For years, rumors have circulated among Westhaven residents that redevelopment was coming—whether they liked it or not. But now that redevelopment is imminent, residents of Westhaven and the rest of the city’s public housing sites have some assurances that they will not be merely pawns in the process, thanks to a Residents’ Bill of Rights for Redevelopment that has now been approved by the housing authority and City Council.
The Residents’ Bill of Rights, which was composed by the Public Housing Association of Residents (PHAR), lays out eight points, among them that public housing residents will help guide the process, that units for low-income households will be replaced at least one-for-one, and that affected residents will have priority. According to PHAR Board member Joy Johnson, Holly Edwards originally suggested the idea.
“If patients have rights, it makes sense that public housing residents have rights,” says Edwards, a nurse as well as a city councilor.
Though the local public housing agency is officially called the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority (CRHA), it has done very little of late to earn the “redevelopment” in
|
“If patients have rights, it makes sense that public housing residents have rights,” says Holly Edwards. |
its title. But this year, CRHA hired a director of redevelopment, Amy Kilroy, and has gotten $150,000 from the city to help master plan CRHA’s public housing sites, which currently have 376 units. Next month, it will interview consultants to conduct the master planning, and it hopes to have a master plan by the end of 2009.
Redevelopment will likely involve the mixed-income model, which has become accepted practice for new public housing and facilitated by a federal grant program called HOPE VI.
But the new model still raises old problems. Though it keeps poor people from being siloed into monolithic blocks, the quantity of market-rate housing has sometimes squeezed out low-income residents. As part of the redevelopment process, Kilroy will organize trips across the country for CRHA leaders and residents to learn lessons about redevelopment, including what not to do. In Chicago, for instance, the notorious Cabrini-Green high-rises were demolished starting in the mid-’90s to make room for mixed-income housing, but replacement units were slow to catch up, some residents were forced into substandard temporary housing, and a lawsuit ensued.
It’s just that sort of conflict PHAR is trying to head off. Though the document is not legally binding, as a resolution passed by CRHA, it still carries weight, establishing policy for redevelopment.
Though in the end the CRHA board unanimously approved the Bill of Rights, it did raise some tensions. “It was mildly contentious,” says CRHA Chair Jason Halbert, “but that’s the kind of thing we’re going to go through in the master planning process. Having people at the table discussing these things is really changing the way our community talks about public housing and the way we relate to each other, and that’s really one of the most important things that we’re going to do through master planning. Bottom line, it’s about building trust.”
In passing the resolution of support for the Bill of Rights, Mayor Dave Norris noted a conversation with one of the architects behind the Vinegar Hill “urban renewal” project of the 1960s.
“He said to me, ‘If we had had a PHAR back in those days, Vinegar Hill would not have happened the way that it happened.’”
C-VILLE welcomes news tips from readers. Send them to news@c-ville.com.