Tag: Locust Grove

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Uncovered: How racist redlining shaped our urban forest

Thanks to Charlottesville’s long history of redlining, low-income neighborhoods have few to no trees, making them up to 30 degrees hotter than their high-canopy counterparts. PC: Charlottesville Tree Commission

The trees you see around town are more than just nice to look at. On a hot day, they provide much-needed shade. When it rains, they absorb flood waters. They help filter air and absorb noise pollution, especially when planted near busy streets. And they’ve been linked to reducing stress and anxiety, among other benefits.

But thanks to decades of racist zoning laws and housing covenants, many low-income, formerly redlined neighborhoods in Charlottesville—and around the country—have little to no tree cover.

According to the Tree Commission’s latest tree canopy study, historically Black neighborhoods Starr Hill and 10th and Page have less than 20 percent tree canopy, the lowest in the city. Meanwhile, neighborhoods where racial covenants once prevented Black people from renting or buying homes—like Venable and Locust Grove—have more than 40 percent tree cover, which exceeds the commission’s goal for the city.

“We got here not accidentally, but [by] creating our cities and our policies historically,” says Brian Menard, chair of the Charlottesville Tree Commission. “With the systemic racism that disadvantaged minority communities, we created these [neighborhoods] where trees were either never part of the environment, or increasingly couldn’t be a part of [it] because there was no ability to plant them.”

With few trees to reflect the sun’s rays, the asphalt roads and concrete sidewalks in Charlottesville’s low-canopy neighborhoods absorb and radiate heat, making them up to 30 degrees hotter than their high-canopy counterparts. This is especially dangerous during the summer—heat-related illnesses kill up to 12,000 people in the U.S. per year, and climate change is only causing more intense heat waves.

Higher temperatures also make it harder to breathe, and have been linked to respiratory illnesses like asthma. Diabetes, high blood pressure, and obesity, already prevalent in the Black community, are worsened by heat, as are mental health issues.

A sparse tree canopy takes a toll on residents’ pockets as well. With fewer shady places to gather during the summer, people are more likely to stay cooped up inside and run their air conditioners—if their unit includes one—all day, which leads to high energy bills.

At the height of Jim Crow, redlining systemically kept Black people from becoming homeowners in white, typically healthier neighborhoods. Black neighborhoods—regardless of income level—were considered “hazardous” for private and federal loans. Only white families were deemed worthy of investment, allowing them to easily attain mortgages and build generational wealth.

White homeowners could usually plant trees on their own property, or lobby their local government to fill their neighborhoods with parks and other green spaces. Black residents, largely forced into renting, had to rely on their landlords, who often had very little incentive or desire to invest in Black neighborhoods.

To make things worse, “poor communities of all colors in cities were often put where the slaughterhouses, mills, and factories were—places that were already environmentally inequitable,” says Menard. “Now we don’t have that kind of industry in most places….[but residents] are still suffering from the effects years and years later.”

The solution is “way more complicated” than just planting trees, warns Tree Commission member Paul Josey. The city cannot plant trees on private property without permission, and there are lots of places where there’s little room on public land for vegetation.

Additionally, the commission—which is currently all white—does not want to continue the city’s legacy of imposing the will of white people on people of color. Instead, it’s focused on “building long-term relationships and trust” with communities, says Josey, mainly by educating residents about the dangers of too few trees, and helping those who want trees, get them for free.

From 2018 to 2019, the commission knocked on hundreds of doors in Belmont—which had the most available planting area—and asked homeowners if they wanted a free tree in their front yard. With help from the Charlottesville Area Tree Stewards, they were able to plant around 45 trees.

“We did a similar effort to bring trees to some of the city’s public housing…Our education and advocacy in several cases led to actual trees going into the ground,” adds Menard. “We’ve already identified some low-canopy neighborhoods we want to start working with, but the pandemic has halted that for now.”

With more trees comes concern about gentrification. Adding green space—along with parks and playgrounds—to low-income neighborhoods could encourage more-affluent people to move in, increasing property values, and forcing the folks in need of the benefits of trees out because they no longer can afford to live there.

Josey says preventing gentrification requires fully addressing the socioeconomic consequences of redlining. The city must work to offer better employment opportunities and increase home ownership among Black residents, in addition to improving its zoning codes and building more affordable housing (with trees).

“The fact that there has been systemic injustice within housing needs to be righted,” he says. And “the key way to build investment within neighborhoods is through home ownership.”

In order to keep climate equity at the forefront, both Josey and Menard emphasize that a diverse array of community groups—from the Public Housing Association of Residents to the Community Climate Collective—must continue to work together to address this multi-faceted issue.

“This can’t be something that we just lead, because we are just volunteers,” says Josey. “It takes a lot of work, and a lot of stakeholders…It’s not just about putting a tree in the ground.”

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Mapping inequality: Innovative project will track housing discrimination

This 1948 deed for a house in North Downtown restricts ownership by “persons of the negro race,” but does not prohibit having black servants on the property. Courtesy Jordy Yager

By Jonathan Haynes

“If you look at Charlottesville in-depth, you see racial disparities at every juncture,” says local freelance journalist and C-VILLE contributor Jordy Yager. “Health care disparities, disparities at police encounters, employment.” For his latest project, he will trace inequality in the Charlottesville area. “I started thinking about how people get to where they are, and dug into the history of Charlottesville,” he says.

Yager has received a $50,000 grant from the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation to construct a digital map of housing discrimination in the Charlottesville area, which he believes will illustrate the link between past institutional policy and modern-day inequities.

To complete the project, he has teamed up with local court clerks, private researchers, employees at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, and professors at UVA, who have enlisted their students to analyze documents at Charlottesville courthouses.

Andrew Kahrl, a professor of history and African American studies at UVA whose students are assisting with Yager’s research, says segregation was written into the housing market through covenants that prohibited sales to blacks. In some cases, covenants also kept Jewish buyers from buying properties.

“In Charlottesville, racial covenants were initiated by developers and neighborhood organizations seeking to preserve the racial homogeneity of the city,” says Kahrl. “They were also pervasive across the United States.”

Yager has found that homes in Rose Hill, Belmont, Fry’s Spring, and Locust Grove had deeds with racial covenants. “This is a problem because homeownership has been the number one tool to gain wealth in America,” he says.

In the 1930s, the Federal Housing Administration began to provide subsidized loans for mortgages, but only to Americans buying homes in neighborhoods that barred sales to African Americans—a process known as redlining.

These loans enabled white, middle-class Americans to make down payments on houses that would surge in value over the next few decades and lead to massive intergenerational transfers of wealth. Meanwhile, black Americans were relegated to neighborhoods with poor infrastructure, further entrenching them in poverty.

“When you purchase a home, you need certain things for property value to appreciate,” Yager says, listing indoor plumbing, water pipes, roads, and transmission lines as examples. “All these required requests to the city. White neighborhoods got them, black neighborhoods did not.”

The final project will be a 10’x10′ interactive display that will allow visitors to select a time period and compare racial demographics in property records to contemporaneous income levels and health outcomes in the area. It will be installed in a permanent exhibit in the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center.

Yager expects to complete the project near the end of next year.

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Opportunity gap: How your city neighborhood defines your life

New data concludes that children growing up in Westhaven have the least chance of escaping poverty when they become adults, while equally poor children who grow up in northern communities such as Locust Grove, Wildwood, Willow Heights, and Village Square have the most. Courtesy the New York Times

The neighborhoods where poor children grow up can have a huge impact on their future earnings, a new analysis of census data shows. Here in Charlottesville, children growing up in Westhaven, the public housing complex in the 10th and Page neighborhood, have the least chance of escaping poverty, while equally poor children who grow up in northern communities such as Locust Grove, Wildwood, Willow Heights, and Village Square have the greatest chance.

The data, which planning commissioner Lyle Solla-Yates calls “disappointing,” but “not surprising,” comes from a new interactive map called The Opportunity Atlas, which “traces the roots of outcomes such as poverty and incarceration back to the neighborhoods in which children grew up.” Released October 1, the national mapping tool is the result of years of work by researchers at Harvard and Brown, in partnership with the U.S. Census Bureau, using anonymized data on 20 million Americans who are in their mid-30s today.   

In Charlottesville, the data shows that kids from poor families in Westhaven are projected to earn only $19,000 per year as adults. South of Westhaven, in the areas surrounding Lee, Grove, Ridge and Avon streets, that number is between $20,000 and $22,000. By contrast, in the northern neighborhoods that offer the most potential, (Locust Grove, Wildwood, Willow Heights, and Village Square) kids who grow up poor can expect to make approximately $36,000 each year.

What’s the difference? Solla-Yates says there’s more access to opportunity—”people who can give them jobs, training, experiences”—in the northern neighborhoods.

“For about a century, there’s been an effort to slice up the city to make sure there’s more mansions, or wealth, in the north part of the city, and less in the lower parts,” says Solla-Yates, who also serves on Charlottesville’s housing advisory committee. But, he notes, affordable housing is essentially “banned” in the northern areas of the city, where neighborhoods are mostly zoned as single-family residential with very little industrial zoning. In fact, more than half of Charlottesville is zoned that way.

“If you want to do affordable development, you basically need industrial zoning because there are the least amount of barriers,” he says.

In single-family zoned areas, the  main barrier is simply cost of construction, says neighborhood planner Brian Haluska. He adds that the average cost of building a single-family home in America is about $250,000 before land costs, which are usually about $100,000 in Charlottesville.

“If all you can build is one unit on that lot, it’ll be listed at $350,000 minimum and I’m probably undercutting the price,” says Haluska. “If the zoning only allows single-family housing, that’s all you can get.”

If the zoning permits multiple units per lot, he says, developers are able to spread the construction and land costs over several units.

The two most recently built affordable housing communities—The Crossings at Fourth and Preston and Carlton Views in Belmont—were in industrially zoned areas, where Solla-Yates says there’s also the least amount of neighborhood opposition because, “Well, it could have been a factory.”

In his analysis of the Opportunity Atlas data, Solla-Yates also pointed out a few gaps. In a recent tweet he said some areas, such as a chunk of real estate south of the U.S. 250 Bypass in the Carlton Avenue area, are “so perfectly segregated by income and race that there is no data to judge from. Yes, affordable housing is mainly banned there, too.”

The Atlas’ creators hope that their data will help policymakers recognize and be able to replicate the kinds of community features that help children succeed. “Using the Atlas,” they write, “you can see exactly where and for whom opportunity is lacking in your community and develop customized solutions to improve children’s outcomes.”

In Charlottesville, affordable housing is already high on the planning commission’s list of priorities, and they’re gearing up to start discussing the land use chapter of the comprehensive plan, Solla-Yates says. It’s also the core of the conversation that the housing advisory committee has been having for the past few years, he adds.

Fellow committee member Lisa Larson-Torres says that while everyone in the group understands and hears the need for more affordable housing, “unfortunately, it doesn’t happen overnight.”

Part of the challenge, she says, is that there’s so little land left to be developed in Charlottesville—and she suggests that all new construction should focus on increasing affordable units in all neighborhoods.

“Is that feasible? Probably not,” she says, but it should be on all city residents’ radars, and she hopes more engagement and education will lead to changes in zoning and affordable housing voucher programs.

Larson-Torres says the Opportunity Atlas data supports an ongoing national and local conversation on systemic racism. And addressing it starts with awareness.

“There are a lot of neighborhoods in Charlottesville who are struggling,” she says. “And so many people seem to be immune or unaware of the significant challenges and inequities of our neighbors, possibly on the same street or just a couple of streets down from where we live.”