Experiencing "Root Shock"

Several years ago, Columbia University psychiatrist and public health professor Mindy Fullilove and I were having a conversation. She was complimenting me on my professional contributions and called me a "tour de force".

It was one of the nicest compliments I’ve ever received and coming from Fullilove, who has been recognized as both one of the top 50 professors and medical doctors in the country, it was professional validation for me as a university professor and public intellectual.

However, after spending the past week following Fullilove around Roanoke as she promoted her new book, "Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America and What We Can Do About It," I’ve recognized that she is truly the tour de force. Her schedule was crammed with speaking events, media interviews, neighborhood tours, library visits and community meetings.

Through it all, she remained poised, humorous and focused on demonstrating the link between urban renewal’s "displacement" policies and the corresponding epidemics of drugs, AIDS, violence, mental illness, asthma and obesity that plague black America. Fullilove, and other psychiatrists such as Harvard’s Chester Pierce, have been in the forefront of establishing the causal link between hopelessness (when dealing with the power structure) and physical illnesses/anti-social behaviors in minority communities.

Urban renewal was sold as a policy to improve minority neighborhoods. That was the original sin. In reality, it was "black removal" from the core of American cities for the purpose of economic development.

Fullilove quotes me in her book on this issue: "But the reality of urban renewal was that cities wanted to improve their tax base. And what happened in Roanoke was neighborhoods were torn down so that commercial developers could develop properties and sell it to private interests. The city won because it increased the tax base, and the private developers won because this (process) was very lucrative. The only people who lost were the people who were promised a better quality of life."

What happened in Roanoke occurred all over the country: black neighborhoods were destroyed under the guise of improving community quality of life so municipalities could enhance economic development and fatten tax bases. Moreover, most residents in Roanoke were not paid fair market value for their property as mandated by law.

All told, blacks in Roanoke and elsewhere were (1) lied to by government bureaucrats concerning the goals of urban renewal, (2) not given fair compensation for property taken through eminent domain, and (3) helpless to do anything about unlawful government behavior.

Is there any wonder, then, that there is a causal relationship between the "root shock" of urban renewal and subsequent black medical and social illness?

Fullilove’s work not only describes the problem, but also offers a prescription. She suggests that residents go through a grieving process so that the psychological and emotional scars can heal. That’s a good first step but residents need a partner — government officials — to join the healing process. I don’t know about Newark or Pittsburgh (the other case studies outlined in Fullilove’s book) but the policies and practices of local bureaucrats haven’t changed at all since the 1960s and 1970s.

Last year, I was an expert witness in the case of Walter Claytor vs. Roanoke Redevelopment Housing Authority. Over the strenuous objections of the RRHA’s legal counsel, I testified that the RRHA 30-year inverse condemnation (that is, the property is condemned by a governmental entity but never purchased) of the Claytor property was one of the longest in American legal history. It also deprived the Claytor family use of their property for rents and leases and triggered a change in Virginia law that now requires any condemned property to be purchased by the governmental entity within 5 years.

Incredibly, the RRHA defended its actions but lost. The judge ruled that the Claytor’s Fifth and 14th Amendment due process rights under the United States Constitution had been grossly violated.

Still, the policy of local government officials treating black Roanokers as second-class citizens continues. The latest example is locating a methadone clinic on Cove Road after residents in SW County protested it being in their neighborhood.

U.S. Attorney John Brownlee (who was vocal in his opposition to the SW Clinic), U.S. Representative Bob Goodlatte (who refuses to support a proposal to put the clinic on the grounds of VA hospital) and City Manager Darlene Burcham (who erroneously claims there is nothing she can do to stop the clinic from opening on Cove Road) have, through their silence and inaction, assured that the clinic will open in a neighborhood just as opposed to it as SW County.

Can any healing really take place in such a polluted environment?

In her other works on displacement, Fullilove talks a lot about "Empowered Collaboration" as both a healing mechanism and vehicle for informed decision-making.

During her remarks to Roanoke City Council, Fullilove noted that economics professor Richard Florida was in also in town to discuss how to attract high-value professionals to a locality.

Florida calls these professionals the "leisure class" and suggests they are crucial for American cities to survive in the 21st century (see my column "Ambassador of Jazz",). However, Fullilove warned the council that these professionals would not relocate to a city where such social justice issues as urban renewal had not been rectified. Her warning is absolutely true and should be a call to action for all local public and private stakeholders.

Roanoke’s image is being indelibly stained nationally and internationally because of the way the city has, and continues, to violate black property rights. Fullilove’s book is being reviewed in both the academic and popular press and will be used in university classroom across the nation. She is also editing a forthcoming book on various aspects of urban renewal and I contributed a chapter on the Claytor case to this manuscript (needless to say, there is nothing complimentary about the activities of the RRHA in my chapter).

A 1991 study I did on urban renewal in Roanoke was published by the Institute for Urban Affairs at Howard University and is often cited by researchers. In this online column, I’ve written an essay on using public nuisance laws to close the proposed methadone clinic because government officials have abandoned the Cove Road community. Local activist Jeff Artis publishes an online newsletter condemning the opening of the clinic as well.

It will only get worse. Artis has promised legal protests when the clinic opens. Media outlets will be there to cover the story. Both the local and national chapters of the SCLC oppose the opening of the clinic. Thus, no good press will come from civil rights organizations nationwide.

Against this backdrop of negative publicity, we have the city paying a publication $10,000 to say that Roanoke is one of America’s best cities to reside. It’s wasted tax dollars. The "leisure class" the city is attempting to attract won’t be fooled by this duplicity.

City officials have to realize that a municipality’s reputation is its "brand" and that Roanoke’s brand is tarnished because of its property-related policies in the black community. The "bad press" will only stop when city bureaucrats treat black Roanokers as first-class citizens. Empowered collaboration is a healthy was out of this mess.

Otherwise, city officials will soon learn why the pen is mightier than the sword.