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Politics & Government

The Legacy of Hope VI in New Brunswick

Some residents say the revitalization of low-income housing has made their neighborhoods safer, but advocates are split on the long term effects of the program.

On a recent warm summer afternoon, 58-year-old Marvin Gregory pedaled his bike through the Hope Manor public housing complex near Remsen Avenue and George Street.

Things were different from years ago. Back then, Gregory said he roamed New Brunswick’s notorious Memorial Homes selling cocaine, heroin and PCP. He admits being arrested at the high-rise projects several times.

But hustling drugs and ducking police grew tiresome and Gregory said he gave up his criminal ways just before city housing officials knocked down the projects in a blast of dynamite. August will mark the 10-year anniversary of the demolition and Gregory’s lifestyle isn’t the only thing that’s changed in the neighborhood since the Memorial Homes came down.

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Three new public housing townhouse complexes were built. The Heldrich Plaza Hotel and luxury homes sprouted up. So did a 12-story dormitory on George Street. Crime and drug trafficking declined.
“Twenty years ago, Rutgers students were warned to stay off that part of George Street,’’ said city spokesman Bill Bray. “Now they live there.’’

“Even though I miss the projects, it was more of a good thing than a bad thing,’’ Gregory said of the demolition. “Now it’s quieter. Before, to be truthful, it was dangerous.’’

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“To have growth, you got to have change,’’ Gregory added. “And that was a lot of change.’’

The redevelopment of Memorial Homes was paid for through a $7.5 million grant from the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development’s HOPE VI program, a national initiative that pumped $6.7 billion in federal funding into America’s cities over the past 18 years. It’s been an effort to replace distressed housing projects – many of them high-rise fortresses that had become bastions of crime – with townhouses and other low-rise developments designed to provide tenants with a cleaner and safer way of life.

The $400 million in HOPE VI revitalization money allotted to New Jersey cities - more than any other state in the union - has transformed the Garden State’s urban skylines.

But HOPE VI’s legacy remains an issue for debate among housing experts, tenant advocates and government officials mainly because of a basic fact – most places that were rebuilt under the program ended up with fewer public housing units than when they started. Nationwide there are about 100,000 fewer public housing apartments because of HOPE VI redevelopment, said Vito Gallo, who has taught housing policy classes at Rutgers’ Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy.

“For future generations, we have less public housing stock,’’ said Arnold Cohen, policy coordinator of the Trenton-based Housing and Community Development Network of New Jersey, a nonprofit coalition of more than 250 groups. “That’s problematic.’’

Tenant advocates say some residents of the buildings demolished through HOPE VI ended up being displaced and sometimes found themselves living in circumstances that were worse than where they had been.

“When a project is demolished, what ought to be done is that every unit of affordable housing is replaced by another one,’’ said Matt Shapiro, president of the New Jersey Tenants Organization. “Most of the projects are never anywhere close to that. As a result, you have fewer affordable housing units."

“This is gentrification by another name,’’ added Shapiro. “Its purpose is to get rid of poor people."

But housing officials and HOPE VI advocates say reducing the density of the housing was essential to improving the living environment. Also, they maintain that including housing for middle-income families in the new structures has changed the social dynamic and reduced issues like crime.

In New Brunswick, 246 family apartments came crashing down in the Memorial Homes demolition in August 2001. In their place, at the same site and at two nearby locations, the New Brunswick Housing Authority built 144 townhouses and 48 senior apartments, officials said.

The demand for public housing in New Brunswick remains great. At present, the waiting list for rentals has about 640 names on it, according to housing officials.

John Clarke, executive director of the housing authority, maintains that the redevelopment has actually increased the number of affordable units in the area. In addition to the new units that were built, the agency distributed about 110 Section 8 vouchers to former tenants of Memorial Homes, he said. Section 8 vouchers subsidize rents for people with low-incomes and allow them to lease apartments outside government-owned and-operated projects.

But C. Roy Epps, president of the Civic League of Greater New Brunswick, a community nonprofit group, says building senior apartments in place of family units hasn’t been a good trade-off in a community that desperately needs affordable housing for families. He also disagrees with Clarke’s take on the Section 8 vouchers.

“They didn’t create new housing,’’ Epps said. “That housing already existed. They moved into housing that other people would have been living in.’’

Tenants’ experiences in Section 8 housing has been a mixed one, according to Epps. “In some cases it works out fine. In other cases, they lose their social structure and they feel isolated,’’ he said.

That’s part of the downside of the Section 8 program, according to tenant advocates. They say folks sometimes move out of the neighborhood and find themselves disconnected from essential aspects of their lives – family, friends, jobs, mass transit, child care, stores with affordable prices and schools where their children were acclimated.

It’s not clear how many of the Memorial Homes tenants who moved into apartments paid for with Section 8 vouchers were successful in their new homes.

HUD requires local housing authorities to submit relocation plans as part of their applications for HOPE VI funding. But there is no requirement to do follow-up research on what happened to tenants after the new complexes opened, said a New Jersey HUD official.

In New Brunswick, however, officials say there has been research done on what happened with Memorial Homes tenants during the four years after the demolition.

Clarke said approximately 200 of the 246 units where occupied when the relocation process began more than a decade ago. Eight families, he said, bought homes when they left the projects. The other 192 tenants moved into other public housing or used vouchers to rent private-owned apartments in New Brunswick, surrounding towns and out of state.

Clarke said 116 families from Memorial Homes remained in New Brunswick – half of them in housing authority buildings and half in private rentals through rental vouchers.

The Schwartz-Robeson Village, uptown between Jersey Avenue and Route 27, was the public housing complex that took on the greatest concentration of former Memorial Homes tenants. Community activists say the mass relocation worsened conditions at Schwartz-Robeson.

“They brought a number of the characteristics that were in Memorial Homes with them, like the gang issue and the drug-dealing,’’ said Epps.

Also, New Brunswick has had long-standing rivalries between its uptown and downtown youths, a split that in some cases has produced street gang factions, he said. Putting downtown families in the uptown housing complex exacerbated the trouble, according to Epps.

“I am not aware of any major increase in reported crime after tenants relocated,’’ said Clarke. “However, we did have a one- to two-year transition period, between 2000 and 2002, where tenancy issues and disputes increased. Most of those matters were worked out by our site management staff, the tenants involved and the case management team that was still working with the relocated families.’’

Not everyone from Memorial Homes stayed in New Brunswick. Clarke said 51 families used vouchers to move into homes in surrounding towns, including North Brunswick, Perth Amboy, Somerset, Plainfield, Edison and South River.

Three families moved out of New Jersey to South Carolina, Virginia and Florida, he said.

When the housing authority opened the new townhouse complexes that were built as part of the redevelopment, 66 families from the original Memorial Homes moved into HOPE VI units, Clarke said. During the four years that officials tracked the tenants, another seven of them were able to buy homes, he said.

“One of the goals of our HOPE VI was to allow families the opportunity to choose where they wanted to live and to move to the communities where they wanted to raise their families,’’ said Clarke. “Through our HOPE VI grant, all of the families that were relocated from Memorial Homes were given that choice. Some families moved out of the city and state and some became homeowners.

“Most chose to stay in the City of New Brunswick and to remain part of our community,’’ Clarke added. “I think that is one of the real success stories of our HOPE VI grant.’’

A decade ago, New Brunswick had five high-rise public housing projects that towered over Route 18. Four of them came down in the HOPE VI redevelopment. But the Hoffman Pavilion, known as Building Five to local residents, has remained standing.

HOPE VI grants only provided money to rebuild public housing for families and Building Five is for senior citizens and people with disabilities. Now it’s also targeted for demolition during the fall.

Clarke said 40 of Building Five’s 60 apartments were occupied when the housing began relocating tenants late last year. 10 of them moved to a new senior citizen building at 55 Harvey St., Clarke said.

Another 22 tenants chose to use Section 8 vouchers for private apartments, including eight who stayed in New Brunswick and 14 who moved out of town, he said.

Of the remaining eight, Clarke said, three died, three went to nursing homes and two were evicted.

After Building Five gets knocked down, the housing authority plans to build a new 70-unit, $14 million senior complex on the site, Clarke said.

Sheree Davis was among the Building Five tenants who used a Section 8 voucher to find her own apartment in New Brunswick.

“I’m in a better place,’’ she said. ”The maintenance is kept up. It’s bigger, it’s better looking. There no bed bugs, no broken down elevators, nothing like that.’’

Davis lived in Building Five for 14 years and recalls the days when the family high-rises were ground zero for trouble in the neighborhood.

“It’s a lot safer now without the projects,’’ she said. “You don’t hear people shooting outside your window.’’

Davis was sitting in a plaza in front of the Rutgers dormitory that was built on George Street, a couple blocks up a hill from where Memorial Homes once loomed. The plaza, which includes a 7-Eleven store, has become a place where two worlds overlap. Both students and neighborhood residents seemed to enjoy hanging out at the spot.

More than a decade ago, some streets in the area had been considered a “no man’s land.’’

“It was okay if you were from here,’’ said Gregory, “but not if you came from the outside.’’

City officials believe the neighborhood’s revitalization would have been extremely difficult – if not impossible – if the Memorial Homes were left in place.

“I don’t know if many of the successful lower George Street development projects completed after we began the HOPE VI efforts in 1998 would have ever been attempted,’’ said Clarke.

He then listed a series of projects that followed the demolition: “the new Lord Stirling School, the Public Safety Building, Rockoff Hall (dorms), the Heldrich Hotel and dozens of private homeowner and commercial business revitalization projects along the Lower George Street corridor.’’

But Epps believes city officials are giving the demolition too much credit for the wave of redevelopment. For example, he said, Rutgers already had its plans in place for George Street dorm before Memorial Homes came down. “Don’t let them tell you it couldn’t have gone up,’’ Epps said of Rockoff Hall. “It would have gone up anyway.’’

Clarke, however, said the plans for the demolition of Memorial Homes were in the works four years before the Rutgers’ dorm development agreement was finalized.

Epps also believes the downtown revival has done little to benefit the city’s low income residents.

“Revitalization for whom?’’ he said, arguing that not enough resources have been used to create affordable housing in the city.

New Brunswick’s $7.5 million HOPE VI grant was the smallest among the $400 million worth awarded to New Jersey cities over the past 18 years. But the Hub City seems to have gotten the most bang for its buck. The neighborhoods around Hope VI projects in Jersey City, , Paterson and Long Branch have not seen anything similar to the wave of development projects mentioned by Clarke.

In Paterson, for example, city officials in the past year have talked about their desire to be able to emulate New Brunswick’s revitalization success.

Now the Obama administration is attempting to phase out HOPE VI and replace it with the Choice Neighborhoods program, which supporters say takes a more holistic approach to housing redevelopment by including provisions for transportation, schools, social services and access to jobs.

“HOPE VI was an excellent program and Choice Neighborhoods will build on that,’’ said Donna White, a HUD spokeswoman in Washington, D.C.

Residents of the Lower George Street neighborhood and other parts of New Brunswick say some of the crime that plagued Memorial Homes has been scattered to other parts of the city.

“Now you hear the gunshots uptown,’’ said Wesley Brown of Townsend Street.

The townhouses on the land where the Memorial Homes were located tend to be more peaceful than the Hope Manor complex a few blocks away, up near Remsen Avenue, residents said.

That was evident on a recent weekday afternoon stroll through Hope Manor. A group of rowdy young men and women were hanging out near one apartment, gambling and drinking. Several said they had lived in the Memorial Homes and preferred living there because they said police officers interfered with their activities too often at Hope Manor.

In contrast, at the townhouses on the grounds where Memorial Homes had stood, there were no groups of people hanging around outside.

Gregory, who called the projects his home for four decades, now lives in an apartment on Commercial Avenue, right in the same neighborhood. He says he’s better off living where he is now. It’s quieter and safer.

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