ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, November 24, 1996 TAG: 9611250184
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LESLIE TAYLOR STAFF WRITER
PUBLIC HOUSING'S military-base style will be a bit cozier by the time the Roanoke Redevelopment and Housing Authority is done with it.
The Lincoln Terrace public housing development has been Jackie Gunn's home for 24 years.
She was the single mother of a year-old son, Bryan, when she moved into the Northwest Roanoke community, which is bordered on the north by Interstate 581 and on the south by Burrell Street. The rent was affordable, calculated according to the "decent money" she earned waitressing at the old Hotel Roanoke.
And Gunn liked the environment - the closeness of neighbors who would watch out for one another, the elementary school just steps from her front door.
Bryan's welfare "was the most important thing," Gunn said. She raised him in Lincoln Terrace, in one of the 300 brick units that were built military-base style in the 1950s.
Bryan - nicknamed "Chipper" - attended William Fleming High School, where he played football and had average grades. He'd planned to attend either Virginia State College or Norfolk State College in the fall of 1989.
Instead, he was murdered in New York less than a week after graduating from Fleming that year. He was shot in a North Bronx hotel room in a drug deal gone bad.
He was 18 - and about to become a father.
"I wake up thinking about him," Gunn said. "I go to bed thinking about him."
Bryan was not the stereotypical product of a stereotypical "project" environment, Gunn said. She insisted that his involvement in drugs had little to do with living in Lincoln Terrace, although drugs had seeped into the neighborhood.
That would have been the perception - that a child raised in public housing would naturally be drawn to trouble. But it would have been wrong, Gunn said. Bryan was a good son, who fell in with the wrong crowd when he was 16, she said.
"People react to you based on what they hear about Lincoln Terrace," Gunn said. "But they don't know the people in Lincoln Terrace."
Now Gunn is raising Bryan's 7-year-old daughter - in the same house where the child's father grew up.
Gunn, 48, said she wants a good, safe life for her granddaughter. She warns her not to talk to strangers or get into strange cars, and to say "no" to drugs.
"I make her aware of her environment," Gunn said. "I'm trying to let her know now."
Maybe the Roanoke Redevelopment and Housing Authority's $20 million plan to convert Lincoln Terrace into a cozy community of white picket fences and front porches will help, Gunn said.
Maybe it will drive away the bad element - the outsiders who bring drugs into the area, the loiterers with nothing better to do than hang out late at night.
Maybe the pizza restaurants will start making deliveries and the cabs will take 10 minutes instead of an hour to show up after they're called.
"Maybe," Gunn said.
A dream plan
The Roanoke Redevelopment and Housing Authority wanted to do more for its public housing developments than install new heating units or repaint walls or replace screen doors.
The authority wanted to completely revitalize a community. And it would start with Lincoln Terrace, one of the oldest of the city's nine public housing developments.
Months of study, with input from residents, produced an ambitious plan to transform an isolated collection of buildings into a community of homes with front porches and yards surrounded by white picket fences.
The plan - called "Lincoln 2000" - is an effort to dispel the stereotypes of public housing. Its aim is to combine physical renovation with efforts to move people off public assistance and into self-sufficiency.
The authority enlisted the help of Urban Design Associates, a Pittsburgh-based firm. The firm is assisting MarshWitt Associates, a Roanoke architectural consulting company that was hired by the authority to develop Lincoln 2000.
Rob Robinson, an Urban Design architect who is acting as project manager for Lincoln 2000, said Lincoln Terrace is a lot like other public housing developments built in the 1950s - built intentionally to be very different from traditional neighborhoods.
They were "projects." They looked like apartment units but had no individuality and no private spaces, Robinson said. No one had ownership - real or perceived - of any space. The ends of buildings - instead of the fronts - faced the street. They were isolated and had no connection to nearby neighborhoods.
They became ideal places for unwanted activity, Robinson said.
"There are no natural eyes on the street like that you get in a typical neighborhood where you have front porches," he said. "Things like drug dealing happen in the street and nobody witnesses it. All of the space around units becomes the territory of people who don't belong there."
All of that only reinforces public housing's image as "projects," Robinson said.
```Project' reinforces a whole kind of class system no matter if it's a good place or not," he said. "It becomes associated with everything bad that happens."
Lincoln 2000 is a three-phase plan that will:
* Reconfigure streets.
* Cut the number of units from 300 to 222, or 12 per acre. Lincoln Terrace now has 15 units per acre, Robinson said.
* Diversify housing opportunities by building 48 single-family and duplex units.
* Establish a family self-sufficiency program, called Upward Mobility Through Public Housing. The program will offer services - training, education, child care and transportation - to help people improve their economic situation and work their way off of public assistance.
* Aim to increase the number of working households and two-parent families.
Some people have criticized the plan as wasteful. They have said that simply changing the physical appearance of the development won't change the people.
"I think they are exactly right," said David Baldwin, director of housing for the Roanoke housing authority. "You can't just improve buildings and expect people's lives to change."
That's why Lincoln 2000 has incorporated the family self-sufficiency program to help people improve their economic condition, he said.
"We want to make this into a community where people who have choices will choose to live. We want this to be a community that has various kinds of housing opportunities and other kinds of opportunities in terms of social services and training, to give people the ability, if they choose, to change their own lives."
'New Urbanism'
Urban housing experts call it "New Urbanism," a movement to rid cities of decaying public housing developments and replace them with modern, more conventional homes.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has set aside billions of dollars to demolish 30,000 units of public housing by the end of this year and 100,000 over the next four years. Some will be replaced with the kind of housing found in Anytown, USA - homes with picket fences and front porches.
Norfolk was one of the first cities in the country to test the New Urbanist theory.
In the late 1980s, the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority decided to try something new with the HUD money it received for repair, renovation and upkeep of its public housing developments. The authority wanted something dramatic for Diggs Town, one of its oldest developments. It contracted with Urban Design Associates to come up with a design that would completely change the development.
The $17 million project transformed Diggs Town - a collection of dismal barracks - into a community of Jeffersonian-style front porches with white columns, new roads, spruced-up interiors and white picket fences. It won a design award from Urban Initiatives, a New York-based nonprofit organization dedicated to good city design.
"It is probably the best example, physically, of what you could do to a public housing community," said Ray Strutten, assistant executive director for housing operations for the Norfolk housing authority. "The feel of Diggs Town is much more of a neighborhood now."
But the Diggs Town plan also had its critics, Strutten said.
"One was from residents who felt we were improving the community so that they would be forced out and we would move in wealthier people," he said. "Some of the political figures wondered why we were putting so much money into a public housing neighborhood.
"They asked `Wasn't there something better to do with the money?' The answer was `That's what the money was for.'''
Others criticized the housing authority for wasting money, saying the transformation would never do any good and that "things were going to be like they were no matter what you did," Strutten.
"I think we've proven them wrong," he said. "In some instances it wasn't as wrong as we would like it to have been. What we've shown is that these kinds of things can make a difference. It may take a long time for differences to materialize, for improvements to take hold and grow. But for the most part, these kinds of things are necessary."
Arlene Barber, president of Diggs Town's tenant management corporation, said residents generally feel wonderful about their homes since the renovation.
"We have porches," she said. "We have fences so that we can say, even though we don't own it, `This is my property.'''
But beautification alone can't change a neighborhood, Barber said.
"We've always had pride in our community," she said.
Looking ahead
The Lincoln Terrace Family Resource Center is busiest in the afternoons, when parents bring their kids over for help with homework or to borrow a book from the center's small library.
The center was developed out of a desire by both the Roanoke school system and the Roanoke housing authority to encourage parents to participate in their children's education through family activity. The center has broadened its scope to help families with emergency needs - food, clothing, transportation.
The center is housed in a converted two-bedroom unit in Lincoln Terrace. It is cramped. There isn't enough room to expand the library or to offer Graduate Equivalency Diploma (GED) classes for adults - a long-held wish, said Vicki Trent Dalton, the Roanoke special projects teacher who manages the center.
Dalton said she is hoping that the housing authority will follow through on its plan to incorporate a new family center into the Lincoln 2000 plan.
And it might. Some cost issues suggest that construction of a new center might be feasible, David Baldwin said.
But precisely when Lincoln 2000 will get rolling is uncertain.
Construction was expected to begin next spring or in early summer, Baldwin said. But the housing authority last month was notified that it would receive only $1 million of the $13 million in HUD "HOPE 6" funding it had applied for to cover renovation, demolition, site improvement and relocation expenses.
"Now we are reluctant to execute any kind of contract for construction until we are assured of funding sources," Baldwin said.
The authority never intended for Lincoln 2000 to be financed solely by HUD dollars, but by a mixture of funding sources, he said. The authority is exploring a variety of sources, including tax exempt bond financing.
And the authority will likely reapply for HOPE 6 funding once HUD issues notice that money is available. Notice is expected to be issued in January, Baldwin said. Applications would be due 90 to 100 days after that, he said.
The housing authority does have about $3 million in funding that HUD routinely allocates for general construction and modernization work in the nation's public housing developments. The authority is scheduled to get another $2 million of that funding over the next five years, Baldwin said.
Lincoln 2000 is expected to take eight to 10 years to complete.
Carolyn Johnson - a 40-year resident - is willing to wait.
"People will take a little more pride in their homes and begin to take care of what they have," she said. "They'll take pride in their community."
It's time for Lincoln 2000, Jackie Gunn said. "Way past time," she said.
"Maybe the public will see Lincoln Terrace as something other than the projects."
LENGTH: Long : 232 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Urban Design Associates, Pittsburgh. 1. & 2. Diggs Town,by CNBin Norfolk, is shown here before and after the $17 million
renovation. It went from a collection of dismal barracks to a
community of Jeffersonian-style front porches with white columns,
new roads, spruced-up interiors and white picket fences. It won a
design award from Urban Initiatives. "It is probably the best
example, physically, of what you could do to a public housing
community," said Ray Strutten, assistant executive director for
housing operations for the Norfolk Housing Authority. File\September
1996. 3. Deborah Graham, special project assistant at the Lincoln
Terrace Family Resource Center, reads a story about a spider to
(from left to right) Tierra Jordan, 5, Sasha Buckhannon, 5, Odyssey
Clark, 3, and Unity Clark, 1. Children can be helped with homework
or participate in activities. color. 4. Jackie Gunn (right) of the
Lincoln Terrace Resident Council, and her granddaughter Nikita, 7,
pose in front of their home. 5. NHAT MEYER/Staff. Precisely when
Lincoln 2000 will get started is uncertain. Construction could begin
as early as next spring. KEYWORDS: 2DA