Aug
12
Dunbar rape notoriety spurs federal push to revive rebuilding plan
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Originally published in The Palm Beach Post on Sunday, Aug. 12, 2007.
By KATHLEEN CHAPMAN and THOMAS R. COLLINS
Palm Beach Post Staff Writers
WEST PALM BEACH – A gang rape that horrified people across the nation could reawaken long-dormant plans to tear down the Dunbar Village housing project.
At the suggestion of federal officials, the West Palm Beach Housing Authority will inject new urgency into an old plan to rebuild the project with a mix of new public housing units and affordable homes for people with higher incomes.
Housing authority Executive Director Laurel Robinson said Thursday that she would be delighted to be able, finally, to remake Dunbar Village. For at least four years, she said, the agency has planned to improve the barracks-style development with open plazas, homes for private ownership, better parking and roads connecting to the neighborhood.
Rejected for a federal grant in 2004 and focused on the MerryPlace project to the east, the city and the housing authority put plans for Dunbar Village on hold. Since the attack on a mother and her 12-year-old son in June, however, outside attention has focused on the outdated housing project in a dangerous and often forgotten corner of West Palm Beach.
With public pressure, it finally may be possible to win millions of dollars from the federal government or find city or private money to tear down the entire public housing project at once, city leaders said. After the rape, calls and e-mails from across the country came into the city, asking what was being done to help the victims.
“Dunbar Village is in the news, and people want to help, so maybe we can do it quicker,” Mayor Lois Frankel said. “If we can figure out where to move 300 people, then we can do something quicker than a row at a time.”
Orlando Cabrera, an assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, called Robinson after the rape to suggest that she rebuild Dunbar Village and begin applying for vouchers that would pay rent for residents who would have to move.
Frankel and Robinson met with federal officials again Tuesday, and the city is asking local consultants to begin drawing up plans. Robinson, who met with residents Thursday and Friday, said most say they support rebuilding the housing project.
The city’s redevelopment head, Kim Briesemeister, has talked to a developer interested in the project, a New York company that has worked with housing authorities up north. Briesemeister said she’s sure local companies would be interested, too.
Robinson said two things are nonnegotiable: The housing authority, an independent agency, will not sell the 17-acre site to a private developer or anyone else; and although affordable homes for people with higher incomes should be added, Dunbar Village cannot lose a large number of public housing rental units reserved for the poorest residents.
Many working people in Dunbar won’t be able to afford homes for sale. The waiting list for public housing units in the city stands at about 850 people, and the need is too great to lose large numbers of existing units at Dunbar Village, Robinson said.
The housing chief did not say that every family there would have the right to return to a rebuilt Dunbar Village, nor did she set a number of public housing units to be preserved. She stressed, however, that the number of public housing units there should stay as close as possible to the 194 there today.
“We are going to have to redo Dunbar and stay true to our mission of serving extremely low-income families,” Robinson said.
Residents of Dunbar Village at the time the bulldozers roll would be offered a housing choice voucher, formerly known as Section 8, to help pay for an apartment in Palm Beach County, she said. That would cost about $4,000 a family, or $800,000 in federal money, assuming that residents could return to new units in Dunbar Village after about five months of construction, she said.
Frankel said she wants to increase the density to include homes for people with higher incomes, without pushing out the poorest. The mayor agrees that the new project should not lose units for the lowest-wage workers of Dunbar, the nurse’s aides and day-care workers, and knows that many feel attached to the community.
“It’s all part of the sensitivity of moving people,” Frankel said. “They are not inanimate objects.”
But, she said, “that neighborhood has to change.”
‘MONOTONOUS BOXES’
The housing authority’s 2004 application for HOPE VI, the federal program that pays winning projects millions of dollars to rebuild, was blunt about Dunbar Village’s shortcomings. The agency described the development as “monotonous rows of monolithic one- and two-story, basic, rectangular boxes more suggestive of warehousing than housing for families.”
The only way to drive into Dunbar Village, the agency said, was down the “sadly named Division Avenue,” past the railroad tracks and then down a long entryway lined with trash receptacles.
At that time, the housing authority planned to reduce the number of public housing units in Dunbar Village from 226 to 140, of which 40 of would be reserved for elderly and disabled renters. The agency also hoped to add 100 fair-market-rate rental units and 20 townhouses for sale.
The grant went to other cities that year, and the city’s ambitious plans were shelved. After three failed applications for Pleasant City and one for Dunbar Village, the agency gave up.
“Finally, you wake up to the realization that they are never going to give something like that,” Robinson said last month.
The federal government intends to phase out the HOPE VI program, which had awarded about $600 million annually. HUD has not requested money for HOPE VI for three years, but Congress nonetheless appropriated a smaller amount of money in 2005, 2006 and this year.
Four of 26 cities that applied got a total of $71.9 million in 2006 revitalization grants, and the housing authority did not try. Applications for 2007 are due in November, and Robinson said the agency might apply. With only about $90 million available this year, it is unlikely that more than four or five cities will win the awards, she said.
Frankel said she did not realize until an interview with The Palm Beach Post Wednesday that the money still was being awarded. Plans have been on hold in part, she said, because she did not want to get distracted from doing a good job with MerryPlace, the mixed-income development beginning to rise just to the east in Pleasant City.
Minutes of housing authority board meetings did not often mention Dunbar Village in the year before the rape, with most meetings focused on finalizing plans for MerryPlace. On June 20, two days after the rape, Robinson told the agency’s board that the contract for a police security camera was still in the city’s legal department but that she had hired a worker to focus on redeveloping Dunbar Village.
Dunbar Village is just part of Frankel’s goal to clean up the surrounding neighborhood of Coleman Park, the mayor said.
She always intended to focus on one blighted neighborhood at a time, Frankel said, and with Pleasant City coming together, Coleman Park’s time has come. The city has ramped up code enforcement to cut down on trash and dumping and has been buying empty lots.
Soon, Frankel said, the city will issue a bid for the construction of affordable new homes on city lots throughout Coleman Park and other blighted neighborhoods.
The housing authority has emptied 13 former public housing buildings along Tamarind Avenue in Dunbar Village with which it hopes to attract businesses.
Last summer in San Francisco, at a mayor’s conference on planning issues facing American cities, Frankel led a round-table discussion on remaking Dunbar Village. Many agreed that attracting working- and middle-class homeowners to Dunbar Village will be difficult, more so than at MerryPlace, which is farther east, close to the ocean and half-million-dollar condos.
Dunbar Village, by contrast, is ringed by rail yards, industry and blight, Frankel said at the summit, and the neighborhood cannot qualify for some federal tax incentives because there is no grocery within a mile.
Still, there are signs that working- and middle-class people are willing to buy houses in Coleman Park.
Bishop Harold Calvin Ray’s Redemptive Life Fellowship’s Urban Initiatives Corp. built new single-family homes just blocks from Dunbar Village for families that meet income guidelines.
Realtor Serena Hopkinson and her family are restoring the 1926 home of legendary businessman Cracker Johnson on 14th Street near the project. Hopkinson is president of the Coleman Park Residents Association, which formed this year and includes Dunbar Village.
Mike Sobczak, a planner at Glatting Jackson Kercher Anglin, said Wednesday that the city contacted his company and others in April about compiling a plan for Dunbar Village. He said he sent an updated proposal only recently.
“I think that cities have different priorities, and you can’t do everything at once,” Sobczak said. “So my sense is that this may have been put onto a side burner.”
A city spokesman said Thursday that no one has been selected to do the work.
MANY LAMENT LOST COHESION
Dunbar Village is one of the city’s two original housing projects. The barracks-style complex was built in 1939 or 1940, less than three years after the United States passed a law establishing public housing nationwide. Named for the black poet and author Paul Laurence Dunbar, the segregated housing project was built on the coastal ridge overlooking the city.
Many of the area’s successful black residents grew up in or near Dunbar Village. They remember a lost sense of cohesiveness and pride.
“We were jealous of those people over there. That was one of the better communities,” said Zenobia Scruggs, a housing authority board member who lives in Pleasant City.
As times changed, though, the fence that rings the community has not always been able to keep out the neighborhood’s larger problems: the drug dealers, prostitutes and gangs, the idle teenagers some older people call “one-arm bandits” because they need one hand to hold up their sagging pants.
“There is no use pretending,” Robinson said, that Tamarind Avenue, just west of Dunbar Village’s fence, “isn’t the most drug-infested, crime-ridden street in the city.”
The development has aged. Many residents like the distinctive copper cupolas that crown the roof of each building, and the housing authority agrees they should be incorporated into the new design. But the windows leak, the street layout was not designed for an era when most residents have cars, and some of the buildings are cracked.
Bessie Mcghee, 83, said she has lived in Dunbar Village for as long as she can remember. She said no one has talk to her about rebuilding her home, but that would be a good thing. The rainwater gets in, bothering her.
As far as adding residents, she prefers that city officials leave the village as it is.
“No one bothers me, and I bother nobody,” Mcghee said.
About 125 residents attended meetings Thursday and Friday about the proposed demolition of Dunbar Village. By voice vote, the majority said they support the plan, Robinson said.
Some say they have been told previously that the housing authority was trying to get money for Dunbar Village. They don’t believe change will ever come.
There are still no guarantees of money, and the bulldozers won’t roll soon.
“But they said we would never build MerryPlace,” Robinson said. “And now it is going up.”
Copyright 2007 The Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
August 12, 2007 Sunday
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