People moving out of Norfolk public housing are mostly ending up in other poor, racially segregated areas

Norfolk — Norfolk’s billion-dollar plan to redevelop a swath of the city that includes three 1950s public housing communities is now underway. And not just on paper — the first building has come down, and the first of 4,200 residents have moved out.

The city has spent millions to develop ways to help those residents move, and it’s said all along they would have a choice in where they go.

In seeking federal grants, the city has written that the plan to redevelop the area, known as St. Paul’s, aims to “help repair generations of economic and racial segregation in Norfolk.”

But the majority of St. Paul’s residents leaving public housing are winding up in neighborhoods that are much poorer and Blacker than average, according to city data.

And most are moving using housing vouchers, the federal subsidy often known as Section 8 used to pay private landlords. Studies show people with housing vouchers can face substantial discrimination and are limited in where they can move because many landlords won’t take vouchers.

A new Virginian-Pilot analysis demonstrates that someone using a voucher in Norfolk is highly likely to end up living in areas with segregated schools, higher poverty and fewer opportunities.

This is the crux of an ongoing federal lawsuit seeking to halt the redevelopment. Attorneys representing residents of St. Paul’s and other advocates have argued that the city’s relocation efforts will only serve to further segregation.

As The Pilot continues Dividing Lines, a project exploring how the city became segregated and what’s being done about it, the newly compiled data show making changes will be an uphill battle. (You can read the rest of the project at PilotOnline.com/dividinglines.)

City officials say residents are choosing where they move, often because they want to live near family or in neighborhoods they know.

But experts, studies and residents all say they don’t have much choice at all.

‘People out there are stuck’

Shantae Brown was growing more desperate by the day.

In between juggling college classes online and caring for her five children, Brown also was feverishly searching for a new place to live. By late June 2020, she worried time was running out.

The 34-year-old had moved to Tidewater Gardens five years before with her kids, after an injury put her out of work at her shipyard job.

When she got her housing choice voucher a few weeks earlier, Brown was thrilled.

City officials had been telling public housing residents who were being moved to make way for redevelopment that a voucher meant you could live basically anywhere, as long as the rent wasn’t too much higher than the region’s average.

“When I got my voucher I was super excited, ready to move, to start a new journey. I did not know I would have to go through 150 people,” Brown said.

Even with a solid credit score, no evictions or criminal charges on her record and the backing of a federally guaranteed rental subsidy, Brown couldn’t get a foot in the door.

Over the course of a grueling two months, she called and emailed about several listings a day and faced rejection after rejection.

“Nobody ever told me I wasn’t qualified, but I did have a couple people saying they were ‘looking for someone else to take it,’” she said. “I took that to mean a better family, that they didn’t think I could pay or something.”

In some cases, she was told explicitly it’s because she was using a voucher, getting a hard “no” as soon as she mentioned Section 8.

And Brown — who, like nearly all public housing residents in Norfolk, is Black — said she believes her race played a part in some of the rejections.

“Meeting in person, it was ‘We’ll get back with you’ after it was a go on the phone,” she said. “My hopes were shattered.”

Research shows that Brown’s experience with using a voucher isn’t unique — especially if you want to move into a better neighborhood.

The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development has acknowledged voucher holders “may find it challenging to find landlords willing to lease to them,” especially in “high opportunity neighborhoods.”

Virginia passed a law last year making it illegal for landlords to reject an applicant based on how they’ll pay for their rental. But HUD has found discrimination against voucher users continues even with such “source-of-income protections.” That disproportionately affects nonwhite people, who are more likely to be voucher users.

As time dragged on and the rejections piled up, Brown was getting anxious. The voucher rules meant she had only two months to find a place, though she said she knew the housing authority has said it will grant extensions for those moving out of St. Paul’s.

“I was looking for a better neighborhood than where I was coming from and a good school zone for my children. When my voucher was about to expire, I said ‘I’ll settle,’” she said. “I felt like I was being pushed toward settling for less.”

But her persistence paid off.

After losing out on yet another listing, Brown made a direct appeal to a property manager. She spent an hour on the phone imploring the woman, explaining that she’d come up short with her voucher for nearly two months and she was desperate to find a place for her and her kids.

Finally, a break. The manager said she had a place that may be coming open at the end of June.

“I was lucky enough to get a house. It wasn’t even on the market,” Brown said.

Coming from one of Norfolk’s poorest and most segregated communities, Brown is thrilled with where she ended up: a two-story yellow house with a yard in the Lafayette neighborhood, an integrated community where she said her neighbors are lawyers and doctors and accountants.

But that makes Brown the exception, not the rule, for residents relocating out of the St. Paul’s communities. And she knows it.

“People out there are stuck because they don’t have good credit or have evictions,” Brown said. “They’ll have to settle for a slum landlord. That’s where a lot of people out there are going to end up.”

Brown also said she got very little help from the city to find new housing, and was left to comb listings and call landlords herself.

“They said they were going to hold our hand through the whole process and they didn’t,” Brown said. They did eventually help her pay the deposit on her rental, she said.

City officials have said that there are resources to help residents find suitable housing and that folks don’t have to go anywhere they don’t want to.

So why are so many ending up in poor and segregated neighborhoods?

“We designed a housing program that honored the choice of families,” said Susan Perry, who oversees the redevelopment effort for the city.

“We should be doing that (encouraging neighborhood integration), but we can’t do it at the expense of family choice,” said John Kownack, the ex-head of the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority.

After first agreeing to, then cancelling, an interview for this story, city officials changed their mind yet again last week. Kownack has retired from the housing authority and now works in the private sector, but the city asked him to be part of the interview.

When asked if she thought she and other St. Paul’s residents are empowered with choice, Brown chuckled behind her black-and-rhinestone mask.

“We don’t have a choice.”

Leaving out race

Less than 30% of those moving out of St. Paul’s by the end of 2020 who stayed in Norfolk ended up in “areas of opportunity.” Those are defined by the city as census tracts with less than 40% poverty (more than double the city average) and less than 62% nonwhite residents.

The number is even lower for children from St. Paul’s, less than a quarter of whom have moved into areas of opportunity. Studies show — and city staff has acknowledged — that moving to neighborhoods with better economic opportunities dramatically improves kids’ economic prospects later in life.

But city staff and elected officials have pointed to how much those numbers improve when you remove the racial criteria.

Angelia Williams Graves, then a Norfolk councilwoman and chair of the St. Paul’s Advisory Committee, said during its June 2020 meeting that she didn’t like the HUD definition of “neighborhoods of opportunity.”

“I would like if we can pull that piece out of the puzzle and give an alternative to racial population,” Graves said. “Give a bit of balance and perspective given a city that’s predominantly Black.”

In fact, Norfolk is about 43% white and 41% Black, census data show.

Graves, now a state delegate, did not respond to requests to discuss the redevelopment effort.

Like Graves, Perry has suggested leaving race out of the analysis, saying HUD’s definition excludes areas the city thinks are otherwise “areas of opportunity.” In an interview last week, Perry rejected the notion that the city was deemphasizing race.

But even if you ignore race, St. Paul’s residents are still more likely to move into very poor areas. Less than 7% of Norfolk’s population lives in a neighborhood with over 40% poverty, but 14% of people moving out of St. Paul’s are ending up in one.

Since poor areas in Norfolk are disproportionately Black, that means their children are more likely to go to segregated schools.

And persistent residential segregation, based on racist laws and practices dating back more than a century, have been shown to limit access to jobs, high-performing schools, transportation and other opportunities.

While city officials say they try to steer those moving out of St. Paul’s to higher opportunity areas, they argue resident choice mostly explains why people are ending up in areas with fewer opportunities. But studies have shown that, when controlling for other factors like class, Black people generally prefer to live in mixed-race communities and white people prefer majority-white communities.

Limited opportunities

To understand where — and how — St. Paul’s residents are moving, The Pilot enlisted the help of Johnny Finn, a Christopher Newport University professor who studies racial geography.

The Pilot has paid him for his work using grant money from the Education Writers Association.

More than half of those moving out of St. Paul’s are using housing choice vouchers. So are around 3,000 households in Norfolk.

Finn analyzed three months of housing voucher use data from the fall of 2020 and found that people with vouchers — and not just those relocating from St. Paul’s —- disproportionately rent in poor, Black neighborhoods.

“Broadly speaking, this is not helping to racially or economically integrate nonwhite renters,” Finn said. “If the goal is choice, it is not actually leading to an abundance of choice.”

Around 60% of vouchers in Norfolk are used in areas where at least three in five residents are Black.

The number of vouchers used in areas where three in five residents are white? Less than 7%.

Fewer than one in five vouchers are used in neighborhoods with less than 10% poverty rates. About 7% are used in areas with 90% or higher high school graduation rates.

Finn said people who use vouchers are also more likely to live in neighborhoods defined as the most vulnerable under a broader federally developed measure called the Social Vulnerability Index. It takes into account not just income and race, but things including access to transportation, disability statistics and housing stock.

More than 45% of Norfolk voucher holders live in the most vulnerable 20% of the city, while less than 6% live in the least vulnerable 20%.

One study found it’s more common for landlords to refuse to take vouchers in wealthier neighborhoods. The study didn’t ask why, but one of its authors, Martha Galvez, said some landlords might want to avoid the bureaucracy of a housing authority, while others have stereotypes about — or past negative experiences with — people who use vouchers. Is it about race for some? Galvez said it’s possible.

Either way, the discrimination against people with vouchers makes life much harder for them and their children.

“It’s really limiting people’s opportunities beyond the house they’re living in,” said Galvez, who researches housing policy at the Urban Institute. “It limits their ability to get into good schools, and areas that are safe, and give them other opportunities.”

Despite the problems, she said, vouchers do help. They’re the nation’s major source of housing assistance, and even though Black families who use them tend to end up in poor and segregated areas, they’re still better off than those without vouchers.

The city and housing authority have held events and programs to boost the number of landlords accepting vouchers, and officials said the number has risen slowly. They’ve said they’re also considering an incentive program to entice landlords with more expensive rentals.

‘Where they can go’

Whether the city is doing enough to prevent further segregation is the central thrust of a federal lawsuit filed in January 2020 on behalf of St. Paul’s residents and advocates. The suit argues that moving residents out with vouchers will only move them from one poor, Black neighborhood to another, in violation of HUD requirements to promote integration.

The plaintiffs have brought in expert witnesses, including Finn, to analyze both public data and data obtained confidentially from the housing authority in the course of the lawsuit. They declined to release that data or the analysis, but said even just the public data shows residents aren’t winding up in high-opportunity, racially integrated areas.

“We’re seeing where people go, and they’re not going to areas of high opportunity at all. The percentages going to segregated, low-opportunity areas are very high,” said Stan Brown, a New York-based attorney involved with the suit. “They’re not going to these places because they have a real choice. They’re going to these places because it’s where they can go.”

The city has refused to talk about the lawsuit, going so far as to cancel interviews related to the redevelopment effort over unspecified legal concerns related to the litigation.

LaVonne Pledger, who’s a member of the St. Paul’s Advisory Committee and has been a vocal critic of the redevelopment effort, is a member of a tenant group that’s a party to the lawsuit.

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The relocation numbers take on personal importance for Pledger: He and his kids are among the thousands still living in St. Paul’s public housing who will, at some point, have to leave.

He said the relocation numbers to date amount to a failure.

Pledger said recognizing the context of minority neighborhoods yielding fewer opportunities and resources is critical.

“If you take that portion away from the data, it’s defeating the whole purpose of the project,” Pledger said.

“There’s no success if people aren’t moving into an area where the schools are better and there’s not more opportunity within the neighborhoods,” Pledger said in an interview. “We’re not doing our job.”

This story was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.

Ryan Murphy, 757-739-8582, ryan.murphy@pilotonline.com