One new development, called Westchurch, constructed between 2004 and 2006, consists of 31 handsome single-family houses. Some were sold by the housing authority — the developer of both the Attucks renovation and Westchurch — at market prices, as high as $275,000, and others for as little as $110,000 to low-income buyers.
“I challenge you to tell me which is which,” Mr. Jenkins said of the houses during a walk-through of the well-groomed community. Then he noticed a Hummer in the driveway of one of the houses. “That gives it away,” he said. But he said he was proud that people of means were buying in what had recently been a no man’s land....
For Mr. Jenkins, 60, improving the fortunes of disadvantaged African-Americans has been a long-term goal. He grew up in Washington, where his father, Robert Sr., was an accountant and his mother, Bertha, a mathematician who worked for the National Security Agency.
While attending Howard University in the ’60s, he said, he joined the Black Panthers. Though some Panther leaders advocated armed resistance to what they saw as racist policies, Mr. Jenkins said he never came close to committing a violent act. “The only time I’ve ever seen a gun is in the holster of a cop,” he said, adding that his Black Panther activities were limited to discussing ways of improving the economic status of his community. He left the Panthers, he said, when his membership threatened his mother’s security clearance.
He sees what he is doing with New Markets Tax Credits, he said, “as a mature version of what we were doing in the ’60s.”
Restoring the Past to Improve the Future
By FRED A. BERNSTEIN
Norfolk, Va.
ON a sunny June morning, the Attucks Theater here was filled with the lilting melody of “I Shot the Sheriff.” About a dozen people, ranging in age from about 7 to 70, were tapping out the tune on steel drums, following the lead of an instructor.
Not long ago, a music class at the Attucks would have been unthinkable — and the program is an example of changes, including the construction of new housing, that have begun to occur in the neighborhood known as the Church Street Corridor.
Early in the decade, the Attucks was disused and decrepit. The surrounding area, once the commercial center of the city’s African-American community, had become a haven for drug dealing and prostitution.
“You didn’t even want to drive there,” said LaShawn Fortes, an 18-year resident of Norfolk who is the director of HomeNet, a program that counsels low-income home buyers.
The feeling then was that a revitalized Attucks Theater — which was built in 1919 and had fallen into disuse in the 1950s — could help revive the corridor, which is about a mile north of downtown Norfolk. But attempts to renovate what had been one of the first legitimate theaters in the country owned and operated by African-Americans had run short of funds.
Enter Robert K. Jenkins Jr., a former lawyer for the Securities and Exchange Commission. Mr. Jenkins, who spent most of his life in Washington, moved to Norfolk in 2000 to work for the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority. Soon thereafter, the federal government created a program that offered tax credits to people who invest in low-income neighborhoods. (The bill authorizing these so-called New Markets Tax Credits was one of the last signed by President Bill Clinton.)
Mr. Jenkins created a profit-making company — Hampton Roads Ventures, which is wholly owned by the authority — to use the tax credits for projects like the restoration of the Attucks. His goal, he said, was to create catalysts for neighborhood redevelopment — and if the catalysts involve preserving black history, so much the better.
The theater, which reopened at the end of 2004, is now a showplace. The interior has been completely restored — the work of Livas Group Architects of Norfolk — with new facilities for visiting performers. (The theater also has an elaborate fire curtain depicting the Boston Massacre, in which its African-American namesake, Crispus Attucks, died in 1770.) Outside the theater, the prostitutes and drug dealers are gone, and the neighborhood, while not bustling, is pleasant and tidy.
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