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Norfolk's Urban Renewal
(For more Norfolk geography tidbits, click here.)
"...Historically, urban renewal remains a brief, although consequential, period in the history of American cities. By the mid 1960s, urban planners would start to turn against it. Jane Jacobs would startle planners by praising the traditional city street. Scholars would label urban renewal "Negro removal," because of the thousands of poor, usually  black families removed from their homes. In Norfolk in the 1960s, attorney and later judge Joe Jordan denounced urban renewal as racist. In the 1990s, Milwaukee is following the lead of some other cities in trying to tear down some of the highways built during the urban renewal era and rebuild a city of streets, mass transit and walking.
Norfolk was and is unusual in that it started urban renewal early, and has continued it long after it has lost fashion nationally. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the city tore down and rebuilt virtually all of Ghent east of Colonial Avenue, moving thousands of black families from their homes. In the present day, the city is clearing a section of East Ocean View, and in the process evicting roughly a thousand families, in an attempt to build a new, more prosperous neighborhood.
For better and for worse, Norfolk continues to believe in the power of the bulldozer."
(from "Urban Renewal in Norfolk - What Was Lost: A lot. What Was Gained: Not Much." by Alex Marshall, alexmarshall.com, August 10, 1999; first published in the Virginian-Pilot)
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