
DATE: Monday, October 6, 1997               TAG: 9710060076

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY JON GLASS, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: NORFOLK                           LENGTH:  114 lines

COUPLE'S FUTURE NOW LINKED TO PARK PLACE

Rotting boards sag underfoot on the front porch of the vacant two-story house. The windows are boarded up.

Many people view the neighborhood as questionable.

But Carl and Sandra Harris can see beyond all that.

They are convinced that this Park Place community, where drugs, crime and blight once scared residents away, is on its way back - and they're ready to reclaim it.

The couple - he's a Navy electronics technician and she's a leasing agent for a property management company - want to turn the old, empty house on 34th Street into their dream home.

``We have made up our minds that this is where we want to settle down,'' Sandra Harris said. ``This place does have a stigma, but that doesn't mean we can't clean it up, if everybody works together. I think it's really going to work.''

The first-time homeowners consider this a unique opportunity: They won the house for $1 in a lottery sponsored by a new partnership of the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority, mortgage lenders and social service groups.

The goal of the program, dubbed the Home Ownership Network, or HomeNET, is to clean up the city's blighted neighborhoods by fostering home ownership.

The Harrises plan to invest at least $50,000 in the solidly built 81-year-old house to rehabilitate it.

Park Place, occupied mostly by black, low- and moderate-income renters, is sandwiched between Ghent and Colonial Place, both of which have undergone rebirths of their own in recent years.

Now, after more than 20 years of patch-quilt efforts to stem blight in Park Place, residents, officials and private builders say the neighborhood finally may have turned the corner to recovery.

Norfolk builder T.J. Dunleavy, who's worked alongside the redevelopment and housing authority in the neighborhood for about five years, says more middle-class families like the Harrises have become interested in building or rehabing homes there.

These families don't need financial assistance to obtain a mortgage loan, and they are key to the economic stability the neighborhood needs to revive, Dunleavy said.

``That's what we've been waiting a long time for,'' Dunleavy said. ``I've seen it when you had to pack up your tools by 3 p.m. and get out of there, but I believe they've broken the barrier.''

Added Acquanetta Ellis, a development project manager for the redevelopment agency: ``Homeowners become stakeholders. They're concerned, they're involved.''

Some who grew up there and left want to return, such as Sheila Cooper. She and her husband, Michael, live in Chesapeake, but they hired Dunleavy to build a new, two-story, 2,400-square-foot home in Park Place on 29th Street, across from Monroe Elementary School. Their two sons will attend nearby Maury High School, which they've heard is a good school.

``We could have gone to Virginia Beach and bought a $150,000 or $160,000 home, but I feel Park Place is going to be a beautiful neighborhood,'' Sheila said.

In the 600 block of 34th St., where the Harrises will live, lawns are neatly maintained. Nearly a dozen new or rehabilitated homes have replaced deteriorated buildings. Next door, builders are busily framing a new house. Plans are under way to build two more new houses in adjacent, vacant lots, Ellis said.

Ellis said officials credit the change in part to a shift in strategy in the early 1990s to concentrate redevelopment money within specific blocks, rather than scatter it throughout.

The effort has focused on blocks bordered by Colley Avenue on the west and Colonial Avenue on the east and between 27th Street and 35th Street, the neighborhood's struggling yet enduring business district. ``You can really see the impact. It's more visible instead of being dispersed throughout the community,'' Ellis said.

Norfolk officials, distressed by widespread blight, declared Park Place a conservation neighborhood in 1973. Since then, the redevelopment agency has funneled about $24 million into the area, primarily to buy and demolish decayed property and for grants and loans to help rehabilitate single-family homes.

Since July 1, 1991, when the new strategy of concentration began, the redevelopment agency has pumped in nearly $10 million, including loan and grant money to rehabilitate about 120 properties, mostly single-family homes, and to build 33 new homes, Ellis said.

The new and refurbished homes have increased in value, from an average $80,000 several years ago, to close to $90,000, Ellis said.

``A lot of people see Park Place as actually having a future now,'' Ellis said.

The Harrises hope to move into their renovated home by Christmas - and they plan to stay.

``They're going to be renovations for our own comfort, not to up the resale value,'' Sandra Harris said.

``We're going to plant some trees out front,'' added her husband.

Ellis said the redevelopment agency paid about $29,000 for the house, which has been empty for 1 1/2 years. The $1 lottery was a way to promote home ownership in the neighborhood; otherwise, the house likely would have been razed for new construction, she said.

The Harrises, who now rent a home near Wards Corner, say an incident that occurred shortly after they won the house reinforced their good feelings about the neighborhood. Late one afternoon, Carl Harris stopped to look over the house. A police car pulled up within minutes. ``We found out that someone in the Neighborhood Watch had called the police because there was a strange person looking around,'' Sandra Harris said, laughing. ``That's what you want to see.''

``I don't foresee any problems at all,'' added her husband. ``This is going to be a good show.'' ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photos]

TAMARA VONINSKI PHOTOS/The Virginian-Pilot

Sandra and Carl Harris recently won a house in Park Place for $1

through a lottery run by the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing

Authority.

Sandra and Carl Harris now own their first home and will invest

about $50,000 to renovate it.

MAP KEYWORDS: PARK PLACE REDEVELOPMENT