What I learned reporting on big plans to reconnect broken neighborhoods in two Virginia cities

Standing near the razed rubble of the Tidewater Gardens public housing complex in Norfolk, Virginia, waiting for a key source to arrive, I had the audacity to think I was on a reporting roll. 

After all, just 100 miles away and three weeks beforehand in Richmond, I’d hit the source jackpot.

It came in the form of amateur historian and radio show host Gary Flowers. His family home was among the 1,000 flattened by bulldozers in the 1950s when 7,000 residents of Jackson Ward, the Harlem of the South, were displaced by a toll road that became Interstate 95. Flowers’ insights went beyond a tour. He’s the quintessential informed and observant “guide” reporters seek out when embarking on intense projects laden with nuance and complicated issues. His passion, knowledge and anecdotes provided excellent foundational material for the environmental justice series I envisioned writing.

My National Fellowship proposal centered on the Biden administration’s launch of the first-ever, five-year, $1 billion Reconnecting Communities Pilot, included in the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The government’s goal was to stimulate healing among neighborhoods nationwide, most of them majority Black, that were intentionally torn in half by mid-20th century highway construction.

My goal was to find out if that was possible in Norfolk and Richmond. But first I needed to figure out how both Virginia cities were proceeding with their planning grants of $1.6 million and $1.35 million, respectively. They were two of the 40-plus grant recipients.

Asphalt alone is a dull topic, so I needed to track down humans with riveting tales. Flowers had opened that first door to people in Richmond. I tapped into a robust source stream there.

But it had slammed shut in Norfolk. Even though I’d done the telephone legwork, the source who eventually showed up near Tidewater Gardens in the St. Paul’s neighborhood had a limited perspective and the former resident she brought along was a last-minute substitute, not the resident “guide” I’d been promised.

Not only that, city officials refused to meet me at the I-264 “spaghetti bowl” of interchanges and ramps they sought to disentangle because traveling there was “too dangerous.” In addition, a city councilor told me I shouldn’t bother pursuing my story and the mayor wouldn’t fit me into his suddenly booked schedule. 

I salvaged that initial visit by walking the neighborhood and interviewing at length a landscape architect, sociologists, transportation specialists, a history professor, a pastor and others to make sure I understood the big picture, the tensions and what was at stake.

Then, on a whim, I again called a woman displaced when Tidewater Gardens was leveled. She’d had to cancel our earlier interview because of her job. Yes, she did have time to meet me early the next morning at the site of her old apartment.

As Zenobia Wilson and I walked around her old “disappeared” block, she told me about the challenges of being separated from her longtime community and why she wouldn’t feel welcome in a new “reconnected” community, even if she could afford it. As I was taking her photo, she revealed, as an aside, that her Norfolk grandmother had suffered though a similar “removal” decades prior.

Before my visit, we had talked on the phone half a dozen times. During this in-person visit, however, Wilson was more candid. Soon, we were two women chatting in a church parking lot. Trust had bloomed.

By cultivating that reporter-source bond, I realized I’d found my guide for the Norfolk article, the person who would serve as my compass as I navigated a hugely complex and nuanced article that required deep listening and constant questioning of my own assumptions.

After reading each city’s grant proposal, I found that Richmond’s plan was not only further along but also more transparent. Norfolk’s plan, opaque and vague, also seemed at odds with housing redevelopment plans already proceeding in the St. Paul’s neighborhood.

My savvy Virginia readers and listeners thirsted for stories that delved below the surface on equity, race, climate and whether government can deliver on lofty promises. The more I learned, the more nuanced my line of questioning needed to be for these articles:

Is reconnecting even possible under current circumstances? Can it be more substantial than a pretty park or some welcome green space? Can city leaders gain trust in cities with such brutal histories of racist practices? How does public housing fit into a reconnected future? Would highway harms be addressed in these neighborhoods? What does reconnecting even mean so many decades later?

It was a lot to bite off. Yet other Virginia news outlets weren’t reporting what “reconnecting” meant in Norfolk and Richmond beyond basic nuts and bolts about grant amounts. 

Here are a few tips I relied upon as I plowed forward:

1) Shoe leather matters: Get out of the office.

My home in Washington, D.C. is a couple of hours from Richmond and roughly four hours from Norfolk.

The phone is a lovely and necessary reporting tool, but nothing beats meeting sources on their own turf and being on the ground to absorb the area’s sights, sounds and smells. Talking face-to-face not only builds trust with sources but also makes you question any preconceived notions you had beforehand. Interviewees also can recognize how sincere you are in attempting to ferret out the truth. 

I traveled to Richmond and Norfolk three times apiece. Here are just three crucial story pieces I would have missed out on if I’d done all my interviews long distance:

• Norfolk Mayor Kenny Alexander’s perspective wouldn’t have been included because, for months, he wasn’t returning phone calls. I “ambushed” him during a routine evening city council meeting because his voice was crucial. We then engaged in a lengthy follow-up phone conversation because I wanted to be fair. It was still clear he only had the vaguest grasp of “Reconnect” but was tuned in to larger environmental justice angles.
• The head landscape architect of the Blue Greenway was willing to walk, with detailed maps in hand, across the massive new park and stormwater project he was designing to “Reconnect” Norfolk and mitigate climate change. That interview convinced my editor that the topic merited more than a few sentences in the main article; it ran as a separate sidebar.
• It might seem a small detail, but I wouldn’t have garnered valuable insights about the sway of Jackson Ward’s Black congregants in Richmond if I hadn’t knocked on the door of the Sixth Mount Zion Baptist Church and listened to the historian’s stories.

2) Today matters, but don’t dismiss voices of the past.

Remember that your project is likely not a breaking news story. You’ll have to talk to tons of sources — many of whom won’t be included in any story — to gain a firm grip on the essence of these deep-dive stories.

Listen carefully. Their insights might help you reframe or fine tune what you’re tackling. Always ask who else you should talk to. That emphasizes the seriousness of your reporting and helps sources understand your commitment to “get it right.” 

You’re under no obligation to include somebody in a story just because you interviewed them. As a reporter, you need to make the story flow, not clog it up with every source. It’s OK to explain that to interviewees; media “rules” are confusing to those not immersed in the profession.

For my “Reconnecting” project, historical perspective was crucial because I soon realized this was the heart of the series: examining the generational impact of roads splitting communities. Historians, sociologists and professors all had perspectives. Museums and universities have helpful photographs, documents and news clippings.

3) It’s OK to present existing data, with context.

As a one-woman reporting show, I didn’t have the resources to compile my own primary data points about the effects of highway harms on residents. However, I knew the story needed that angle.

It was clear that 20th century highways had not only isolated and divided historically Black communities, they had also contributed to myriad health issues among citizens. Walking around the neighborhoods, I could see that green space was lacking and hear that traffic-related noise was a constant burden. Also, years of environmental reporting told me that breathing in tailpipe emissions was a health hazard.

The challenge was telling the tales of these “hidden harms” in a way that went beyond the anecdotal. After digging into research papers and drawing on my reporting experience, I opted to focus on three specific harms: tailpipe pollution; hotter urban temperatures due to climate change and the lack of trees; and traffic noise. I was able to extract relevant charts and maps to show readers how people in the two cities were being affected compared to the rest of the state.

Interviews with doctors, public health professionals, climate scientists, noise experts, acoustical engineers and others helped me frame not only how those harms affect people’s health, but also potential solutions Norfolk and Richmond could deploy as officials “Reconnected.”

I had collected the story’s bones, but lacked the connective tissue with the oomph that could deliver a full body of evidence to readers.

Serendipitously, urban geographer Johnny Finn, an associate professor at Christopher Newport University, happened to be installing his exhibit “Living Together/Living Apart” at Norfolk State University on one of my trips there. His study of Virginia’s Hampton Roads region revealed life expectancy to be two decades shorter (61.5 years) in Norfolk’s poor majority-Black neighborhoods compared to adjacent upscale, whiter downtown neighborhoods on the “other” side of the dividing highway.

The cumulative impact of racist housing policies and practices, and environmental injustices takes years off of people’s lives, his research showed. Harms from the highway just compounded the situation.

In Richmond, I found that similar lifespan discrepancies had been uncovered by the Office of Health Equity at Virginia Commonwealth University. 

4) Believe in your pursuit; trust your instincts.

All freelancers — and staff writers, too, for that matter — know that news can be ephemeral, with no guarantees their pieces will be published.

But this environmental justice project took an unexpected turn. My editor at the Energy News Network, where I had freelanced as the Virginia beat reporter for six years, had signed a contract with Center for Health Journalism to publish my series. 

It was a shocking setback when his feedback on the Richmond piece was that it was too heavy on housing, history and harms and too light on highways. I wasn’t open to his suggestion to turn it into a trade magazine article about what highway engineers could learn via community feedback. He didn’t bother to edit the other pieces I had submitted. After several editing exchanges on the Richmond piece, he unilaterally decided the series was not a fit for his publication.

To say I felt anguished would be an understatement. Unwilling to accept defeat, I reached out to an editor who suggested I send a query to the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism (VCIJ), which is affiliated with WHRO, the public radio station in Norfolk. 

Within 24 hours, I received an enthusiastic response from the WHRO executive editor: “Yes, these are the stories we don’t have staff time to cover.” In turn, the VCIJ editor was thrilled for such a timely series to be dropped in his lap. Within a week, my series had found a new home. 

The message to fellow reporters is this: When one plan falls apart, don’t lose faith in your news judgment and the pieces you are pursuing. Trust your instincts. Environmental justice stories have merit. Your sources deserve to be heard and it’s imperative that nuanced stories be part of the broad news mix. Persist.