Community members had their final chance to provide feedback on the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority’s (CRHA) plans for neighborhood revitalization at a final master plan meeting Tuesday evening.
Westhaven resident Takiyah Jones, who has attended most of the CRHA neighborhood revitalization meetings, hoped to have one simple question answered: Where would she and her two children will live during construction?
CRHA Executive director Randy Bickers said current residents could relocate to new units built on vacant land during the first phases of construction and thereby remain under CRHA’s jurisdiction. Should these units prove too few in number, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) could provide residents vouchers for relocation within the housing market, although CRHA hopes to keep the dispersal of vouchers to a minimum. CRHA has also contacted local public schools to ensure that children who are moved outside of their present school zone would be able to stay at their current schools.
CRHA also wants to create more mixed income communities. Bickers said that making solely lower income housing creates “pockets of poverty” in the community. By mixing in tax credit and market rate units, the dynamic of the neighborhood changes and achievement scores go up, explained Bickers. But in order to create this new type of community while maintaining the current number of public housing units, the neighborhood has to increase in density.
Residents had different responses to increased density. Crescent Hall resident Overy Johnson and his wife, Adrienne, said they were glad that more families will have affordable housing, but added that redevelopment will take away much of the current recreational area for the children. Johnson repeated the importance of education and recreation for kids, and said, “Children want to go places, but they need a place to go”— a take on the New York City Police Athletic League motto. His wife echoed the sentiment, and said children need “to have some place to go beside the streets.”
While a time frame has yet to be set for the project, CRHA executive director Randy Bikers predicted construction should start within the next year.