Little Rock Story #2: In Lynn Found

Among the documents I had to write as part of my work in Little Rock was a relocation plan. Urban Renewal in the 50s and 60s had given itself a bad name for dealing poorly and unfairly with people displaced by urban renewal schemes. “Urban Removal” became the pejorative nickname for urban renewal. By the time the Model Cities program came into being the Department of Housing and Urban Development required that every plan submitted by a locality include a relocation plan to show how people displaced by the renewal could be beneficiaries rather than victims of the plan.

To my recollection, our neighborhood plans did not displace anybody, though there might be a way to use urban relocation assistance as a way to help some households voluntarily upgrade their housing. To that end, I read the requirements and guidelines well and penned a relocation plan that I hoped would both gain approval and help some people in our neighborhoods. Since our goal was to help people stay in a much upgraded neighborhood, the plan was quite modest. I remember no details other than that the plan could not come directly from City Hall; It had to come through the Little Rock Housing Authority which was a semi-independent partner to the Model Cities Program which was, indeed, housed in City Hall under the city manager's office. A woman at the Housing Authority was my liaison for the work. I wrote the plan, she reviewed it, offered a few suggestions and took the plan through her board for its approval.

That was the end of it, except … .

During the summer between my first and second year of planning school at the Graduate School of Design, I took a short-term position with the town of Lynn, Massachusetts which now had its own Model Cities program. I confess I did not do much good work for that program, my head now in the clouds of graduate school. However, they did ask me if I could help write their housing relocation plan, to which I said, yes. I was told I should first go to the offices of the Department of Housing and Urban Development in Boston to talk with the woman in charge of housing for the federal agency. She was known by the Lynn staff as someone who was difficult to deal with and could not be avoided.

I made an appointment and dutifully went in to face her music before beginning my task. I found her serious, but pleasant. I am not sure of the complete range of her duties, but several things from Lynn had crossed her desk that she believed were inadequately prepared. I told her my responsibilities only extended to the housing relocation plan. Before she would let me loose to submit more inadequate work, she took out a report, plopped it on the desk in front of me and told me that if I wanted to do an acceptable plan I should model it after the one she laid before me--“The best I have seen,” she told me. Well, color blind but in love with purple, I had foisted a purple color scheme on the work we submitted from Little Rock. And there it was; I recognized it immediately: the relocation plan I had prepared in Little Rock. She had worked for the Department of Housing and Urban Development in Fort Worth when we submitted our plan. It went first to the regional office in Fort Worth. These documents did not carry names of authors, and since it came most directly from the Housing Authority, she was hesitant to believe that I was the author. I'm not sure I ever fully convinced her. However, Lynn did get a start on a damn good housing relocation plan the summer I drafted it for them.

Apparently, this is a story I have seldom if ever told. It fit nicely into a conversation among friends a few evenings ago. When my wife told me later that she liked the story but could not recall having heard it, I decided it was time to write down Little Rock Stories, #1 and #2.

 

 

(c) from date of posting, by Bob Komives, Fort Collins