Improving public housing by eliminating the poor
What a happy day: a couple of ex-residents of blighted public housing got to move into new digs in the complex that replaced their old neighborhood.
Nearly two years ago, the Tampa Housing Authority tore down Riverview Terrace, a six-decade-old public housing project with a reputation for drug deals and crime.
In its place is a development called the Oaks at Riverview, a planned community of apartments, town houses and single-family homes in Seminole Heights, off Florida Avenue.
Last week, former Riverview Terrace residents Ruby Poole, 63, and Cardidad Menendez, 72, became the first Terrace occupants to move into the Oaks.
Other Riverview residents and new arrivals will join them in the coming weeks.
The Oaks is the new face of public housing, meant to blend with the surrounding neighborhood, said Jerome Ryans, the housing authority's director.
Its brochure touts roomy closets, private balconies and patios, a fitness center and a resort-style swimming pool.
``The whole idea is to give people a better place to live,'' he said. ``There is no reason poor people shouldn't have options.''
Yes, the poor should have options, but unfortunately, the two residents cited may be the only ones who get to return, since mixed use developments like this one typically leave the poorest residents behind. These poorest of the poor are left to flounder in the Section 8 grant pool, forced to come up with security deposits and living at the mercy of slumlords as they and their former neighbors are scattered to the winds.
Across the bay, the Tampa Housing Authority will have about 1,000 fewer public housing apartments when several projects under way are completed by 2006.
The gradual but steady dwindling of federally owned public housing reflects an ongoing shift by agencies away from owning low-income properties and toward buying mixed-income sites and moving residents into the private rental market with subsidized rent vouchers under the Section 8 program.
Housing officials say the redirection is vital to their survival in an era of significant drops in federal funding for public housing.
They insist the residents they serve, some already teetering on the edge of homelessness, aren't left more vulnerable. In fact, they say, residents in the Section 8 program - in which federal dollars make up the difference between market rate rents and what residents can afford to pay - may use the vouchers to live almost anywhere they choose.
"The Housing Authority is positioning itself for the future," Syl Farrell, an agency spokesman, said in a statement. Darrell Irions, the St. Petersburg Housing Authority's executive director, and Debbie Johnson, his deputy, declined to be interviewed for this story.
"Our portfolio is evolving to provide affordable mixed-income housing opportunities rather than providing a concentrated public housing product. In this era of federal funding cuts to the public housing program, it just makes good business sense for the authority to reposition itself," Farrell said.
"Additionally, providing residents with choice in their search for housing will benefit the residents and community as a whole."
But some low-income housing advocates offer a different, less sunny take. Public housing, they say, is a "precious resource" during a "huge" affordable housing crunch.
Moreover, they say, moving residents from public housing to Section 8, a program already under enormous pressure, puts residents at further risk. Families armed with such vouchers face a new set of challenges: looming threats of cuts by Congress; scraping up additional money for security deposits and paying utilities; and finding an affordable, available home to rent with the voucher in the first place.
"The federal government can take away a voucher just as easily as they give it," said Charles Elsesser, an attorney with Florida Legal Services, based in Miami. "But they can't take away a brick and mortar building. In selling the property they've given up an asset dedicated and targeted to the lowest income.
"Vouchers do not necessarily provide long-term housing for these people," said Elsesser, who serves on the board of the National Low Income Housing Coalition and the advisory board of the Florida Housing Coalition. "Housing authorities are not fairly calculating the benefits of public housing and the difficulty of using Section 8 vouchers."
To be clear, I am not against improving the living conditions of public housing residents, but when we simply evict them and build something nicer then set rents that ensure that the vast majority will never return, we have solved nothing and helped only a very lucky few.