Down the Pike:
Life on the Jeff Davis Highway

A story about highways, community displacement and long-term consequences.

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Kelsey Ratliff, 25, walks out of her hotel room while her two-year-old daughter Liliana runs around the parking lot at America's Best Value Inn near Jeff Davis Highway in Chesterfield, Virginia. Kelsey is seven months pregnant but says she will give the baby up for adoption. She has received no prenatal treatment. "I can't raise another child in a hotel room like this," she said. * The baby was born in early June and Kelsey decided to keep her. She was "just too cute and the terms of the adoption changed," Kelsey said.
When I-95 was built, the consideration was on traffic congestion in major cities and accommodating a growing middle class with access to personal vehicles. In Virginia, a new highway meant Jeff Davis Highway would no longer be a destination with shops, diners and hotels for traveling families. Years of neglect have left those living in this area known as "the pike" in a cycle of poverty, cut off from infrastructure and access to jobs and even grocery stores.
Shane Snow dressed in a Scooby-Doo costume runs around the parking lot at the America's Best Value Inn near the Jeff Davis Highway. Many families call the hotels around Jeff Davis Highway, home. They are one step from homelessness and are often threatened with overnight eviction if they can't pay daily for the room despite legal protections against it.
Angelina, 10, (left) swims with her cousin* behind her home along Jeff Davis Highway during spring break. Angelina's mother, Angie, is watching the girl while her own mother deals with a meth addiction. Angie was raised by her grandmother because of her mother's addiction. For Angie, drugs have never been a temptation. "There is no rock bottom for addicts. You can keep going down, until you die. I guess rock bottom is when you die," she said. *The girl's name is being withheld to protect her identity.
Kennedy Lane, 5, was three-years-old when her oldest brother, Dakota Austin was murdered at the age of 18. Since that time her parents have become "missionaries" working in the trailer parks and hotels along Jeff Davis Highway. "There's a man - he's not my brother, but another man I liked very much who also died. I know there is a time to go but there are so many people dying. What is God doing?" she said.
Laundry hangs out to dry in Shady Hill mobile home park along Jeff Davis Highway on the first day of summer 2017.
David, 63, shows his scars from over 35 years of drug abuse. He said he started using cocaine and heroin to "be cool" in the late 70's and now his hands and arms are scarred from repeated needle injections. He has been on methadone for over a decade. "I'm afraid to come off it," he said. He knows America is in the middle of an opioid crisis but added, "There wasn't an 'epidemic' till these drugs came out of the ghetto."
The old Americana Mobile Home Park, home to 240 families, was closed over eight years ago to make room for new development along Jeff Davis Highway, but remains undeveloped. Neighbors in the nearby Bermuda Estates trailer park worry that they will be next to be displaced to make way for housing they won't be able to afford.
Twins Sophia and Samuel Hamlin, 2, stand outside of their family's home in Bermuda Estates mobile home park along Jeff Davis Highway. Their father, Richard Hamlin, worries that the trailer park could close to make way for housing development his family couldn't afford. "That's why so many people have to stay in hotels," he said, "They keep closing the trailer parks."
Angie Smith, 38, and her daughter Angelina, 10, cut through the woods to buy new school clothes at a nearby thrift store. They live on Jeff Davis Highway, which doesn't have sidewalks, so instead of risking the vehicle traffic, they go around. Angie struggles to pay rent on a studio apartment for her and her three children still at home by doing odd jobs on Craigslist. She remembers being four-years-old, lying in bed next to her mother while her mother and "a girlfriend with dirty, green toes" did meth together.
Mary Dean pays $400 a month to live in a 1/3 of a trailer - a trailer broken up into three separate apartments - in Shady Hill. She looks out for her community and the little kids in the park. "But I go inside when it gets dark and close my door," she said.
David Mullenax looks out the window of his mother's trailer in Shady Hill trailer court along Jeff Davis Highway. Shady Hill is known for its violence and poverty. A computer map that displays crime lights up with cartoon fists (assault) and blue stick figures (theft) at the Shady Hill address. David carries a knife in his waist. "I live in a dangerous place, I would usually have a gun," he said.
"I slipped up two weeks ago. I was ten years clean. But I made crank and I did it," said Lee Lee Sydenstricker, 42, near his home on Jeff Davis Highway. He said he turned to drugs after his girlfriend told him he wouldn't be able to see his youngest daughter. The father of six girls also said he knifed a pedophile to death on January 1, 1991. "It was the first murder of the year," he said.
Latisha Ragland holds her daughter Annarenee, 9, as she cries about her hunger pangs outside of their hotel room where they have lived for several months at the Flagship Inn in Petersburg, Virginia. Latisha lives on $735 from a disability check each month but rent at the hotel is $220 per week. "When it gets time for the rent to be due and I can't pay, I feel my chest caving in," she said.

Julia Rendleman

Julia Rendleman is a freelance photojournalist who loves telling stories in her own backyard. She is particularly drawn to stories a…

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Social Justice
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Poverty
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North America United States
Poverty

About Down the Pike: Life on the Jeff Davis Highway

Down the Pike: Life on the Jeff Davis Highway tells deeply personal stories of American poverty in a region outside of Richmond, Virginia. It is a story about highways, community displacement and long-term consequences. Poverty in this region can be directly linked to an infrastructure decision from the 1950s, a time when the major north/south highway on the East Coast was the Jefferson Davis Highway. Toward the end of that decade, I-95 was built, draining the lifeblood from the Jeff Davis artery. The Jeff Davis corridor, or “the pike,” as it is known to residents, is an area under special study by the local government. “With the completion of I-95, business demand along the corridor declined,” the April 2017 Northern Jefferson Davis Area Plan reads.

The goal of Down the Pike is to show fringe communities in a compassionate, relatable light and highlight the challenges that impoverished communities face. Down the Pike is central to Blue Earth’s mission to educate the public on critical social issues. So much of poverty journalism in 2017 has been about Appalachia and a bitter white working class threatened by changing demographics. It seeks to explain Donald Trump. Down the Pike is not this. It is not fly-over journalism but a deep embed in a community close to home that has struggled for decades.