Residents of Norfolk’s historic Freemason neighborhood say they’ve been blindsided by the city’s plans to build a floodwall that would wrap around the area to protect it from major storms. They worry a wall could block waterfront views and bring down property values.
Around 150 people in the community gathered at a YMCA near downtown Wednesday night for a meeting – at times tense – about the project with officials from the city and Army Corps of Engineers.
“Most people I’ve talked to have no idea” it’s happening, Steve Sigmon, a 20-year Freemason resident, said at the meeting. “You might say that’s our fault, but it’s not. This has been an opaque process. Nobody’s really known.”
Pushback from Freemason residents is the latest challenge facing Norfolk and the Corps as they work to carry out the biggest infrastructure project in city history. Initial work on the project started a decade ago.
The city’s overall plan created in partnership with the Army Corps is called Coastal Storm Risk Management. It’s part of a series of similar projects proposed up and down the U.S. coastline after Hurricane Sandy caused billions of dollars of damage in 2012.
The effort includes a range of strategies meant to protect residents from catastrophic flooding during major storms like Sandy, including pump stations, home elevations and surge barriers across waterways such as the Lafayette River. It is not designed to address routine tidal flooding worsened by sea level rise.
The current price tag for the project is about $2.6 billion, 65% of which is covered by the Army Corps, leaving Norfolk on the hook for at least $930 million.
The flagship piece is an almost 9-mile-long series of seawalls, levees and living shorelines stretching from Chesterfield Heights up to Lambert’s Point, broken into four phases.
The section of floodwall that would run through Freemason — from downtown to Ghent — is the third. The city says it has started site surveys but hasn’t yet designed this section and wouldn’t enter construction on it until at least 2027. In the meantime they’ll gather resident feedback on the potential path and design.
Officials are currently finalizing designs for the first section of the wall around the Berkley Bridge.
Renderings of what a wall could look like around downtown’s Town Point Park include options for a more standard concrete wall – like the current one built in the 1970s near the USS Wisconsin, but higher – or a raised earthen berm with a walking path on top.
Eric Thompson, the president of the Freemason Harbour Condominium Association, said at this week’s meeting that he was shocked not to see discussion of potential negative impacts to property values in the project’s cost-benefit analysis.
“We're terrified we can't sell our property if this thing goes into the public eye, and there's an impediment between me and the view that we paid dearly to have,” Thompson said.
Elsewhere on the East Coast, communities have raised similar concerns about the aesthetic of a wall changing the character of historic waterfronts, including in Miami, Charleston and New York City. Norfolk is the furthest along in implementing its coastal storm plans.
Kyle Spencer, Norfolk’s resilience officer, said the “cost of doing nothing is much higher than the project,” noting that most cities don’t get approval to do this type of work until after disaster strikes.
Jack Kavanaugh, president of the Freemason Street Area Association, said “obviously, something has to be done” about flooding.
“But putting a 16-foot wall (through) Freemason Harbor is unacceptable.”
Michelle Hamor, planning and policy chief with the Army Corps’ Norfolk District, noted damage from storms made worse by future sea level rise could also affect real estate values if there’s no flood protection.
Officials also say the floodwall project will likely lower local flood insurance costs.
Meanwhile across the city, historically Black neighborhoods on Norfolk’s Southside are fighting to be included in the project.
Shortly before the City Council was set to approve the agreement with the Army Corps last year, residents of Campostella and Berkley learned the floodwall would not be built on their side of the water. (The plan includes some non-structural measures like home elevations and potential buyouts.)
Community members showed up in force to protest, citing concerns about environmental justice. Local, state and federal leaders held community meetings and ultimately agreed to ask Congress for permission to re-evaluate the approved plans, including potentially building flood structures in the Southside.
The Corps didn’t get funding to do that study in the agency’s most recent work plan, WHRO reported in July — which surprised Southside residents who were upset that leaders hadn’t notified them directly.
The exclusion of the Southside stems from the way the Army Corps evaluates a project’s worth, known as a cost-benefit analysis, which prioritizes protecting the dollar value of real estate.
That leaves lower-income areas like Norfolk’s Southside at a disadvantage – especially because of historic discrimination in urban planning – while elevating protection of wealthier neighborhoods such as Freemason.
