Bring Community to the Table

I did not grow up with the language for what was happening to my neighborhood. I just had the evidence in front of me.

The grocery store that closed. The Colonial Bakery, gone. The youth programs that quietly stopped getting funded until there was nothing left to cut. You feel all of it before you understand any of it. You don't yet know that decisions did this. That developers and policy, not fate, drew the lines.

I was still inside that fog in December 2015 when I read a column in the Times Free Press by a man named Dr. Ken Chilton.

I was at home. The read felt heavy, heavier than a newspaper column has any business feeling. I had to go back through it more than once, just to let each sentence land before I could take in the next.

He had just spent two years heading the Ochs Center for Metropolitan Studies here in Chattanooga. In that piece, he laid out, in plain numbers, what I had only ever felt: that Chattanooga's renaissance had a floor built for some and not for others, that the comeback story running through every glossy feature about our riverfront was true for some ZIP codes and false for others.

That column did something to me. Once you have language and data for what you already know is true, you cannot go back to not knowing it.

That was my first civic education, and I didn't even know I was enrolled.

Dr. Chilton left Chattanooga not long after, moving to Nashville to teach at Tennessee State University. By most measures, that could have been the end of the story. It wasn't.

He kept researching Chattanooga. He kept publishing on Chattanooga. And in January 2019, he stood in front of a packed sanctuary at Westside Missionary Baptist Church in Alton Park to present a report that would not let this city look away: between 2000 and 2017, more than 2,500 Black Chattanoogans had left downtown, and more than 5,000 white Chattanoogans had moved in. Median income for white households had climbed by tens of thousands of dollars while Black household income barely moved. The report, released through Chattanooga Organized for Action, called it what it was: a modern-day "Negro Removal."

I was a couple of rows from the front that night. The church was packed, and you could feel that particular weight a room gets when everybody senses something important is about to happen. People around me were talking before Dr. Chilton even started, saying the phrase itself was shocking, and it was exactly right. People were also wondering whether Mayor Berke, or anybody from the city's leadership, would show up to hold space for what was about to be said.

They didn't come.

He opened that night by asking who in the room worked for the mayor's office. For the county. For River City. For the Enterprise Center.

It got quiet enough to hear a pin drop.

Dr. Chilton has always been talking to the people in the pews, not the powerful who rarely show up to hear it. The people in Alton Park, East Chattanooga, and the Westside already knew what the data said before anyone handed them a report, because they were living it.

Dr. Chilton's research never stayed inside city limits, either.

I've followed this part of his work from a distance, the same way you'd watch weather building somewhere upriver. Chattanooga tends to feel what happens in Nashville and Atlanta on a delay. By the time it shows up here, it's already been tested somewhere else first.

In Nashville, he started tracking Wall Street firms buying up single-family homes by the thousands, not to live in them, but to rent them out, cash offers, no inspections, algorithms generating offers before a first-time buyer can even schedule a walkthrough. NewsChannel 5 Investigates profiled one Nashville woman, Joy Styles, who lost house after house to firms she never even knew she was bidding against.

Dr. Chilton put numbers to what Joy Styles was living. In Rutherford County alone, he tracked the top investment firms owning roughly one in forty single-family houses, not distressed properties, but homes marketed to families earning $80,000 a year, renting for $1,800 to $2,500 a month. He has laid out, publicly and repeatedly, how the model works, and called it what it is: a business built on turning housing into something traded like a commodity.

What he mapped in Middle Tennessee is the same pressure quietly reshaping who can afford to buy a home in Chattanooga. He saw it before most of us had a name for it, the same way he saw the downtown numbers before most of us had a name for that, too.

You would not guess, meeting him for the first time, how much Dr. Chilton cares about the people his data is about. He is reserved, polished, mild-mannered. Then he presents, or sits across from you one-on-one, and the reserve falls away into something direct. He does not tell you what his data means. He hands it to you and tells you to check his work.

I watched him do exactly that in March, at Bethel AME Church.

He was there to walk the room through what gentrification looks like in Chattanooga right now, census tract by census tract. Joan McClane was in the room that night too. Dr. Chilton went through every slide, in order, at a pace that let you sit with each number before the next one landed.

Then he stopped talking and opened the floor.

Somebody asked the question sitting in everybody's chest. His original "Negro Removal" report broke in 2018. He followed it up again in 2021 once the new census numbers came in. Both times the data said the same thing. So why, years later, were people still being pushed out?

Dr. Chilton didn't reach for one villain. Other people in the room answered before he had to. Somebody brought up the Lookouts stadium, built with taxpayer money that could have gone toward low- and moderate-income housing instead. Somebody brought up last year's tax increase. And somebody brought up the ground we were standing on, East Chattanooga, and Boone Heights, where the city tore down public housing on a promise that the people who lived there would come back once the new development was finished. More than 400 families were displaced. The promise did not hold.

By the time the back-and-forth settled, the room had landed on the thing that made the whole night heavier than any single slide: this was never one decision, or one government body, to point a finger at. It was a stadium and a tax increase and a broken promise a few blocks away, made by different people in different rooms over different years, all pointing the same direction.

He went quiet and let the room build the answer together, out loud, in front of him.

Joan was taking it all in too. Months later, her June reporting on Chattanooga's historic Black neighborhoods opened with Nikki Lake, an Avondale renter watching her monthly payment triple to $1,500 while new townhouses went up the road for just under $300,000. I don't think that's a coincidence of timing.

Data and institutional credibility are not evenly distributed. Most of the people doing the real work in this city, the volunteers, the organizers showing up after a full shift somewhere else, do not have a PhD behind their name. They know what is true. But knowing something and being able to prove it to a room full of power brokers are two different fights.

Dr. Chilton showed up to fight the other one, not because his title required it, but because he chose to.

Chattanooga owes Dr. Chilton his flowers, and we don't often say that kind of thing until it's too late to say it to someone's face.

He didn't have to keep coming back. He didn't have to keep researching a city he no longer lived in, or stand in front of that sanctuary asking a room full of preachers and grandmothers to sit with numbers that made a city's self-image look a lot less flattering than its marketing. He did it anyway, whether the subject was downtown demographics or REIT-owned rental homes, with the same message every time: bring community to the table, in the same room as the people holding the purse strings.

Dr. Ken Chilton gave a lot of us something we didn't know we needed: proof. Proof that what we felt in our bones, watching the places we loved disappear one at a time, was not paranoia. It was pattern.

He also gave me something no report can hold. He gave me permission to trust what I already knew was true, and then taught me how to prove it. Every time I reach for a dataset before an opinion now, that instinct traces back to a heavy afternoon at home in 2015, and to a man who kept coming back to a city he no longer had to call his.

The grocery store never came back. Neither did the bakery. But Dr. Chilton did, again and again, from three hundred miles away, long after anyone would have blamed him for staying gone.

So on behalf of everyone in this city who needed proof of what they already knew in their bones: thank you, Dr. Chilton. For the numbers. For the flowers you never asked for and would probably deflect if we tried to hand them to you in person. We’re not done needing you yet.

William Allen Fuller began working for the Western & Atlantic Railroad in 1855. One morning in April 1862 is the reason his name outlived him.

Union raiders led by James J. Andrews seized the General, a locomotive at Big Shanty, now Kennesaw, planning to burn the railroad's bridges behind them and cut a key Confederate supply line. Fuller, the General's conductor, gave chase on foot, then by a series of commandeered locomotives, finally the Texas, run in reverse for much of the pursuit. About 80 miles later, near Ringgold, he recaptured the General. The bridges stood, the raid failed, and the episode became known as the Great Locomotive Chase.

Fuller briefly served as Chief Marshal of Atlanta in 1865, worked for the Macon & Western Railroad for two years starting in 1870, then returned to the W&ARR in 1876. He later became a merchant in Atlanta and is buried in Oakland Cemetery.

His monument there still credits him with saving the railroad's bridges and, in doing so, protecting a supply line the Confederacy depended on. The chase he's remembered for was, at its core, a chase to keep the Confederacy's war machine running.

That framing only hardened with time. In 1950, in the middle of the Jim Crow South, the Georgia legislature commissioned a gold medal honoring Fuller's role in the chase, presented to his son that May, part of a broader Lost Cause push that recast the Confederacy's fight as noble rather than a fight to preserve slavery.

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I've been thinking about service lately, and about how it's really the rent we pay for room on this earth.

Nobody asked to be born here, into this body, this family, this stretch of time. We didn't earn a place on this planet. It was given to us before we could do anything to deserve it. And a gift like that, the kind you never applied for, still comes with an obligation attached, even if nobody hands you the invoice.

That's what service really is, I think. Not charity, not a resume line, not something you do to feel better about yourself on a Tuesday. It's the payment. It's what you owe for the space you're taking up, the air, the years, the people who showed up for you before you could ask them to.

Nobody sends a late notice. No landlord knocks. You can skip paying for years and nothing visibly breaks, which is exactly what makes it so easy to keep skipping.

But the people who actually make a place worth living in are never the ones staying current on a schedule. They're the ones who show up anyway, unasked and usually unpaid, because somebody has to, and the alternative is a room nobody bothered to take care of.

— Marie

Previous Edition: We Built Big Brother. Now He's Watching All of Us.