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The 64-year-old Maverick Gardens housing project in Boston is being torn down and rebuilt under the Hope VI program, which is being eliminated by the Bush administration.Exclusive Report: Tax Cut Impact
Home rehab cutbacks leave poor in shambles
Millions struggle: Tax cut benefits outweighed by cost of shabby housing.
Arlene Carr works 76 hours a week, but still can't afford private-sector housing. She lives at Boston's Washington-Beech housing project with her mom and two children.
Maintenance director Wesley Recasener walks through a unit at the B.W. Cooper housing development in New Orleans, one of the nation's most violent projects.
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BOSTON — A panic-stricken Maribel Colon rushed her daughter Kyara to the emergency room after the 2-year-old kept tugging her ear and crying uncontrollably.
Doctors treating Kyara quickly made a disturbing discovery: A cockroach had burrowed into the little girl’s ear and was trapped there.
It wasn’t the first time. Four months earlier, doctors removed another cockroach from inside Kyara’s ear.
Colon, who lived in Boston’s crumbling, roach-infested Maverick Gardens housing project, had seen enough. Shortly after the incident, she and her daughter moved out.
That was three years ago.
Today, the 64-year-old Maverick Gardens is being torn down and rebuilt under the Hope VI program, which uses a combination of federal and private money to rehabilitate troubled public housing projects.
But Hope VI, which has spent more than $5 billion on 193 housing developments since 1993, is being eliminated by the Bush administration. It is one of several programs for the poor that the administration froze, scaled back or eliminated to trim costs while passing $600 billion in tax cuts that went primarily to those who earn more than $288,800 a year.
America’s working poor have seen their tax cut benefits eclipsed by the cuts in services that helped them climb from poverty. Many of the affected programs are essential elements of welfare-to-work initiatives.
Federal housing programs are especially critical for Americans in poverty and the working poor, who often find it difficult to pay for shelter without assistance. Public housing is hardly a free ride for tenants, whose rent payments cover anywhere from 35 to 65 percent of housing authorities’ operating budgets.
Often, what they pay for are apartments in decades-old buildings riddled with structural problems. Hope VI, with its focus on razing complexes and replacing them with modern units, targets the worst of public housing.
Detroit has lost more than 6,000 of its 11,000 units in the last decade.
The result has been a long list of people — waiting longer and longer — to get into public housing. In Detroit, there are 9,000 people on the waiting list for public housing.
Under President Bush, funding for the program has fallen from $570 million in 2001 to $149 million this year — a 74 percent drop. And although Congress has extended the program for at least the next two years, the administration again has asked for no money to fund it next year.
While Hope VI has not always created as many low-income units as it tears down, it remains the only comprehensive rehabilitation program for public housing. And many of the nation’s housing projects clearly need an extreme makeover.
At least 66,000 of the 1.2 million public housing units are in such disrepair that local housing authorities consider them “severely distressed.” These units, in crumbling buildings with dangerously decaying infrastructure, are barely habitable, if at all.
In New Orleans, for example, inspectors for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development noted in 2001 that existing structures were so bad that if their buildings were privately owned, the agency could seek criminal charges against the landlord.
Given the age of many projects and their lack of upkeep, the state of disrepair should surprise few.
More than half of all public housing projects are at least 20 years old. One-third of them are more than 40 years old.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development estimates it will take about $22 billion to catch up on a backlog of repairs in public housing. That’s roughly the amount the Bush administration is giving up in the first five years of cuts in the estate tax, which only the richest 2 percent of the population pays upon their death.
The federal government traditionally has been stingy with capital improvement money for housing projects. Under the Bush administration, it is even more so.
The current capital budget of $2.7 billion is $300 million a year less than when Bush took office in 2001. The cut is even more significant when inflation and rising material and labor costs are factored in.
At current funding levels, it would take at least 58 years to clear up the backlog of needed repairs, according to the National Low-Income Housing Coalition, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that works on housing issues for the poor.
Allowing structural problems to linger also means fixing them will cost more in the long run, say housing authority officials.
In the meantime, the 3 million Americans who pay in excess of $1 billion a year to live in federally subsidized housing must wait for much-needed renovations.
Andrea Foster, a 52-year-old resident of the Brewster- Douglass public housing complex in Detroit for the past four years, knows well what that means.
One of the two elevators in the 15-story building has been out of service for months. Foster, who needs hip and knee surgery, said she has waited three months to move from her seventh-floor apartment into a third-floor unit. She said officials still need to repair ceiling damage to that unit.
Foster, who gets around on a scooter, pays $160 monthly rent from her $564 Social Security check. She also receives $42 in quarterly assistance from Michigan.
“You would think that it was a million dollars. It is so helpful,” Foster said. “It’s a shame $42 could uplift you so much.”
Competing needs
Faced with funding that hasn’t kept pace with needs, housing officials around the country have raided their already bare-bones capital improvement budgets to meet state and federal regulations and pay for day-to-day operations.
That is the case in Boston, where the housing authority has shifted 10 percent of its capital funds to operations since 2002.
Sandra Henriquez, executive director of the authority, says this means that repairs are delayed or put off entirely. Before the authority can make improvements to its housing units, Henriquez must ensure that units pass state housing codes and that underground oil storage tanks meet environmental rules.
These are “jailable offenses,” she said, which means they take precedence in her capital budget. She also must make at least 5 percent of her units accessible for the handicapped.
This alone will cost $35 million over the next five years, Henriquez said.
“Right now, I’m as lean as possible,” she said.
The shortage of affordable housing in the Boston area is a virtual epidemic.
There are 31,000 people on the waiting list for subsidized housing.
It is the same around the country, where the number of available public housing units has fallen by 100,000 over the past 10 years.
There are hundreds of thousands of people on waiting lists across the country. The lists include those trying to get into public housing as well as those waiting for rental subsidies for private apartments.
HUD stopped keeping a tally of wait times in 1998. Back then, the average wait was 11 months, with people in places like Detroit waiting for up to 10 years.
Known needs
With the rent on the private market often beyond the reach of many low-income Americans, millions depend on public housing.
“Nobody wants to live in public housing,” said Meena Carr, who lives in an apartment in Boston’s Washington-Beech housing project with her daughter and two grandchildren. “But when you can’t afford to pay the kind of rent out there, you have no choice.”
Carr’s daughter, Arlene, works 76 hours a week — after recently taking a second job. She said even with the increased salary, renting in Boston’s private housing market would consume more than half her income.
“You work so hard to get ahead,” said the 39-year-old Arlene. “But your money just goes in bills.”
It is hard to exaggerate the problem.
The number of Americans who spend more than half their income on housing, or live in substandard housing, has jumped from 7.2 million to 14 million over the past two decades.
Especially vulnerable are the elderly, disabled and families with children.
A million children live in public housing. And more than half of all public housing residents are elderly or disabled.
Half of housing project residents make less than $10,200 — a figure that places them in poverty. Many say without public housing, they would be in serious jeopardy of being homeless.
Praise for Hope VI
Even as Hope VI is phased out, many are touting its successes.
In 2000, Hope VI won an Innovations in American Government Award from the Ford Foundation and John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. The award honors exemplary achievements in government problem solving.
In Houston, officials are completing work on the Historic Oaks of Allen Parkway Village using Hope VI funds.
“Hope VI was a fabulous program,” said David Zappasodi, deputy director of administration for the Houston Housing Authority. “It was a catalyst in the Allen Park community. It is a beautiful community.”
In Chicago, one of the nation’s most notorious housing projects, the Cabrini-Green high-rise, was demolished and replaced with attractive town houses.
The same is true of Atlanta’s Villages at East Lake, a project so crime-ridden and dilapidated that tenants and police once called it Little Vietnam. Today, it is a mixed-income community of town houses.
In Seattle, Hope VI money is being used to replace 893 damaged units at the New Holly housing project. The new development includes 968 low-income units and a mix of 465 market-rate apartments and homes.
In Philadelphia, $140 million in Hope VI money is being used to rehabilitate the Mill Creek, Richard Allen, Schuylkill Falls and Martin Luther King Plaza housing developments.
The Detroit Housing Commission is embarking on one of the largest Hope VI projects in the country. More than $24 million in Hope VI funds is being used in the commission’s proposed $250 million to $300 million redevelopment of Herman Gardens, on Detroit’s west side.
The 2,144-unit Herman Gardens high-rise, which was razed several years ago, will be replaced with 920 mixed-income town houses. Construction on the 139-acre project, slated to begin next year, was approved for Hope VI funding in 1996.
Before it was demolished, the more than 50-year-old project was riddled with problems and less than 25 percent occupied, said Damon Duncan, the Detroit Housing Commission’s director of Hope VI.
Maverick’s hope
Ruth Capone, president of the Maverick Gardens Tenants Association, is a third-generation resident of the project. She has lived there 40 years.
When lawmakers in Washington cut funding for public housing, she sees firsthand what it means.
Capone hears the complaints: cockroaches, drug dealing, wall tiles falling on children while they bathe. The tighter housing budget means there is no longer on-site maintenance for the aging buildings.
“When all the funding stopped, all the services stopped, too,” Capone said. “We got hit double.”
She said workers tearing down the existing structures have found traces of lead and asbestos, toxic substances that were supposed to have been removed years ago. Both were routinely used in the construction of older projects.
Hope VI at least offers a needed change.
The new structures will have 368 units. A quarter of the new neighbors are working-class and can bring a more stable environment to the crime-ridden complex.
The new buildings have better heat, better cooling and offer residents simple comforts like their own front door.
Capone knows she and residents of Maverick Gardens are among the lucky ones. At least 66,000 public housing units nationwide are still classified as severely distressed.
“It’s about quality of life,” Capone said, standing between the new buildings and the old. “We don’t deserve to live like this.”
Staff researcher Zena Simmons contributed to this report. You can reach Ronald J. Hansen at (313) 222-2019 or rhansen@detnews.com. You can reach Melvin Claxton at (313) 222-2154 or mclaxton@detnews.com.
Malik Carr-Butts, 4, lives in the Washington-Beech housing project in Boston because his family cannot afford private-sector housing. "You work so hard to get ahead," says his mom, Arlene Carr. "But your money just goes in bills."
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The Detroit News.
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