What's next at the 36-acre ghost town that once housed 440 families in the Harriet Tubman housing development?
That was a question we posed in this space on this page more than four years ago, and that was after two years of the Chattanooga Housing Authority's efforts to sell one of its largest public housing complexes.
Finally, Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke listened to the pleas of the Avondale Neighborhood Association, which begged him to intervene in a then-pending sale of the property to an out-of-town "slumlord" who would keep the then-deteriorating and crime-ridden complex open - a complex that had been known for years in Chattanooga as the poverty-riddled Boone-Hysinger Courts - aka, "the combat zone."
Berke did intervene, and CHA accepted the city's offer of $2.6 million in cash. Then Berke and the city pledged to demolish the decades-old brick ghetto and prepare the site to bring jobs to East Chattanooga.
Berke was passionate in his desire to make the intervention eventually be one of transformation, and he talked of it more than once in public settings.
Not just any jobs would do, he said. The jobs must be right for the dense and poor community around the Tubman site.
That was, and still is, a tall order.
More than 2,700 people live in the 1.1-square-mile census tract where the Tubman property sits. About 96 percent are black, and the median household income today is still just $23,000. Fewer than 7 percent have at least a high-school education. Unemployment is 10 percent, and a third of residents don't have access to a car.
"The way to raise this neighborhood is by bringing jobs here. That benefits East Chattanooga and helps the entire city," Berke said in 2014 at a news conference in front of the empty, boarded-up site.
Now it's 2018. The city did demolish the development and prepped the site for sale to a manufacturer or mixed-use developer.
But landing the right jobs has proven more elusive.
City officials turned away some nibbles because they weren't right, and on Monday when the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Regional Planning Commission voted unanimously to rezone the site for light industrial use, it still spelled out some non-starters. No makers or users of heavy chemicals, for instance. No poultry processing.
On the other hand, high tech jobs aren't right either - not in a neighborhood with little educational achievement.
Now a group of well-meaning do-gooders - some of whom don't even live in the Avondale, Glenwood, Orchard Knob or Highland Park areas that surround the Tubman site - aren't happy with the new zoning plan.
They say the city didn't wait for a community group's listening and planning session to end. (Don't tell that to James Moreland, the former head of the Avondale Neighborhood Association who with neighbors got Berke's ear in the first place.) This group - anchored by the nonprofit Glass Street Collective, supported by several local foundation grants - also seems to want more mixed-use development in the plan than light manufacturing. Never mind that the new zoning recommends the city reserve property along Roanoke Avenue and Southern Street for residential use.
Nicole Lewis, a community relations manager at Glass Street Collective, said the city is turning its back on "the Chattanooga way" of visioning by not delaying the rezoning until more voices are heard through what is called the "Area 3" community planning process launched earlier this year.
And Jonah Williams, a Glass Farms resident who lives near the Tubman site, said he wants more mixed-use development like the Southside and North Shore have: "There's no way a proposal of this type would ever make it to this point in the more affluent neighborhoods throughout town like St. Elmo, North Shore, Highland Park," he told the zoning commission.
Well. Yeah. That's the point. In a community where there are few cars and a median household income of $23,000, there is little wherewithall to support the cool art shops, delis and condos of the Southside and North Shore - neighborhoods that were retrieved from slow decay and poverty by gentrification. Yet some of the same folks who asked for a delay are quick to decry the gentrification that has pushed out low-income folks in all those other neighborhoods. Why is East Chattanooga different?
Mayor Berke and the city have put their mouths and money - our money - where the community asked.
They saved East Chattanooga from becoming a victim to yet another out-of-town slumlord. They put up more than $4 million to demolish and prep the Tubman site. They stayed true to the idea of looking for jobs to help - not hurt - the community there now, not newcomers looking for the next cool and high-dollar condo.
If "the Chattanooga way" is to talk an idea into a slow death and high rents, then by all means make East Chattanooga the next neighborhood with sky-high, unaffordable rents.
But if it means giving a community what it needs to stay alive and thrive, then help Chattanooga - which has spent nearly seven years with shoulder-to-the-wheel visioning - finalize the zoning needed to make that right prospective manufacturer comfortable bringing jobs to the Tubman site.