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The other side of paradise

The intention: create a federal program to revitalize public housing and its residents. The result: more costly homes, tighter admission standards, a new class of residents and questions about what became of the former ones.

TAMPA - On a recent afternoon, a young couple named Rodney and Carmen McNealy got in their car and went apartment hunting.

They live in Brandon, in the kind of apartment complex that spells its name with an unnecessary "e" at the end. They spend $1,000 a month, which is manageable on two teachers' salaries. But with their first baby due in July, they needed something they could afford on his salary alone.

They went looking in an unexpected place. They drove back into the heart of the city - against the historic flow of people fleeing to the suburbs - to a working-class black neighborhood.

To get there, they drove north on 22nd Street from Interstate 4, leaving behind the restaurants and bars of Ybor City's entertainment district. Soon they arrived in what Rodney calls "a pretty worn-down neighborhood of dilapidated buildings."

Carmen was not pleased, especially when Rodney teased, "I'm taking you to the projects."

Rodney had lived in the neighborhood for several years, not in the public housing complexes of College Hill Homes and Ponce de Leon Court, but near. He had developed a real affection for the "really good people living there, older folks who'd raised their families there for years. It reminded me of where I grew up in Gainesville."

He knew that the crime-infested public housing had been torn down. Something quite remarkable, something he had never seen in Gainesville, had replaced it.

Rodney turned left at a large sign advertising the Villas at Belmont Heights Estates, "the latest in affordable luxury living." As he drove slowly down an airy boulevard lined with Victorian-style street lamps, an array of brightly painted buildings spread out before them: bungalow-style duplexes in Covent Garden green and two-story grand houses in Gauguin yellow.

Rodney pulled to the curb in front of the "clubhouse," which doubles as the rental office. Behind the clubhouse they could see the shimmering light of a swimming pool.

A tour guide walked with the couple past flower beds of lantana and orange marigolds to the model home next door, a fishpond-blue airplane bungalow with a front porch and gabled roof that could blend in easily with the 1920s-era bungalows of the nearby Seminole Heights historic district.

The front window of the model home looks out onto a playground where, at the moment the McNealys were admiring the home's washer/dryer and computer work station, a handful of children were giddily running around in the shade of a grand oak.

The McNealys liked what they saw. They especially liked the price.

The rent for a three-bedroom, 11/2-bath apartment was $787. Two-bedroom apartments in a new development in Ybor City, featuring many of the same amenities, are renting for $1,245.

"You could have your pick," the guide told the couple.

East Tampa has been so bad for so long, it is tempting to view the McNealys' apartment hunting trip as proof that Belmont Heights Estates is an unqualified success. A young black working couple with a baby on the way considers moving from Brandon to a neighborhood that for decades has been regarded as the city's hidden embarrassment.

What's not to cheer about?

To answer that, let's go back to September, on the sweltering afternoon when the Tampa Housing Authority held a grand opening ceremony for a development that had been in the works for five years.

The homes weren't ready to live in - the first residents wouldn't move in for another six months, as it turned out - but grass had been laid that morning, the clubhouse was open, and officials were ready to celebrate.

Fanning themselves with programs, more than a dozen federal, state and local officials praised the innovative housing program known as HOPE VI. The federal program had provided the $32.5-million grant that wiped out dreary College Hill and Ponce de Leon and gave birth to Belmont Heights Estates, which ultimately will cost upward of $85-million.

"This was an eyesore for so many years," then-Mayor Dick Greco said. These new homes, he said, "will allow people to live in dignity."

Bob Greer, president of Michaels Development Co., which oversaw the project, said "HOPE VI is . . . about tearing down the barriers that isolated a community of low-income residents from the rest of the city."

As proof of who would be living in dignity, reconnected to the rest of Tampa, officials called Brenda Washington to the podium. Washington, a 35-year-old hospital cafeteria worker who had lived in College Hill for three years, was going to be Belmont Heights' first official resident.

In her speech, Washington spoke to the many women who would soon be returning to this oasis as her neighbors.

"We need to respect this property," she said. "This is our future. We need to keep it looking nice."

Someone in the audience might have concluded that the people who would benefit from the development would be the 1,300 families that used to live there.

But nine months later, it's not that simple. Most of the new residents never lived here before, and many never lived in public housing.

Brenda Washington has not come back to Belmont Heights. When it came time to sign a lease, she decided that the rent was too high. Of the 109 new tenants, 37 are former residents of College Hill and Ponce de Leon. That ratio likely won't change much when the last of the 860 units is done late next year; more than half of the housing is set aside for people who can pay market-rate rents or close to them.

Critics of HOPE VI have long complained that the program is contributing to a shortage of affordable housing by tearing down more units than it rebuilds. Tougher readmission standards make it harder for former residents to get back in.

Across the country, as few as 11 percent of former residents are living in neighborhoods that have been revitalized by HOPE VI developments, according to a study last year by the National Housing Law Project.

Many of the displaced residents are not much better off than when they moved out several years ago. Many live in poor neighborhoods with higher crime than the rest of the county, like they did before. Many are still unemployed, still on welfare. Their credit is still bad, and so is their health.

"You didn't solve their problems," said Larry Keating, an expert in public housing policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "You just swapped out a better class of poor people."

That wasn't the plan at first.

In 1992, a government commission concluded that 6 percent of the nation's 1.4-million public housing units were "severely distressed." The buildings, many of them high-rises in cities such as Chicago, were densely packed and poorly maintained, infested from within by rats and beset from without by drug violence.

Of greater concern was "a deteriorating - severely distressed - population in need of a multitude of services and immediate attention," the report stated.

In response, U.S. Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Maryland, declared that "the time has come to reinvent public housing."

Her solution was HOPE VI, a new incarnation of an old program called Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere. The goal would be to tear down and rebuild about 86,000 public housing units and offer services - job training, help repairing bad credit and earning high-school equivalency degrees - that would encourage economic self-sufficiency among the residents. Congress budgeted $500-million for the first year.

Since then, the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department has allocated more than $5-billion in grants to 146 local housing authorities in 37 states. Those authorities have used, or will use, the money to tear down 115,000 units, 29,000 more than originally identified as severely distressed.

The rules for building the new housing all but assured that it would attract a new class of residents - and displace some of the old ones.

In 1995, Congress did away with a requirement that housing authorities had to rebuild a unit of public housing for every one they tore down. This meant that developers could build less densely populated, more aesthetically pleasing properties with plenty of green space. One HOPE VI project in Atlanta, a city that reduced its public housing stock from 15,000 units in 1994 to 10,000 in 2001, boasts a golf course.

With no obligation to replace all the public housing units, developers chose to design projects with a majority of units that they could rent, or even sell, at a profit. They covered the cost of building the public housing units with tax credits they sold to private investors.

Housing experts gave this new model for affordable housing a name: "mixed-income." Though it was patently beneficial to developers, it was touted as a virtue in and of itself.

The rationale was that the good work habits and social connections of wealthier residents would rub off on their poorer neighbors. The residents, regardless of income, would soon be networking, signing each other up for volunteer committees, helping each others' children get summer jobs.

As Harry Wexler, a New Haven, Conn., urban planner who advises cities on HOPE VI projects, put it: "They would do all the things that we take for granted but don't exist in a calamitously poor neighborhood."

But, Wexler said, "there is very little evidence" that goal has been attained.

Even an audit by HUD's inspector general in 1999 indicated that all was not perfect with the program:

"Some housing authorities have accomplished impressive physical revitalizations at their HOPE VI sites. However, improvements to the lives of the residents who lived there are much less obvious."

To know whether their lives have improved, it's necessary to know where they are living.

In Tampa the responsibility to track the nearly 1,300 families was given to the Tampa-Hillsborough Urban League. Each resident was to be given a needs assessment to determine services each needed to settle into a new neighborhood, as well as help to prepare each one to move back to Belmont Heights when construction was finished.

But the Urban League's contract didn't begin until July 1999, by which time many residents had been gone more than a year. As of September, when the grand opening was held, the Urban League had done needs assessments on half of the former residents, said Jacqueline Reynolds, service manager for the Tampa-Hillsborough Urban League. The rest of the residents either were not interested or couldn't be found, she said.

The Tampa Housing Authority can speak only in approximate terms about where all its former residents have ended up.

About 300 moved to other public housing complexes in the city, said Ben Stevenson, the HOPE VI project coordinator. The large majority, about 700 tenants, took Section 8 housing vouchers and went in search of private rental apartments around the county. A small number disappeared without leaving forwarding addresses, a few died, and a couple even bought homes.

Housing officials around the country point to the high number of Section 8 vouchers as proof that the residents are happy to move out of public housing.

"They live wherever they want to live," said Rick White, spokesman for the Atlanta Housing Authority. "For the first time in their lives, they are presented with a choice."

But the truth is not so neat. One of the few studies on how these families fared once they were on their own - whether they landed in neighborhoods with high rates of poverty and crime - was done in Tampa.

In the fall of 1998, researchers at the University of South Florida took the new addresses provided by the housing authority and plugged them into a computer mapping program.

The good news was that the neighborhoods where the families settled were less poor and had lower unemployment than where the families had come from. The bad news was that the unemployment and poverty levels were twice and three times the rest of the county.

"It would be a sweeping generalization to say HOPE VI is bad for everyone," said Shari Feldman, a doctoral student in applied anthropology at USF who worked on the study. "It was good for some and bad for many."

The researchers also did interviews with about 60 women, primarily in the Sulphur Springs area of the city. These women expressed fears about their new neighborhoods, unhappiness that they had been cut off from friends and churches, and frustration that transportation was less convenient.

Moving meant that many residents lost touch with services they had been receiving in College Hill and Ponce de Leon.

In the mid '90s, College Hill and Ponce de Leon were at the center of 14 census tracts in which babies were dying at a rate 250 percent higher than the rest of Hillsborough County. In 1997, the Central Hillsborough Healthy Start program received a $1.5-million federal grant to provide better health care for poor mothers and their newborns. But by the time the money arrived, the women were gone.

"That was frustrating," said Vanessa Anderson of Healthy Start. "But more frustrating was not being sure they were getting the services they needed."

When the USF researchers presented their findings at a public meeting in September 2001, they were assailed by housing authority officials who questioned the size of their sample and their methodology. Residents' lives were much worse before, they said.

"Were some people unhappy? Sure," said Stevenson, the HOPE VI project coordinator. "But there's lots more that were happy."

And another thing. The project that was supposed to solve a crime problem in one neighborhood ended up moving it to another.

In 1999, state Sen. Victor Crist, R-Tampa, thought that the area west of USF had finally shed its seedy reputation as "Suitcase City."

Crist wasn't that surprised to see an influx of young women pushing strollers in the midday sun as they walked from apartment complex to apartment complex. The women were displaced residents from College Hill and Ponce de Leon looking for a place to use their new Section 8 housing vouchers.

Soon Crist started getting reports from Hillsborough County sheriff's officials about spiking crime in an area that was being vigorously patrolled as part of the federal Weed and Seed program.

From the fall of 1997 through the fall of 2001, shootings and stabbings increased 22 percent. Vehicle theft was up 26 percent, robbery 24 percent. Some kinds of crime dropped just as significantly (burglary and theft, for example), but the jump in violent crime was alarming.

"Cities across the country are using HOPE VI to displace their problem," Crist said. "I don't have any problem saying that."

Susan Greenbaum, a professor of anthropology at USF who directed the study, does not mince words about the real motivation of HOPE VI.

"I think this is a poverty dispersion strategy. The notion that (HOPE VI) is for the population that has been displaced is disingenuous," she said.

"Nobody would argue the projects were a good place to live. But they were the most affordable alternative for people of low income."

Last fall, after the Tampa housing authority held its premature grand opening, the St. Petersburg Times undertook an unscientific, door-to-door survey of former residents. The idea was to learn if they were happier with their new housing and whether they intended to return to the new development that was then supposedly nearing completion.

A surprisingly small number of former residents had filled out applications for readmission, according to Interstate Realty Management, a subsidiary of Michaels Development. As of the end of September, Interstate had received nearly 800 applications; 113 were from former residents.

One of them had Lula Mae Williams' name on it.

Late one afternoon in early October, Williams and some friends were playing spades on a shady picnic table in Sulphur Springs. Bottles of light beer were sweating in the heat as the women slapped cards on the table and vented about Belmont Heights Estates.

Williams, who had moved out of Ponce de Leon, was angry because she had been denied for the new development. Apparently, she had not made it past the credit check.

"What's a credit card got to do with living in the projects?" said Wanda Henderson, 40, coming to Williams' defense. "They said they were making it better for people in the projects. They lied."

This invigorated Williams, 53.

"You tell them Lula Mae Williams says: I ain't comin' back."

Besides, she said, "the bedrooms are too small."

Most of the women interviewed expressed little interest in the new development.

"It might be a better environment," said Ivory Bolen, 23, "but I don't feel the need to go back. I'm just lazy. I don't like moving."

"When I left," said Pamyla Goodman, 35, "I said I wasn't coming back. I thought it was going to be the same projects."

Goodman is living in a duplex in Sulphur Springs in a Section 8 apartment that she said is costing her more than she expected in monthly utilities. She pays $36 a month in rent, she said, but "the cost of living was easier when I was staying in the projects."

Moving back is not an option, she said. She doesn't have credit.

Marilyn Robinson, 43, also declined to apply.

"They're too strict," she said.

"People can't sit on their porch," she said. "People can't barbecue. They'll throw you out if you miss a month's rent."

Tenants have to pay their rent like anywhere else, but residents sit on their front porches as much as weather permits, and some barbecue regularly.

"We have a stringent screening process," said Tanya Street, who was the property manager for Belmont Heights Estates during 2002 and early 2003. New residents were required to pass a credit check, a criminal background check, a landlord check and even a home visit to see if applicants kept a clean house.

But the most important standard was that the applicant had to either be working or "actively engaged in a verifiable self-support program, or in school or disabled," Street said. "It's to ensure we have quality people."

None of the new residents disagrees with that standard. Those who made it through the application process are happy that it has weeded out people they consider undesirable.

This is another of the truths of the HOPE VI program. It's not a question of race, but class.

Much as the spurned former residents might think that Belmont Heights is an attempt to push poor black people out in favor of middle-class whites, that hasn't proven to be true. All the new residents are black, and the complex is expected to be more ethnically diverse once it is finished. The variable is socio-economic. Whether they are paying market-rate rent or accepting a nearly 100 percent subsidy, the new residents are looking for the same thing: middle-class security.

Take the case of Conslee Ray and her new neighbor Velma Gallon.

Ray and Gallon grew up in east Tampa in the 1960s. They were classmates through high school. Then their lives diverged dramatically.

Ray, 42, quickly found herself in the Ponce de Leon public housing complex, where she was drawn into drug use and prostitution. She broke free of that life, but she did not escape from Ponce de Leon until 1999, when the complex was set to be torn down. Her application to Belmont Heights Estates was approved based on her enrollment in a local Bible college.

After high school, Gallon, 40, went straight to work and now fills prescriptions at an Eckerd pharmacy in Hyde Park, a job she has had for two years. She has never lived in public housing. Though she has received federal housing vouchers to help with her rent, she has always lived in privately owned homes.

Gallon came to Belmont Heights Estates because she was having trouble finding a single-family home with her Section 8 voucher. The newness of Belmont Heights Estates appealed to her.

Though they arrived by different paths, Gallon and Ray agree about what will be the deciding factor in the success of the community.

"If you get the wrong folks in here, it's going to be a mess," Gallon said. "If you let the drug dealers in, that's it."

This is the idea of "defensible space" that urban planners talk about. It's an almost instinctive urge for a homeowner, but it's something that renters feel only if they think their neighborhood is worth defending.

Residents must be willing to act as sentinels in response to threats to their neighborhood. Basically, they have to be willing to complain about their neighbor's bad behavior, something that would have resulted in certain retribution in the projects.

Lashun Williams sat on her front porch the day in April that she moved in and described for a visitor what she saw in front of her.

"I see a lot of luxury. People enjoying themselves, not fighting, not cussing. I don't see any drug transactions going on," she said.

After 11 years living in the Central Park housing project near downtown, Williams said, this apartment proves that no one is trapped permanently in public housing.

"This shows my kids that all those years I said I was going to get us a better place and I got it," said Williams, a cafeteria worker at Robinson High School. "If I've got to get two or three jobs to stay over here, that's what I'm going to do."

Criticizing a project that has had that kind of impact on a family's life would seem to miss the point completely. Why shouldn't someone like Lashun Williams be rewarded for her hard work? But if HOPE VI has a fault, it is how few people like Williams are benefiting from these new oases.

Only 201 homes are finished, but all the units set aside for traditional public housing have been filled or have qualified applicants ready to move in. What is left to fill are the more expensive units, the ones reserved for people with higher incomes.

"We have to refocus our marketing efforts on higher income levels," said Wayne Cummings, the property manager for Interstate. A new mailer targeting certain ZIP codes, such as Brandon and north Tampa, may include a "first month free" special.

Which brings us back to the McNealys, the young couple who were so impressed by Belmont Heights when they visited in early April. No one from Belmont Heights followed up with them, but they remain very interested.

They were not turned off when they overheard a new resident say that her apartment had been burglarized the night before. They weren't turned off when they were watching television recently and saw drug dealers being arrested on the corner across the street.

"People like us moving in there might break down barriers," Carmen said. "I want to open my own school in that community. I think people who are on public assistance can benefit from living next to people who are working."

One thing troubles them, however: the knowledge that people were pushed out to create this utopia.

"When I first read about this, I thought the people (who were displaced) were getting a raw deal," Rodney said. "I still think they got a raw deal, but I'm happy the opportunity is there for me and my family."

This might be worth remembering as federal legislators decide whether to fund HOPE VI past 2004. HUD wants to end the program, relieving itself of a high-ticket budget item and an administrative headache. The push from the Bush administration is home ownership.

Belmont Heights Estates residents who stay more than three years will qualify to put 5 percent of their rent toward the purchase of a home.

"We're operating on the traditional assumption that it's transitional housing," Cummings said. "We're trying to instill self-sufficiency."

Legislators who have grown to rely on the steady stream of capital dollars to their districts are looking for ways to save the program. But there is a growing awareness of the problems of displacement. One bill proposed in the House of Representatives would give preference to projects that don't displace residents.

Meanwhile, work is expected to start soon on another HOPE VI development in Tampa, a $19.9-million grant to demolish and rebuild the Riverview Terrace housing project. Three hundred and sixty families, some of them having settled there after their homes were knocked down in College Hill and Ponce de Leon, have been relocated.

- Times researchers John Martin, Kitty Bennett and Caryn Baird contributed to this story.