Late in the afternoon of May 27, James Wilson was sitting on a bench outside the Major Robert A. Byrd high-rise on 13th Street. The public-housing complex had been Wilson’s home for five years, but then a large brick section of the southern façade suddenly crumbled.
“Just like that–boom!” Wilson says. “There was noise and dust coming up. I walked around the corner and saw all them bricks piled up.”
Brown Engineers was called in to assess whether the 39-year-old building was structurally sound. According to company president Norman Brown, a cursory examination of just 10 percent of the high-rise found no other weaknesses. Still, the Springfield Housing Authority decided that shutting Byrd down and moving its 36 residents would be less costly than fixing the building.
SHA director Willie Logan says federal budget cuts have put the nation’s 2,500 public-housing authorities in a bind. “We can’t maintain buildings that are getting older,” he complains. In the last year alone, a federally backed fund for large repairs has been sliced in half, and the SHA’s budget is down by more than 40 percent–about $2.5 million. It’s also lost $250,000 a year earmarked for security and drug-abuse prevention. This summer the SHA had to layoff four workers from its staff of about 70.
“There are few housing authorities that have not been negatively affected by Washington today,” says Logan.
Federal public-housing policies have been in flux ever since the creation of the National Housing Act in 1937. Programs have shifted from federal to state control, and then back again. Sweeping reforms implemented by one administration have been canceled by the next. But the nation’s approach to public housing has radically changed since George W. Bush moved into the White House in 2001. “There’s really no overall planning in housing right now,” says Logan.
Just a month before Bush took office, Congress established the Millennial Housing Commission, a blue-ribbon panel with a mandate to take the long view on public housing and come up with remedies for the nation’s shortage of affordable housing. When the commission reported back to Congress in May 2002, it called for an expanded Section 8 voucher program, which subsidizes rent and mortgages for low-income families and individuals. Bush is now calling for the elimination of that voucher program in favor of smaller block grants to states. The commission also suggested increasing the government’s role in neighborhood revitalization, but Bush is proposing to abolish the HOPE VI program.
Since the early 90s HOPE VI has spent nearly $5 billion to tear down or renovate tens of thousands of public-housing units. In Springfield, the rundown John Hay Homes–built in 1942–was demolished and replaced by Madison Park Place. The new development was considerably less dense (and more picturesque) than the 599-unit Hay Homes; it included 150 single-family rental homes, 44 lease-to-own residences, and a 2.5-acre park.
Logan says he’d love to build more projects like Madison Park Place, but instead the SHA is spending its shrinking resources moving tenants from one crumbling high-rise to another, leaving 212 families stranded on a waiting list for scattered-site affordable homes that probably won’t be available in the foreseeable future.
The millennial commission argued for the annual construction of 250,000 new affordable housing units over the next 20 years. But Bush’s 2004 housing budget is 36 percent less than what the government spent in 1978, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. As for the final impact of reduced spending, Logan says, “I’m not sure what will happen.”
Meanwhile, back at the Byrd high-rise, they’re waiting for their move. On a muggy August afternoon, three months after the bricks fell down, Wilson is sitting on the same bench with a couple of friends, Edward Williams and George Jackson.
Wilson is moving to the Hildebrandt high-rise on September 10, six days after he turns 66. “It’s smaller there,” he notes.
Williams would prefer to stay at Byrd. “It’s nice here,” he says. “There’s nothing wrong.”
Jackson agrees. He’s also moving to Hildebrandt next week, but he’ll miss
Byrd. “Other than the bricks falling down, it’s been alright.”
This article appears in Aug 28 – Sep 3, 2003.
