The Tacoma Housing Authority is making a bid for a second major federal housing redevelopment grant, and a chance to further revitalize the Hilltop.
It’s a bold move to bring Hope VI money back to Tacoma to create jobs and affordable housing. If it works, it will bring a swath of Hilltop up to the neighborhood’s new standards.
It will also beef up and coordinate education and social services that residents will use to achieve economic independence and move into the private sector.
“All the residents who come back will be expected to be working,” the THA’s Nancy Vignec said during a presentation to the authority’s board of directors. “They will have seven years to be able to pay rent on their own. When they’re able to move on, the space will be available to the next family.”
The whole package would cost just over $33 million, with $15.7 million from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Hope VI program. The rest would come from a combination of grants, THA capital funds and the sale of a piece of surplus property.
The money will pay to raze and redevelop the failing Hillside Terrace complexes at the 1800 and 2500 blocks of Yakima Avenue.
Those apartments might have been neighborhood assets back in the Hilltop’s bleak old days. But they have aged badly.
Yes, the Housing Authority has maintained them since it bought them in the 1970s. But they were poorly designed as market rate apartments in the late 1960s. The kitchens are one-cook small, and the stoves aren’t big enough to roast a turkey.
The outdoor spaces are so awkward and unlovely that residents wryly call the playground “the baby cage.” The shotgun interiors are a cascade of stairways, which are deteriorating. The original building materials, from pipes to asbestos tiles, are failing.
The buildings are so worn out, board member Stan Rumbaugh said, that 12 years ago, the Housing Authority considered demolishing them “without a penny and without a plan.”
That was under different leadership. The current administration has kept them standing and habitable.
There’s plenty of shabby public housing across the country, and THA Executive Director Michael Mirra said there will likely be only six Hope VI grants awarded early next year.
Still, he’s optimistic.
The Hillside Terrace lies in a HUD empowerment zone. The new buildings would be energy-efficient and innovative. They would increase the total number of homes from 104 to 127, but they would have more pleasant and useful open space, including vegetable gardens.
They are convenient to public health facilities, schools and transportation. The management plan includes cooperation with area resources from Goodwill to People’s Center. Residents would have case managers to guide them toward independence. The people who live there now have been included in planning discussions, where they supported the idea of an on-site “baby college” early learning center.
On top of that, the Housing Authority has a first-rate reputation with HUD.
New Salishan, Tacoma’s first Hope VI project, has won awards for livability, design and efficiency. The East Side neighborhoods of privately owned and subsidized homes are safe and lovely.
Though the recession wrought havoc with plans for its final construction phase, the THA has put the financing together. Crews are laying in the water and sewer lines and storm drains and will start on the power and streets. Home construction will generate about 250 jobs, from framers to roofers.
Original plans had Hillsdale Heights, at East 60th Street and McKinley Avenue, well under way by now. The economy has put that project on hold until housing and tax credit markets recover, Mirra said.
If the THA wins the grant, Hillside Terrace will be the next big project.
The agency will submit the application in the next two weeks and should hear back from the feds around March. If it’s a go, staff will finalize designs, hire contractors and begin to relocate residents in 2010. They’ll start 18 months of construction in 2011, and move residents back during the fourth quarter of 2012.
And what if they don’t win the grant?
“Plan B for this footprint is to reapply the following year,” Mirra said, “If there is another Hope VI.”
Kathleen Merryman: 253-597-8677
kathleen.merryman@thenewstribune.com
