This story was reported and written by our media partner the Virginia Mercury.
On a mid-July evening, condominium owners in Norfolk’s historic Freemason district met to organize against what they saw as a threat to their property values and the enjoyment of the waterfront: a planned floodwall, 11 feet or more high, running through their neighborhood.
They’d been blindsided a month earlier when a resident invited Kyle Spencer, the city’s resilience officer, to present a $2.66 billion U.S. Army Corps of Engineers coastal storm risk management plan to protect the city from catastrophic flooding.
They watched as Spencer showed options for the wall alignment, including one slicing between two condominium buildings and down a cobblestone street that is a key entryway into the neighborhood. Another option hugged the waterfront and then traversed into the Elizabeth River. They weren’t told, but specifications would require it to rise about 17 feet above the water.
“Whether intentional or unintentional, there has been no visibility to this process,” said Eric Thompson, the president of the Freemason Harbour Condominium Association, who led the meeting.
Condominiums there are valued from about $350,000 to more than $500,000. They asked Spencer: Would owners be compensated for any lost property value? They might benefit from lower flood insurance rates, he responded. That incensed Thompson.
“So we’ll save two grand a year on flood insurance and lose $200,000 (value) on each unit,” he told two dozen owners at the July meeting.
Thompson’s presentation that night included a slide showing the wall at street level, something the city has never included in its presentations. In Miami, similar renderings helped fuel a backlash against walls running through the downtown waterfront leading the city to demand a new plan from the Corps.
In an interview, Spencer offered several reasons why similar drawings have not been produced. It’s too early in the design, he said. He wants to show the wall as integrated into the neighborhood. And his office has limited resources.
“Showing a big, ugly, gray wall,” he said. “It doesn’t seem to really show what is going to actually happen.”
The July meeting concluded with a plan to organize a letter-writing campaign to Virginia’s congressional delegation detailing their objections and to engage in the historic preservation overview required by the project.
“This is the beginning,” Thompson told the condominium owners.
Implementing resilience proves challenging
The Freemason group is the latest to complain that the city has failed to adequately inform them about details in the plan, the largest infrastructure project in Norfolk’s history. Of the threatened waterfront cities in the U.S., Norfolk is ahead with plans to combat rising waters. The City Council approved a partnership agreement with the Army Corps last year, obligating Norfolk to contribute a $931 million local share and move forward with detailed design and eventually construction. The plan will reshape the city, with more than eight miles of walls as high as 16 feet along its wealthiest neighborhoods, and softer solutions such as shorelines planted with grasses in other areas.
But implementing those plans is complicated, the city and the Corps are discovering. About 200 utility conflicts have been identified in just the first phase along downtown, slowing progress. Residents of the city’s lower-income, largely Black Southside last year challenged the failure to provide them with walls, noting their home values have been depressed by historical redlining. Critics have long said the benefit-cost analysis used by the Corps values property over people and grey infrastructure over green solutions to the detriment of disadvantaged communities and the environment.
When Norfolk’s City Council approved the partnership agreement with the Army Corps last year, obligating the city to contribute a $931 million local share and move forward with construction, it passed a resolution seeking a new study looking at the feasibility of adding walls in Southside. Spencer sent a formal request by letter in July 2023. City representatives including Mayor Kenneth Alexander as well as Col. Brian Hallberg, then the district commander, pledged their support and promised to keep leaders in the loop through regular meetings.
The plan protects the city from inundation by major storms, not the increasing flooding from high tides or more intense rainstorms. At the July meeting, Thompson noted flooding takes place further inland from Freemason, but not in the neighborhood.
“The frustrating thing is that Freemason basically absorbs all of the negative consequences for the 1% chance of a flood that will impact the middle of the city,” Thompson said.
Without the project, the 2019 Corps plan estimated that all but a sliver of the city’s interior would be at risk for flooding from a major storm by 2075. With the project, the feasibility study says Norfolk will reap annual net benefits of $122 million from reduced damage to businesses, homes, and critical infrastructure, including healthcare facilities.
Greg Rutledge, an architect at Hanbury Design, historic preservation expert, and a member of Norfolk’s Architectural Review Board, recently learned about the walls planned for Freemason. He wondered why the review board had not at least been consulted during the feasibility study, completed in 2019, about the effects on Norfolk’s three historic districts, which include Freemason.
“The ramifications to the city’s interface with the waterfront and the viewshed, both from the water to the city and city to the water, is just unreconcilable, and it’s going to be permanent,” he said. “How can anybody even assess this as a benefit except only in economic property terms, which is frustrating.”
‘We were bamboozled’
The Freemason residents aren’t the only ones disappointed in the city’s lack of communication about the plan. Southside civic league leaders were also angered to learn by reading a news story last month that the study was not funded this year.
A day after that July Freemason meeting, Lawrence Brown, president of the Campostella Heights Civic League, got a call from a fellow activist pointing him to a story on the local NPR affiliate WHRO’s news site reporting that funding had not been approved to reconsider building walls to protect his and other neighborhoods on the city’s Southside.
Like the Freemason condominium owners, Brown and Southside leaders were blindsided. No one from the city had called or emailed after the Corps learned two months earlier that funding had not been appropriated.
“When were they gonna notify us?” Brown said. “A lot of the community is pissed off because they read it in the paper. I don’t blame them.”
In Norfolk, Southside residents say they often feel like afterthoughts; the communication failure fed into that narrative. City and Corps officials were aware of the need to communicate clearly. A summary of a November meeting between Spencer and Corps staffers, obtained through a records request, notes: “For Southside, the optics of waiting to begin study for 1-2 years will be (a) communications challenge.”
Kim Sudderth, a Planning Commission member and Southside activist, said she was trying to remain optimistic. “Hallberg, when we first met him, said over and over again that he would be our champion,” she said. “There were a number of people that wanted to just disregard what he had to say —we’ve heard this before. People say they’re going to advocate for us, and they never do. And my fear is, that pessimistic approach was actually accurate. “
Brown said last week that the city still has not notified him but has scheduled a Southside Task Force meeting for Sept. 3.
“The community has the impression, as my grandma used to say, we were bamboozled from the beginning,” he added. “It could have been easily dealt with by just coming up and saying, ‘Hey, we’ve run into a snag with funding for this. It may look like it’s going to be next year.’”
Spencer said he failed to inform Brown and others because he was focused on determining why the money was not appropriated and scheduling conflicts prevented earlier meetings. An Army Corps spokesperson confirmed that the North Atlantic office endorsed the new study’s funding in June after learning it didn’t need approval from higher-ups, nearly a year after Norfolk’s request. It will be considered for next year’s budget.
Mayor Kenneth Alexander, in an emailed response, said the city is pursuing an earmark funding the study. Meetings have been held with the Corps, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Congressional delegation.
While city officials were not updating Southside residents, they were addressing the concerns of potential developers over preliminary designs showing a wall running along Front Street, adjacent to the Freemason neighborhood. One large waterfront parcel along that street, labeled for future development on city maps, remains undeveloped.
Emails obtained through a public records request show Spencer, City Manager Pat Roberts, and Economic Development Director Sean Washington discussing scheduling a meeting with representatives of Gold Key PHR and Virginia Beach developer Bruce Thompson. An email from Spencer to Kristin Mazur, the point person for the Corps, said he was getting pressure from Roberts and the mayor to arrange a meeting soon.
“I understand the intent of the July workshop to be to develop design alternatives to the Front Street CSRM (coastal storm risk management) structural alignment, in the context of proposed private investment to take place in Fort Norfolk in this immediate vicinity,” Roberts wrote in a June 6 email to Spencer and other city staffers. “We will be asking the Corps to consider various design alternatives as well as a schedule that aligns with the private redevelopment.”
A public records request for July emails about that project is pending. In an emailed response, Spencer wrote that the city shares information with the Corps on proposed projects “to work on solutions that allow for both projects to be successful.”
While at least four media relations firms are consulting on communications, Spencer, who has a degree in geographic information systems, has been the point person communicating the plan. He says he and his staff have attended more than 80 public meetings. The city held four open houses this spring to explain its resilience strategy. A total of 157 people signed into those sessions although it’s possible more attended.
Spencer said the city was doing a better public information campaign for the floodwalls than on any project he’d done. “I’m not sure why they don’t know,” he said. “I think we’re doing our best to get it out there.”
