House Money

Budget cuts have long threatened public-housing upgrades. That could soon change.

by Jared Goyette

shelter

One Sunday night this summer, 11-year-old Jeffery Rodgers was playing basketball on the parking lot behind his house when a police car pulled up. At first he wasn't worried, since police frequently patrol this part of town, not far from Broad Street and Girard Avenue. Before long, he heard more sirens and, as a helicopter buzzed overhead, a series of squad cars arrived.

His sister, Yanayeh Turner, called Rodgers' name, but he was already scrambling to the back door. Whatever was going on, he didn't want to be a part of it. Rodgers didn't have much of a choice, though, since an officer followed him into the family home.

As his mother Sharon Turner, 56, pulled her son close, the officer yelled, "Where did he go?" Turner immediately sensed why they had come: Like so many times before, they were probably after a suspect they'd followed to the back entrance of Arlene Homes, the small Bouvier Street public-housing complex where Turner lives with three of her children. There, just beyond the entrance, is a graffiti-tagged wall that has become a hangout spot for people who don't live in the development, but use it to avoid police. It's not only the ideal place for undesirables to run and hide, but a symptom of an incessant public-housing problem not just here, but across the city.

The officer ran to the front door, and peered outside. Rodgers stood at the back of the house, in the kitchen. He wasn't scared, just nervous. He figured more police would arrive soon.

"What's going on? There is nobody in here!" yelled Turner.

After a garbled voice came over the officer's radio saying, "You're in the wrong house," he ran out the back door without saying a word. The police then pulled away, empty-handed.

Just another day in the neighborhood.

EASY ACCESS: With no locking gate, the Arlene Homes parking lot has proven difficult to manage. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Scenes like this are all too common in the city's older public-housing units, as Sharon Turner can attest. Often, a courtyard that was designed to create "community" proved instead to be a convenient hideaway. Discussing the problem, Turner wears a gray Philadelphia Community College sweatshirt and jeans. A few years ago she enrolled to study criminal justice and has developed a keen sense of how crime operates in the neighborhood.

"There's a big opening there, away from the street, where cars can just come and go. So mostly when people run from the cops, they run around here," says Turner, whose pleas for a locking gate were inexplicably rebuffed by the residents' council. "Whatever they want to do, this is where they do it."

The Philadelphia Housing Authority, led by executive director Carl Greene, has been trying to correct poorly designed public housing for years, mainly by replacing crime-ridden complexes with mixed-income townhouses. The process gained national attention in the 1990s, when notorious high-rises were demolished in cities across the country, usually with a television crew and a cheering, implosion-loving crowd nearby. The last Philadelphia high-rise to fall was Mill Creek, in 2002, but there are still many developments in need of what PHA calls "remodeling."

In some cases, that means tearing down the old buildings and putting new ones up. But the PHA, like all housing authorities, is funded through the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, an agency that has seen its budget for public housing slashed by $1.5 billion since President Bush took office. The money for rebuilding developments comes from a HUD program called HOPE VI. Though Bush has tried to eliminate the program for the last three years, Congress resisted as best it could, reserving $100 million for what used to be a $615 million program, according to a PHA spokesperson.

PHA's operating budget has faced the same assault. In June, HUD announced rule changes that, if implemented, would reduce PHA's funding by $23 million. "Layoffs are going to be unavoidable," adds PHA spokesperson Kirk Dorn. "The only question now is the timing."

Other city housing agencies are also facing the squeeze. On Saturday, the city cited federal housing cuts when it laid off 44 employees from the Redevelopment Authority and the Philadelphia Housing Development Corporation.

Since HUD provided just 70 percent of what it pledged to PHA's budget, launching new construction projects is a tricky proposition, even if Greene says there's much to be done. "So many of the programs that we've put together, and that are successes, the current administration wants to cut off," Greene says. "We're struggling with ideological warfare."

In recent years, PHA has redesigned approximately 6,000 units, but still has another 10,000 to go. Take Wilson Park in South Philadelphia, for instance, where backhoes are currently ripping up courtyards.

"The way these developments were designed resulted in a special subculture," Greene recently said during a site tour. "It meant these people were different. These people don't receive all the city services. These people, they feed on themselves."

The looming crunch notwithstanding, Liddonfield Homes, a 300-family PHA site in the Northeast, is awaiting a similar treatment. With a layout that makes it difficult for police and ambulances to access homes, PHA plans to convert it from a low-income development to a mixed-income community with fewer residents. To be eligible to return, residents must go through an application process that evaluates their credit history, including whether they have consistently paid rent on time.

What that has meant for many is hope. Once 31-year-old resident Sonia M. Cooper found out about the conditions for returning, she enrolled in a class offered by PHA to become a home health aide. Last week, she got her certification.

"After they showed us the blueprints, and we saw what Carl Greene was going to do, it made you feel like we're going to finally get a change," she says. "I saw the pictures and was like, 'I wanna be a part of that.'"

Now, despite the reality of layoffs to come, some expect that the new Democratic majorities in Congress could restore public-housing funding; if that happens, fewer cities could be in as good a position as Philadelphia.

After all, U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah — should he not step down to run for mayor — will have increased authority on the Appropriations Committee, which decides where the federal government spends money, and how much of the budget is put aside to support HUD.

Though restored funding is hardly a certainty, the potential has Dorn, the PHA spokesman, saying the agency is "optimistic that there will be a political change in Washington more favorable to public housing."

(j_goyette@citypaper.net)