This post is a response to Eli Bray's letter printed on September 8, 2022, page A4, which was a response to the August 31 article "Everybody Wants to Move to Kingsport."
In that letter, Eli Bray asked, "Who would want to move into one of the worst cities or crime int he entire state and possibly the nation (for a city of its size)?" and says, "Kingsport used to be a wonderful place to live, go shopping and go to eat Kingsport is losing business left and right as well Why? The crime rate..." of , "According to neighborhoodscout.com...5a per one thousand residents...One's chance of becoming a victim of either violent or property crime here is one in 20."
This is true. Two primary factors contributed to the precipitous decline in the quality of life in the northeast section of Kingsport.
One was inevitable: The residents of the neighborhood called Upper Sevier Terrace, or Snob Hill, were mostly retired people. Active, healthy, and loyal to their own, they kept walking through their neighborhood and using their pool and tennis club into their eighties or nineties. Still, many of them didn't live to see the coronavirus panic.
The other factor was a bad decision made by the city for the sake of federal funding. The nice little downscale shopping plaza that was built to serve paper mill and press employees, on Sullivan, was replaced with apartment towers designated "low-income housing" and stocked with the hardest cases from the welfare rolls of other cities--the people those cities most wanted to get rid of. As these people moved in, those who bought or inherited houses in Upper Sevier Terrace began to move out.
My mother always wanted to retire in Upper Sevier Terrace. While she lived there I visited that section of Kingsport often. I didn't care for the factory emissions in the air,but other than that, it was really a "Model City" with the tiers of increasingly luxurious houses as you go uphill, the easy walks to the Super Wal-Mart or the schools or the hospitals or almost anything else you can think of, the charming Greenbelt Park with its waterfowl once including a pelican, the fine selection of new and old books Mr. Bartlett, Mrs. Liu, and staff maintained in the library, and generally everything a nice city neighborhood ought to have.
I'm glad Mother didn't live to see what that neighborhood has become now. It's trashy, with homeless or just drugged-out people squatting everywhere--and I do mean squatting--and surly staff in the few big-chain businesses that have stayed open. One reason why the staff are surly may be the well documented fact that the crowd roaming those streets now are so mean, they steal the shoes and socks off homeless people's feet while they sleep. The "crime" rate still consists more of shoplifting, trespassing, littering, and public (let's stick with "squatting") rather than rape and murder, but it's certainly unpleasant. Walk on those streets on a wet day and your shoes are ruined forever.
I no longer walk into Kingsport. When I join a car pool from Gate City to Wal-Mart, more often than not we find allegedly homeless people begging outside the store. Once, surprised by the age of a couple of panhandlers, we checked them out and found that they really were homeless as the result of a fire.
In Gate City we now have a problem parallel to Kingsport's problem. Northeast Kingsport has a problem with "White flight." It's not that Kingsport's White yuppies are racists. They got along well with their neighbors, Asian doctors and Black business owners and Hispanic storekeepers, for all these years. They recommended these people to me and other visitors or newcomers to their neighborhood. The "blackandhispanic" social problems culled from the slums of Chattanooga are something altogether different. I think that, for the first time in their lives, Kingsport's White yuppies are learning what race prejudice used to be about.
Anyway, we now have a problem with Kingsport's "White flight" people wanting to move to Gate City. This puts us in the awkward position of having to say to friends and even relatives, "No, don't move in here. Don't pay the sucker prices, inflate property values, and start a process of yuppification here!" Although Gate City could certainly use a cash infusion, that cash infusion does not need to take the form of inflated taxes that would jeopardize local business and property owners. Although some Kingsporters are truly nice people and good neighbors, the solution is not for them to let themselves be herded into Gate City and try to create yuppified "boutique" neighborhoods here.
Gate City is a low-rent town, and should remain that way. We have luxurious Victorian houses, decent-looking four-rooms-and-basement houses, and trailer houses, in the same block. That is a valuable quality we should maintain at all costs. Any Kingsporters who do move in need to be committed to resist the temptation to stratify and yuppify. They need to understand fully that what makes nice neighborhoods, including Upper Sevier Terrace, is not "property values" that automatically exclude people who do certain kinds of jobs, which is un-American and morally obscene, but small communities of people who know, respect, and trust one another.
In a nice neighborhood everyone is not everyone else's close friend; in fact people may not speak to each other often, but when there is any reason to speak they are cordial and respectful. People support one another's businesses or employers. One of the nicest things about Upper Sevier Terrace was the way, when a neighbor who was still working became disabled and lost his job, people paid him to do odd jobs and bought what he had to sell off, keeping him in his home as long as possible. When a neighbor's daughter lost her home and children in a divorce, they found part-time work for her maintaining the club facilities. Such things showed that, though well paid even in retirement, the neighbors really were nice. In order to re-create that sort of niceness in a different neighborhood, however, they would need to accept and respect the fact that equally nice people may have lower incomes and may not have or want an "upscale" neighborhood. Kingsport was specifically planned to be a big enough city to have rows of "upscale" and "downscale" stores. Gate City is not so big and, whatever a certain immigrant from Tennessee on our town council may think, we cannot afford the stratification. We need to keep the hardware stores, consignment shops, and "dollar stores" right beside the tourist-trap gift shops and upscale boutiques. If there are people in Gate City who don't want to go into stores where they might meet tobacco farmers, disability pensioners, or even coal miners, we need to keep Jackson Street the sort of place where those people won't want to shop at all.
Yes, we have different personality types and different income levels and different circles of close friends. However, a nice neighborhood has to remain a place where people who are not close friends don't have to talk to one another, but do mingle. In Kingsport the space available made it feasible to build literal tiers of houses and shops that people literally moved up as they progressed from entry-level jobs to management jobs to retirement. In Gate City we don't have that much space, and some of the most "downscale" houses and businesses are and should remain next door to some of the poshest, and if you can't deal with that you need to stay in Kingsport.
What's happening to Upper Sevier Terrace is horrible and tragic. I do understand how the people who had just started redecorating their nice houses, on the tiers higher than Wal-Mart, feel about their neighborhood now. I don't know whether to cry or to be sick as I look at what used to be such a pretty section of town, either.
Kingsport never really had a bad neighborhood, in the sense that Washington or Baltimore, Richmond or Chattanooga, understand the phrase. That's rare for an American city. Kingsport had rows of endearingly shabby little houses near its factories, but they were separate houses, clean, green, well kept. It had a section "redlined" for Black residents, but there again, the houses were small but well kept, the residents had jobs, there seemed a clear intention to attract people who wanted to have a Black cultural atmosphere rather than to confine Black people in a ghetto, and in fact Black people lived in other parts of Kingsport too. Kingsport had a few low-rise apartment buildings, but most of the apartments advertised for rent were either above stores or in the attics or basements of houses; there wasn't even room for potential slums to develop. All of Kingsport was and still is too close to factories for any neighborhood to be considered really good or healthy, but as factory towns go, all of Kingsport was surprisingly decent.
I hate that "Snob Hill" was chosen to be put in danger of becoming Kingsport's first really bad neighborhood.
In 2015 I blogged about being harassed by two teenaged boys, in Lynn Garden near the Virginia border. A relative who wouldn't have stopped if he'd seen me walking peacefully home stopped to ask what was going on, and the boys fled. But the last time I joined a car pool into Kingsport I saw the same boys, now young men. I wonder if they're still claiming Lynn Garden Drive as their drug business zone, still harassing responsible adults who walk along that neighborhood's only real street.
There is a way Kingsporters can fight this. It's not easy but I have seen it work, and when it works, it is tremendous fun. It worked for Takoma Park, Maryland, for a long time; it worked for the part of Pittsburgh where I stayed during the Gulf War. Washington and Pittsburgh are big enough cities to have seriously bad neighborhoods, but there are also neighborhoods where people decided to stand their ground and keep their neighborhoods decent.
Sam Abbott, Mayor of Takoma Park for much of the twentieth century, was a distant relative of Mother's. On national issues he might have been called a left-wingnut. On issues facing a suburb-town his thinking was practical and rational; I think I learned from studying his policies what Kingsport needs to know, and do.
1. Welcome diversity. As a factory town Kingsport has always been diverse, less ingrown than most towns of its size or smaller.. Accept this. Despite the tiers of cheaper and posher houses, rich and poor Kingsporters have shopped in the same stores, sent their children to the same schools, and attended the same churches. Embrace this.
2. Do not accept poverty as a reason for bad citizenship. Expect your new poor neighbors to behave as decently as your familiar poor neighbors always have done.
3. Deal with people as individuals. This is hard when the undesirable people have been shipped in, if not by bus loads, at least in quick succession, but it's necessary. Recognize which new neighbors are merely poor people, just like some of you only without the supportive families, and which ones are truly undesirable people. Don't tolerate the bad ones in the belief that it will make the ones who are merely poor feel better about themselves. Black people may have been socialized to stick together in the presence of White people they don't know well, but they do not enjoy having their property stolen or their yards squatted in by other Black people, When individuals are dopey and incontinent, put them in rehab, and when they are aggressive, put them in jail, whatever they look like and however long they've been there. This policy will make it easier to recognize the chronically poor but decent human beings among your new neighbors.
4. Help and encourage poor people to improve their income and thus their lifestyle. This is not done with yuppie rules about how low everyone needs to keep their grass or how much income every renter needs to have above the cost of rent. It's done by discarding yuppie rules. Fling wide the gates to whatever legitimate products or services poor people can offer to earn quick cash. Buy those products and services. Understand that welfare programs do nothing whatsoever to help people improve their situations, that big grants don't come along every day, and that poor people who work their way into the middle class do so with one little cash sale at a time. Ban all restrictions on yard sales, flea markets, rent parties, and door-to-door peddling. If you catch yourself thinking or saying anything like "Why would I want any of the cheap junk X makes," do penance, thusly: Bite your tongue. Find out how much it would cost someone who's been making cheap frilled-paper ornaments to make something you consider more "upscale." Buy as much of the person's existing wares as the person says it would take to pay for the cost of making them, the time of selling them, a week's groceries, and the posher art supplies. Then, once you know for sure that the person can afford it, describe exactly what you'd prefer to buy and commission the person to make it.
5. Keep rent rates and property values reasonable relative to the incomes of neighborhood residents. Accept trailer houses as a fact of life--they're more comfortable for most people than the "tiny houses" fad. Neither of the two traditional objections to trailer houses is valid: (1) You want to support local construction businesses by letting people pay to replace all the cheap tacky surfaces in a trailer house; and (2) once trailer houses are set up as permanent residences with their own utilities, there's no reason why they should not be taxed as the small, cheap houses they are. Do not allow prejudice against trailer houses to herd people off land that then sits vacant until it's bought up by some sort of really undesirable outside interests.
6. Resist the temptation to plead, "Oh, but with higher taxes local government could do so much more for people!" With higher taxes local government can become more bureaucratic and annoying to the taxpayers. With lower taxes people can do more for themselves. You want to focus on lower taxes. Anyone campaigning for office needs to be able to display the overall budget cuts person has made.
7. Stop thinking of "needs" and think in terms of "worth." Socialists have had a hundred years to yammer about "needs," and what is the effect on the actual poor people? They are sick and tired of it. Don't dare think of a human being as some pathetic bundle of useless, worthless "needs." Before you presume to make eye contact with a person, think of what that person has to offer you and how that person may be able to meet your "needs." In this way, if you want to help the person begging for money to buy food outside Wal-Mart, you will not be tempted to start prescribing what food they ought to buy. Learn to say "I'll pay X amount for the product or service Y" and trust the person to know what to do with the money. Some people do need to be supervised through a rehabilitation program in which they can't spend their own money as they see fit, but most working parents, retirees with medical bills, and disabled people who have not been awarded pensions yet, just need more cash flow. If their priorities seem different from yours, you might respectfully ask them what you need to know about living on their kind of income, bt it's really none of your business.
Which brings us back to step one: Welcome diversity. So there we are.
By taking these short, simple steps Kingsport has a chance to reclaim Upper Sevier Terrace. And never doubt that everyone in Gate City hopes youall can do it.
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