Norfolk is planning to tear down half of its public housing ]
The St. Paul’s redevelopment, a ground-up overhaul of those public housing communities, is expected to take more than a decade to complete and cost more than $1 billion. Norfolk’s City Council voted in January 2018 to formally move forward with the effort.
A plan for the redevelopment is in place — as are tens of millions of dollars in federal grants — but the relocation of the area’s 4,200 residents has largely been put on hold as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
The current St. Paul’s redevelopment plan has, from the start, included reconnecting roadways that were severed long ago and increasing accessibility to make the rebuilt St. Paul’s an attractive place to live.
Alexander said $14 million will go a long way to restoring that lost connectivity.
Though the project has been slowed by the pandemic, the city’s project developer is still trying to push forward on the first bit of new construction — a pair of apartment buildings located on Wood Street, near Fire Station 1.
Ryan Murphy, 757-739-8582, ryan.murphy@pilotonline.com