Gangs of roving white thugs are invading a dirt poor neighborhood near downtown Tampa, intending to force the elderly and poor form their homes while turning a nice profit along the way.
A selection committee on Tuesday chose three developers to prepare detailed plans on rebuilding the Tampa Housing Authority’s rundown Central Park Village just north of downtown.
The committee, made up of representatives from the Housing Authority, the city and Hillsborough County, received six responses to its request for qualifications from developers.
……The 28-acre Central Park is strategically located between Ybor City and the north end of downtown Tampa, which is in the midst of a residential and commercial redevelopment boom.
City leaders want to see Central Park redeveloped to blend into the surrounding neighborhood.
The concept sounds good at first: raze the blighted public housing project and erect a mixed income development in its place. That way, residents who are currently living in unbelievably shabby conditions will have a chance to inhabit dwellings with proper plumbing and even air conditioning.
Some kind of change is way overdue, but the problem lies with the dispossessed. See, whenever we start rebuilding the ghettos, affordable housing units are invariably lost, and residents are scattered to the wind , many never to return to their old neighborhood.
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.”
HOPE VI is no longer funding new projects, but Tampa’s hope for Central Park Village is for a HOPE VI type project, blending “affordable” housing with “market rate” units and aiming for a mix of lower and middle income residents.
The new project will undoubtedly be “nicer” than what’s there now – bleak cinder block apartments built as temporary housing for troops during World War II, but current residents who are thoughtlessly cheering the coming demise of their homes don’t seem to realize that the new construction is not meant for them .
“I think they should tear it down quick, fast and in a hurry,” said Elaine Forbes, 24, who lives there with her 4- year-old daughter.
Forbes said she does not know where she would go if forced to move. She has heard rumors that residents may be offered federal “Section 8” vouchers to find housing elsewhere, but is skeptical.
She added that many older residents are frightened about having to relocate.
“If we had somewhere to go, we wouldn’t be here in the first place,” Forbes said.
I hope she’s not counting on having someplace to go anytime soon. The last big idea for this area, Ed Turanchik’s plan to take over the world, called for 6 percent of the new units to be set aside for the poorest residents. They were going to evict over 2,000 low income residents and build only 257 public housing residences in a 4,500 unit project.
As any New Urbanist will tell you, housing for the poor in mixed-income neighborhoods is far better than large low-income developments. The trouble with 257 low-income units in a 4500-units project isn’t the 4200 middle- and higher-income units per se. It’s that a bunch of other developments going up have no low-cost units at all.
Further, what works isn’t this sort of awful suburban-style project with low-income buildings isolated from the rest of the development, usually in an undesirable corner by the feeder road or a gas station or whatever. What works is old, organic small-scale urban development, with tenements sprinkled among more expensive homes and buildings, so that block by block there’s economic diversity.
The dominant residential style these days, though, is the exact opposite. Even within a high-end gated community, income groups are strictly segregated, with the $300,000 townhomes completely cut off from the $500,000 4-bedroom homes, and those in turn completely isolated from the $800,000 6-bedroom homes. It’s going to take a seismic political change to climb down from that.