"Race, place and income" : Thinking Out Loud : Blogs : News-Record.com : Greensboro, North Carolina

Race, place and income

My colleague, Doug Clark, in a provocative post on where public housing ought to go:

"The High Point Housing Authority plans to replace the community with 160 new units on the very same 20-acre site.

"It's a poor place for housing. The center-city property would be better suited for a business or industrial development.

"What's needed in High Point's low-income, inner city is not more low-income housing but more jobs for the underemployed population already there.

"This public housing community should be relocated to north High Point, miles closer to existing and anticipated jobs at Piedmont Centre, the airport and Dell.

"Proximity to those jobs is essential for people who face transportation challenges getting to work."

Predictably, not everyone agrees.But Doug raises an interesting point. Greensboro has seen remarkable success with its extreme makeover of Morningisde Homes into Willow Oaks. Yet, there are similarities to High Point. In Greensboro public housing is concentrated more heavily in the southeastern part of town.

As an aside ... I experienced the flip side of this issue.
I grew up in Woodmere Park, a middle-class black community that protested the construction of Claremont Courts public housing.
Residents argued that the city wouldn't have dared do that when Woodmere had been an all-white subdivision.

I agree.But the episode made us re-examine the demons that not only racism, but classism, can conjure among black and white people. There was at least an element of that in the Woodmere case.

On the other hand, the big difference with Willow Oaks and Claremont Courts is that the city did Willow Oaks right. It's the kind of place that breeds community pride, not a place whose look at feel screams, "Projects!"

David Wharton's most recent post on Willow Oaks:

"This kind of holistic approach -- folding low-income housing in with middle-class housing and neighborhood-friendly business and schools -- is typical of other Hope VI projects I've read about. And Willow Oaks successfully avoided one of the pitfalls that earlier Hope VI projects fell into, by making sure that the residents of Morningside Homes were all taken care of and relocated successfully into the new project.

"Will it be a success? We won't really know for a generation or so, but I think it's got a good shot."

Posted by Allen Johnson on July 8, 2005 6:31 PM | Permalink

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Race, place and income

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