Ann Arbor’s Black neighborhood was once targeted for demolition. Now it’s home to $1M condos.

ANN ARBOR, MI — For 82-year-old Shirley Beckley, the term “urban renewal” still conjures up bad memories.

It’s what took away her family home — the house at 115 W. Kingsley St. on the edge of downtown Ann Arbor, where she grew up in the 1950s and where she was raising her own children in the 1960s when the city came knocking, she said.

“The whole thing was disturbing,” she said.

The city wanted to demolish her home and others to make way for a controversial Packard-Beakes bypass, a traffic route proposed to cut through the Black neighborhood.

City voters ultimately rejected the Republican-backed plan in 1972 and it was never completed, but by then damage already was done as the city had worked to acquire properties through the threat or force of eminent domain, said Beckley, whose family was among those forced to leave.

The city was tugging at the threads of a once tight-knit Black community and it eventually unraveled, she said, lamenting Ann Arbor no longer has a Black neighborhood.

“They demolished all three of those houses,” Beckley said of her and her neighbors’ houses along Kingsley.

“It was traumatic,” she said. “I knew it was through urban renewal, but it just didn’t seem fair to me.”

Where Beckley’s house and other structures once stood, a six-story, 18-unit condo building was built in the last decade. Luxury-branded residences there now sell for over $1 million, typical of new development seen as the neighborhood has grown increasingly pricey.

“It’s not a good feeling,” said Beckley, who now lives on Social Security with a Section 8 housing voucher for an apartment in Pittsfield Township, just outside the city, and laments she and others are priced out of their old neighborhood.

Urban renewal was a buzz term sweeping across America in the 1950s and ’60s as the federal government put its weight behind helping cities combat blight and demolish old buildings to position large areas for redevelopment and new traffic infrastructure.

In Ann Arbor, like other places, it took aim at a neighborhood where many Black residents lived.

While it wasn’t exactly successful, it was the start of a chain of events Beckley and others argue led to Black residents leaving as the neighborhood gradually gentrified.

Ahead of a federal “slum clearance” official’s visit in May 1955, City Council President A.D. Moore laid out his thoughts, suggesting the area bound by Main, Ann, Detroit and Depot streets could be the focus of a large-scale rehabilitation effort as there were many old buildings. It was where racial segregation forced many Black residents to live near a junkyard, slaughterhouse and other industrial operations.

“To attack the problem of blight by going after one structure at a time is to get nowhere,” Moore said. “A successful attack must be on an area basis through what is now being called urban renewal.”

While there were many good homes in the neighborhood, some needed replacing, Moore said, adding there were other old buildings along Ann Street, a Black-owned business district, but no one could afford to buy, raze and replace them. He suggested federal assistance via the Housing Act of 1954 may be the only way to reverse what he saw as decay.

The city also had the right to condemn properties, Moore said, suggesting the city could exercise that to purchase and demolish structures “unfit for saving,” and then flip the properties for redevelopment.

Other structures worth saving could be rehabilitated by the owners unless they were unable or unwilling, in which case the city could condemn those as well, he said.

“Along with all this, the plan might call for setting aside a cleared area for a park or playground, relocating a street to improve traffic conditions, and changing of zoning to get a better land use,” he said, saying it could greatly benefit the city.

In March 1956, City Council approved boundary lines for a 75-acre urban renewal area, up from 48 acres originally, covering the north-central neighborhood on the north side of downtown, including what’s known today as Kerrytown.

The first step was to apply for federal planning funds to determine which structures to demolish or move and what street route changes to make, and the total cost of the project was estimated at more than $3.5 million.

Debate over the controversial program continued into 1958 when an estimated 300 to 400 people turned out for a stormy July hearing at a City Council meeting that had to be moved from city hall to a nearby church because the crowd was so large. The plan took a verbal pounding from residents, but Mayor Samuel J. Eldersveld wasn’t discouraged.

The city’s plan called for removing 172 residential structures, including 117 single-family homes, and displacing nearly 250 families, while suggesting 267 new dwelling units could be built, 219 of them in multi-family structures. It also called for traffic pattern changes, including closing some streets.

The Rev. C.W. Carpenter of the Second Baptist Church called it diabolical, unjust and ruthless and warned city officials to expect residents to keep challenging it.

“We will fight this thing from the lowest court to the Supreme Court of the United States,” he declared.

City Council eventually voted 6-5 in favor of a 75-acre urban renewal plan in June 1959, but newly elected Mayor Cecil O. Creal vetoed it and proposed a Citizens Committee on Voluntary Rehabilitation as an alternative.

The neighborhood avoided massive disruption then, but the idea for a Packard-Beakes bypass gained momentum in the 1960s and once again set off alarms, some saying it would put a scar across the heart of the Black community. City voters approved a bond for it in 1966, but after the city spent funds acquiring properties, it no longer had public support when the city went back to voters with another bond six years later.

In the meantime, Beckley reluctantly bid farewell to her family home that stood in the way.

She was 7 when her mother purchased it for $12,000 in 1949, she said. Her mother died and didn’t have a will, so it went to her stepfather, who accepted the $10,000 the city offered as compensation for it around 1967-68, she said.

“We didn’t have a choice,” Beckley said, saying she still thinks it was a bad deal.

She tried to stay in the home, but the city wanted to evict her and she eventually left, moving her family across town, she said.

City records from March 1968 list the house as city-owned at that point and in “fair condition.” By early 1969, the city had utilities to the house disconnected in preparation for demolition.

“It wasn’t the slums,” Beckley said of her old neighborhood, arguing the city wasn’t justified in targeting it.

“We were OK,” she said. “We helped one another. We had Second Baptist Church, we had Bethel A.M.E. Even though we had the Baptists and the Methodists, we worked together.”

The city started a Housing Commission in 1965 and in the years to come developed several low-income housing complexes throughout the city, but they were described by some tenants in 1973 using terms such as “ghetto,” “slum” and “mudville.” One tenant organizer who called attention to conditions then said, “When you live in a mess like this, you stand out from the rest of the neighborhood like a sore thumb.”

As gentrification displaced many Black residents from their old neighborhood, and some sold their homes but then couldn’t afford another in the city, many ended up in the scattered public housing complexes, said Beckley, who was a housing manager for the commission in the 1970s.

“It got to be the houses were starting at $300,000 and $400,000, so then you can’t afford to even go back,” she said.

From 1970 to ’80, the Black population around the areas known today as Kerrytown and Water Hill went from 45% of residents to 25% and continued to drop to 18% in 2000, according to census data. Even as Ann Arbor’s population grew 9% in the decade up to the 2020 census, the city’s Black population fell 5%.

Looking at the changes from 1990 to 2020, the city’s population grew more than 13%, while the number of Black residents fell 17% — down from 9,905 to 8,236, going from 9% to 6.6% as a proportion of the overall community.

“It isn’t that I’m not for progress,” Beckley said. “But my problem with the progress is they didn’t include any of us Black people.”

However, she is enthusiastic about the Housing Commission’s new Dunbar Tower affordable housing development being built in the neighborhood, with plans for a first-floor space honoring the area’s Black history.

Ann Arbor Black history film draws sold-out crowd at Michigan Theater

Beckley still has memories of certain Ann Arbor establishments prohibiting Black people when she was younger and her family not being able to get a loan for home improvements when white families could, she said, recalling her childhood home had a coal furnace and they’d have to load up a wheelbarrow with coal down at the train depot.

“My mother decided that she wanted to upgrade and have a gas furnace, but she never could get help with that cost,” she said. “But when the white people moved in, they got all kinds of 1% loans to fix up and remodel the homes that they had bought. But that was not offered to us at any time.”

As for urban renewal, while officials who supported such efforts suggested they had good intentions, Beckley’s take is it was just another form of discrimination.

“I think it was a design to break up the Black community,” she said.

“I think they knew what they were doing.”

Ann Arbor council votes unanimously to explore reparations for Black residents

Want more Ann Arbor-area news? Bookmark the local Ann Arbor news page or sign up for the free “3@3 Ann Arbor” daily newsletter.