The subject is severely distressed public housing: ragged buildings, drugs and violence, despairing people. A new report concludes that 86,000 of the nation's 1.6 million public housing units deserve that label.
"We shouldn't allow human beings to live in these environments," said Vincent Lane, chairman of the Chicago Housing Authority and co-chairman of the National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing, which issued the report.
Jacqueline Massey, who lives in Southeast Washington's Valley Green, one of the public housing developments the commission deems severely distressed, disagreed with that assessment.
"We love Valley Green," Massey said this week in the bustling office of the Valley Green residents' council, of which she is president. "It's as simple as that!"
Not much is simple when it comes to public housing. Sometimes it works, providing safe, decent homes to some of the neediest Americans. In other instances, like in the 32-block high-rise Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago, public housing developments are crime-ridden money pits.
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The problem is complex and so are suggested solutions, from Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp's favorite -- making the tenants the owners -- to less radical solutions involving complex policy and funding changes.
The commission was established by Congress in 1989 to study severely distressed public housing and propose a way to eliminate it by the year 2000. The commission's report said the worst public housing developments are "unfit, unsafe, unlivable" homes where "a significant number of families are living in extreme poverty in almost unimaginable and certainly intolerable conditions."
The report offers a list of recommendations for turning these places around, emphasizing a greater managerial role for residents, a wider mix of income levels, better integration with the surrounding community and the need to hold public housing officials more accountable.
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Serious reform has a serious price: $1 billion a year for the next 10 years to eradicate the problem, by the commission's estimate.
Why spend all that money if Jacqueline Massey, at times a vocal critic of public housing policy, already loves Valley Green?
Big money, in fact, is key to understanding the enthusiasm of Massey and other Valley Green residents about their home -- 32 pink-brick buildings clinging to 22 acres of bare Anacostia hillside. About $18 million in renovation funds from HUD is about to pour into Valley Green and hope is the dominant mood.
Valley Green today is nearly a ghost town -- only 91 of its 312 units are lived in. The rest are vacant and boarded up, unsuitable for habitation. The apartments still occupied by Valley Green residents stretch the definition of the word "habitable."
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The graffiti-covered front stairwell of one occupied building, the one where the director of the D.C. Department of Public and Assisted Housing, Ray Price, spent some nights at the beginning of his tenure, is filled with the stench from a broken sewer pipe. And all of Valley Green's 30-year-old buildings are basically rotted out. "The roofs, the plumbing, the electrical wiring all is bad out here," Massey said.
The insect-damaged interior walls of the buildings serve as conduits for the water that pours in through the roofs. Ethel White, 59, who has lived at Valley Green for eight years, points to a mouse hole in her bedroom wall that began leaking water last week, flooding the room and destroying her carpet. "It was a terrible mess in this room," White said. But, like Massey, she says she is happy these days to be there.
The impending remaking of their community, including complete renovation of the buildings inside and out, plus the addition of a recreation center and other amenities, is one reason for the residents' optimism.
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Another is the new spirit residents said has taken root among them, and that might, if all goes well, do what money alone cannot: turn the place into a thriving community and permanently dispel the severely distressed image.
Share this articleShare"We've got a good team ... the 'Minute Men and Women,' " said White, referring to the 17 men and nine women who have formed an all-purpose Valley Green cleanup, security and community revival unit that works daily from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
By all accounts, the new Valley Green unity epitomized by this group, together with police vigilance, has drastically cut the violence and drug dealing -- most of it, the residents said, by outsiders -- that in recent memory made this a dangerous place to live.
Valley Green was "just like a lot of people's image of public housing for years. ... The drug trafficking in and out of there was just astronomical," said Lucy Murray, a spokeswoman for the D.C. Department of Public and Assisted Housing.
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Massey, who has lived in Valley Green for more than 20 years, said the residents' main worry used to be "how fast you could run." But "that was when we were having a lot of murders, a lot of violence. ... The community rose up and starting doing things to help themselves."
Walking down one Valley Green street this week, Hilda Hall, 42, a three-year Valley Green resident, was jeered by one man making it clear he didn't like her kelly-green Minute Woman T-shirt (motto: "Yes we can. Yes we will."), but she was undeterred.
"We're going up the ladder, and nobody's going to turn us around, wheel us around. Ain't no stopping us now," Hall said.
The residents, beneficiaries of public housing director Price's belief in extensive tenant participation in public housing policy, have taken on a substantive role in the rebuilding of their community. They've been given the blueprints, consulted on the kinds of renovations they want and, in some cases, placed on the payroll.
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The Minute Men and Women, formerly volunteers, are now paid for their time, and the contractors will be hiring Valley Green residents to work on the reconstruction when it begins this fall. The residents' council has applied for a $100,000 HUD grant for managerial training so they can run and eventually buy the development themselves.
"The initiative that we're doing at Valley Green is just another step in residents being involved in determining their own destiny," Murray said.
Giving residents a say about their homes is central to the national commission's recommendations. "That's the biggest resource we have in public housing ... millions of people that literally have time on their hands," said Lane, the commission's co-chairman.
Put poor people to work building quality homes, and you transform all the other parts of their lives, Lane argued. "When you give them something that is of value, something that quote, 'All normal people, have in America,' then you can hold them accountable and hold them to the same standards that everyone else is held to and literally change their behavior, because now they've got something to lose," he said.
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It remains to be seen whether a revolution in public housing is actually underway. The problems in the worst developments are enormous, and they're not all about to be rebuilt as Valley Green is. In the District, there are some 11,000 people on the waiting list for public housing, even as about 2,300 units sit empty and boarded up.
Rep. Bill Green (R-N.Y.), the other commission co-chairman, said he expects the House Banking Committee to incorporate some of the report's recommendations into its pending housing bill.
But Lane said he cannot realistically predict the federal government will provide the annual $1 billion the report calls for, and hopes for about 15 percent of that as a start.
In any case, things are definitely looking up at Valley Green. Rawlin Peyton, 18, who grew up there, stood in the afternoon glare outside one building this week and talked about his job application to work on the renovation, doing "internal demolition ... just tearing out everything from top to bottom."
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Peyton, who was shirtless, said the extensive scars on his belly are from the time two years ago when he was shot with a .45 while at party in a nearby high-rise. Of Valley Green today, he said: "It has been a big change ... {in} everything. Murder, drugs, all the crime, you know, activity."
Impatient for the renovation work to start, and for the changes he and the other residents have been awaiting for years, Peyton said, "It's taking a while, them promises ... but we're holding out."
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