Northside: Success of project hinges on housing

As various groups begin to plan how to make the city's Northside a healthier neighborhood, housing is the most visible and divisive part of the plan.

"Our biggest challenge here is to build back mixed-income housing," said Harry Byrd, director of the Spartanburg Housing Authority.

The success or failure of the plan to build both public and market-rate housing could determine the fate of the neighborhood's longtime residents, the vitality of several public housing complexes, and the broader revitalization efforts of downtown Spartanburg.

Signs of change are beginning to show in the area. Not a single house remains on some street blocks. On other streets, wrecking crews are busy with bulldozers and demolition. There's something of a retail frenzy afoot in the neighborhood. Together, the Northside Development Corp. and the city have spent about $1.6 million during the past four years buying more than 100 vacant or condemned properties in a square-mile area north of downtown.

The residents who remain are happy at times to see eyesores demolished and at times anxious that they might be next.

Many residents who endured the neighborhood's past problems are not eager to move just as the neighborhood's prospects are improving.

"I don't want to move," said Elizabeth Hardy, who has lived in the neighborhood since the 1960s. "I want to stay right where I am."

A challenge

A house on Folsom Street, where people used to hang out and drink all day, is an example of the tension.

The Northside Development Corp., the nonprofit leading the improvement initiative, bought the dilapidated house for $25,000 in June 2012.

Earlier this month, the 82-year-old house went up in flames as part of a fire department training exercise. The city has already spent $782,000 bringing down houses in the Northside during the past four years, and burning is a way to save money.

Cautious that neighbors would draw parallels to the burning of houses during controversial urban renewal efforts in decades past, the city sought buy-in from residents at a neighborhood association meeting this past October.

Broaching the topic of burning eight homes on Folsom Street, the city's community relations director, Mitch Kennedy, said the block has been a "challenge," prompting laughter from neighbors who knew about the people hanging out at the house.

"It's one thing to tear down a house, but the perception of burning a house is a different thing," Kennedy told neighbors. "This community is going to change, and you are going to have a say in it."

Nobody at the meeting protested the burning.

Kennedy said there would be many more meetings this year, and residents should have ample opportunities to express what they want to happen to make their neighborhood healthier and more vibrant.

Neighborhood association president Silvia Means implored residents to attend meetings. The neighborhood association has fewer than a dozen members who attend regularly.

Hardy, the longtime resident, said the first meeting was more than 20 years ago with so many people, but interest has decreased.

"They just started dropping off and dropping off," she said.

Public housing

There are other anxieties too.

The neighborhood's 105-unit Oakview Apartments public housing complex is no stranger to crime. As a "moderate rehabilitation," or mod rehab, facility, it's privately owned but publicly subsidized with rental assistance vouchers. It is across the street from the Cleveland Academy of Leadership, the neighborhood's elementary school, and has been the scene of murders, domestic violence, shootings and drug-related crime over the years.

Built in 1948, the flat roofs and minimal windows of the identical apartment units lend the complex the look of a military barracks, according to a recent architectural study related to a Spartanburg Housing Authority redevelopment grant.

The chain link fences, poor ventilation, lack of insulation and concrete awnings add to the institutional look, the report states.

"It's one of the highest crime concentration areas in our community," said Bill Barnet, former Spartanburg mayor and chairman of the Northside Development Corp., addressing an audience at a community-building conference in Atlanta. "We need to wipe out that mod rehab center."

Harry Byrd, the director of the Spartanburg Housing Authority, which administers the mod rehab program, agrees with Barnet that the high concentration of poverty at Oakview needs to be addressed with a more mixed-income housing model.

"Oakview in its current state can no longer exist," said Byrd. "That is not the type of housing we want in our community, but at the same time, it provides housing for low-income people."

When and where the 105 families go is a matter Byrd, planners and residents will discuss as the planning process begins this month.

No such plans are immediately in the works for Victoria Gardens, the public housing complex across the street from Oakview. Victoria Gardens was just remodeled this past decade.

No more handouts

In the public housing complexes and in the broader community, displacement and ultimately gentrification are two concerns for both the residents and the planners.

At the same time, the plan has always been to intentionally disrupt concentrated areas of poverty in order to engender a new, healthier culture in the neighborhood.

In East Lake, Atlanta, which completed a revitalization effort in the late 1990s and is the model for Spartanburg's efforts to remake the Northside, many who were moved out of a public housing complex did not return.

Each resident received a voucher to live somewhere else as first demolition and then construction proceeded.

"The residents who lived there sat across the negotiating table," said Shirley Franklin, the mayor of Atlanta during East Lake redevelopment.

The residents agreed that people who returned could not be felons and, if they were 55 or younger and not disabled, had to either be employed or in job training or school, said Carol Naughton, general counsel to the Atlanta Housing Authority during the East Lake redevelopment and now an adviser to Spartanburg's Northside endeavor.

Byrd hinted that a work requirement might also be a possibility in Spartanburg, but no decisions have been made.

"The goal is to make sure that people are given opportunities and a chance, but at the same time are held accountable and responsible for improving their own lives," he said. "We can't afford the handouts anymore."

The government owns a lot of land in the neighborhood: the school, the fairgrounds, the public housing complexes, and the site of a new grocery and farmer's market. That's in addition to the 100 Northside Development or city-owned residential properties.

That leaves a milieu of longtime residents and absentee residential property owners somewhat adrift in a sea of change.

But according to the city, housing authority and Northside Development Corp., homeowners and public housing occupants will be invited to the helm to help steer the neighborhood planning effort.

No homeowners, they say, will have to leave their homes.

"We want to make sure everybody who wants to stay has an opportunity to stay," said Curt McPhail, planning coordinator for the Northside Development Corp.

Displacement happens when residents can no longer pay higher rents, mortgages or property taxes, so McPhail and other planners will have to make policies to make sure women like Hardy won't be forced out of the neighborhood.

"Those are the rocks and the stones that we have to turn over. Those are the site visits we have to make. Those are the experts we've got to bring into this and make sure that that's top of our priority list," McPhail said.

This story was originally published at GoUpstate.com on January 28, 2013

Photo Credit: ANDREW DOUGHMAN