February 6, 2005
a body and gentrification
More information about the body found on 24th St has been released. Always a good read, a long piece by Mark Holmberg goes into the housing situation, gentrification, some short history of the area, and the role of the RRHA.
Snippets from the article:
“The deceased: 61-year-old Walter Bell, address unknown. Cause of death, still undetermined. His court record, unremarkable.”
The rebirth that has transformed large hunks of Richmond has been slow to come to these numbered streets lined with faded frame houses built in the early 1900s.
“Venable Street, the main artery for traffic, cuts through this neighborhood, where a fair number of walking wounded stagger around or stand in the shadows. It’s one of the toughest sections left in the city, and a classic example of the so-called “broken-window syndrome”: Vacant, rundown buildings tend to attract vacant, rundown lives.”
If you think about it, the housing picture in some of Richmond’s tougher neighborhoods can seem pretty daunting.
Do you just want to let code enforcement and tax collectors play hardball with older or poorer residents who can’t afford to maintain their homes, but can’t afford to live elsewhere?
Do you want private-developer profiteering to gentrify neighborhoods to the point of forcing out those who live there?
How concerned should you be about saving old buildings that define those neighborhoods?
Where is the line between forced beautification and governmental intrusion on personal property rights?
This piece, like a recent article in the Richmond Voice and the open letter to the Mayor in The Defender, raises the issue of gentrification as a process that is pricing a Black population out of the area. I haven’t seen the idea stated, though, that gentrification benefits the Black homeowners in the area that invested their time and money to make or keep the areas together as best that they can. The reduction in crime and the added value that follow gentrification is something that is looked on as a positive by the most responsible of the current residents (often senior citizens).
I met Walter Bell once, on a sunny fall day several months ago. I remember him quite vividly, poking through the trashcans behind the Masonic lodge on 25th. St., wiping his hands nonchalantly on his coat as he picked through old, dripping food. I must have talked to him for over an hour…about many things. He was a bit nonsensical at times, but he was trying to figure out what the world had given him, so I didn’t blame him at all for his confusion. He was looking for any sort of aluminum to trade in for cash, limping from trashcan to trashcan with his cane. He talked to me about his stint in Vietnam, how he lost part of his foot there, and hadn’t been able to collect his disability payments due to some problem with the state. He was angry at the government, past and present. He resented going to Vietnam, and how the government was treating him now. I told him about my father, who almost lost his leg in Vietnam, and how I understood only a little of what he felt about that place. He also told me of another problem he was having with the city. He said he owned a house here in Church Hill, had inherited it from his family many years ago, and it was in poor condition. But he owned it, and he seemed to take pride in that fact. However, he said that a “city worker” told him he couldn’t receive certain benefits due to owning this house. They wanted him to sell it, and move into a retirement home of sorts, and then he could collect whatever benefits were owed to him.
I just let him talk…he seemed to need someone neutral to listen, even if it was just a white guy cleaning up a newly gentrified yard. His conversations kept circling back to Vietnam, then to his problems with his house and collecting benefits. Not trying to hinder his pride, I casually asked if he needed anything, and he said food, so I gave him what I could.
This was the only time I spoke to Mr. Bell. He seemed tough, not someone who would give in easily, and looked much older than his reported age of 61. I thought of him every now and then throughout the winter, and was saddened to hear what had happened. I was surprised to read that he had been living in a vacant house for those months. This is not meant to be any sort of obituary or factual account of his life. I don’t know if what he told me is true. I just wanted to tell someone, anyone, that he wasn’t just a drunk with an “unremarkable record.” He was a human who lived in our neighborhood, slept under the same stars, stumbled over the same disheveled sidewalks that we stumble on, yet he lived a completely different life than most of us could ever imagine. A life we’ll never come to know. Tonight let us lift a glass of Wild Irish Rose for this man, whose life and death will be forgotten in moments, and let us walk a little slower through the rain that falls onto no one in particular, for the dead travel fast, and the night is long.