PSU Magazine Winter 2006

during her nine years at Columbia Villa. A military brat, she says her years at Columbia Villa were the longest she had ever lived anywhere. "As dilapidated as those units were– rusty water, hard to heat-that was my home." When she was forced out by the rebuilding effort, Hobbs, who is dis– abled, landed in multi-unit public housing in a swank section of North– west Portland. The transition was rough. Used to having her own house , Hobbs now shared a lobby, elevators, and commu– nity rooms with people, many of whom, she says, suffer from mental ill– ness. Some had "boundary issues"– and invited themselves into any conversation Hobbs might be having in a common room. Others screamed obscenities about and at nothing in particular. But in the two years since she moved out of Columbia Villa, Hobbs has discovered a startling fact. "People's attitudes toward me ," she says, "have completely changed since l got a Northwest address." Gibson can relate. She grew up in a poor section of San Francisco and saw firsthand the daily hardships facing people in poverty. "For me it's a very complicated story," she says. "The population in Columbia Villa was not monolithic, just as the poor are not monolithic. Columbia Villa residents were poor people, elderly, disabled-just like outside." ln fact, 46 percent of the residents in Columbia Villa were either disabled or elderly and not able to work, according to HAP data . m as the HAP experiment suc– ceeded? Even before the project is completely finished, Gibson says the answer is yes. "Public housing has been lambasted as a failure and this shows it doesn't have to be," says Gibson. The differ– ence between success or failure seems to be what she calls "fighting poverty with a heart. " "Having caring individu– als who treat the poor with dignity is part of the reason for success with the people side of the HOPE Vl project. " lf Portland's case-managed mixed– income housing ap proach works, it could influence dozens of projects else– where. Gibson said that of the 200 HOPE Vl grants given, two-thirds have yet to be completed because of the complexity of the process. Recipients of those grants are looking for solu– tions to their problems. Portland's results-backed by survey statistics– will offer a model. And the story of New Colombia will spread omside government circles with a documentary filmed by a local com– pany, Hare in the Gate Productions. The film , Tmagining Home: Stories of Columbia Villa, shown at national plan– ning conferences, will be marketed to universities for use in class discussions. riil ibson hopes all the attention l!!I will help middle-class policy makers understand the effects their unrecognized biases have on low– income people. "Poverty has a lot to do with shame," Gibson told the documentary crew. "We shame people who are in poverty. It's supposed to represent some individual failing: opportunities are abundant out here in our society and if you can't make it on your own, it is really a problem within you that you can– not adapt. Whereas we know that in Portland, for exam– ple, housing prices doubled in some neighborhoods over the past few years and yet wages have remained the same if not declined. And this is true across our nation. " Marlene Clark, cozy in her New Columbia apartment, is just happy to be back. "l could hardly wait," she says. "This is home. " D (Melissa Steinege1; a Portland freelance writer, wrote the articles "AL the Expense of Health" and "Power Currents" in the fall 2005 PSU Magazine.) Tearing down, building up The HOPE Vl story begins in the early 1990s following a bleak report by the federal Commission on Severely Dis– tressed Housing. The commission recog– nized that the social experiment of the 1960s and 1970s-to provide public housing in high-rise towers-wasn 't working. While residents did have a roof over their heads, the concentration of people without jobs and the insidious infiltration of drugs created warehouses of hopelessness. The commission recommended that housing projects that were beyond repair be demolished. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) began providing grants through the HOPE VI program to cities that wanted to tear them down. ln other cities, HOPE Vl grants pro– vided money to demolish such notori– ous high-rise housing projects as Cabrini Green in Chicago. But there was a string attached to the money to rebuild. "One aim of the HOPE Vl program is to deconcentrate poverty," says Karen Gibson, assistant pro– fessor of urban studies and planning. To deconcentrate poverty, most cities have dispersed the poor-replacing the high-rises that provided public housing to the many with smaller complexes that provide housing to the few. It's a tactic that critics of the program liken to a land grab. Public housing is often built on land desirable for redevelopment, says Gibson. ln some cities, the HOPE Vl projects were seen as a boon for devel– opers who demolished public housing in areas where gentrification had increased property values and built tony new homes sold for top dollar. "But when you take away that public housing," says Gibson, "where do the poor people go?" WINTER 2006 PSU MAGAZINE 9