Too often, poor neighborhoods have to tackle society's ills

Imagine this:

A homeless shelter or methadone clinic wants to relocate. It contacts local government officials, but they decline to tell the affected residents. Those folks live in the North End in Virginia Beach or Larchmont in Norfolk or Riverwalk in Chesapeake.

Stop dreaming. It would never happen.

Shoot, social service agencies wouldn't even think about bringing a facility to those neighborhoods.

That helps explain the criticism now coming from residents of the Seatack community in Virginia Beach. They're right to be ticked off.

Folks living there say, justifiably, that they've become a dumping ground - again - for the entire city. They resent it.

The people in charge hadn't even told residents about a proposal to move a homeless day shelter to their community; the issue almost slid by at a recent City Council meeting.

Beach officials want to move the Lighthouse Center from its cramped quarters behind the convention center to a site about five long blocks away on North Birdneck Road, in a residential-business area.

The current shelter property sits near a police station, library and commercial strip, but it could become a convention center hotel. It's easy to see why city officials want the exchange.

The new, $4.3 million shelter would be nearly four times the size of the current one. It could help families with children and have more space for city housing agencies.

It should stay near the Oceanfront because the area "has been a congregating place for single homeless persons for 25 years," Andy Friedman, director of housing and neighborhood preservation, told me Tuesday. It should also help those in danger of eviction.

Nobody opposes the general concept or doubts the benefits.

But why do some neighborhoods - usually black and brown, poorer and less politically connected, like Seatack - always carry the burden of treating society's ills?

Already, officials have broken ground on a new animal shelter in Seatack.

And Seatack had to fight for years to get an upgraded recreation center, which finally opened in 1997. Even then, it was the Beach's smallest facility.

Neighborhoods in other cities can relate. South Hill in Chesapeake lost a huge part of its identity when Interstate 464 was built. Activists in Norfolk's Park Place say they've accepted too many service agencies - including shelters, an AIDS center and an office of the Community Services Board.

When do other neighborhoods take their fair share?

"The politically powerless, the unconnected, the communities already struggling most are the ones apt to absorb things that make life more difficult," Andrew Grant-Thomas, deputy director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University, told me in a phone interview. He noted the creation of the interstate highway system, which often destroyed black communities.

But Grant-Thomas also understands the dilemma at the Beach. The homeless need help, he said, "and no community is likely to embrace a homeless shelter."

Because of the nascent controversy, the city will host public meetings on the shelter later this month.

Here's the $4.3 million question: What if Seatack residents say no?

Roger Chesley, (757) 446-2329, roger.chesley@pilotonline.com