Jason Sandford
Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.
We went to the candidate forum at the YMI last night. Let’s just say it’s as boring as all the rest. Errington Thompson did his best to keep candidates on their toes by changing up the question a little more often than most. But when you’ve got 14 or 15 candidates lined up to talk, it’s just plain boring.
But we did pick up one important tidbit of information that we think deserves to be explored by local media. Council member Jan Davis, who is up for re-election, told the group his top priority is tackling the issue of “concentrated poverty” in public housing complexes by replacing existing public housing with “mixed-income housing” based on the federal government’s Hope VI model.
The idea is to tear down old housing complexes and scatter the new housing units in various neighborhoods. Davis said he’s on a task force with Mayor Terry Bellamy that’s working on a plan for Ashvegas. From what we’ve heard through the grapevine, the Pisgah View project would be the one targeted for demolition and rebuilding.
This is big news, folks. Remaking our city’s crumbling public housing units will have impacts all across Ashvegas. And it will be controversial, there’s no doubt. Yet we haven’t seen much reporting of the issue, although Davis is clearly talking about the issue in forums and on his web site.
Here’s the HUD description of Hope VI.
And here’s a NY Times story about a Hope VI project in Yonkers. A tidbit:
The goal of the Hope VI program is to transform distressed public housing projects into desirable places to live, help residents find jobs and move some of them into homes in better neighborhoods by providing rent assistance. Dozens of communities have taken advantage of the program since it began in 1993 — from Far Rockaway, Queens, to Atlantic City, San Francisco, Washington and Chicago, which has razed nearly half of its high-rise public housing units since 1996.
In those and other cities, the new buildings are attractive, yards are neat and streets have sidewalks that invite neighborly interaction. And the residents who relocated generally moved to neighborhoods that are less poor, more diverse and markedly safer than where they used to live, according to several studies of the Hope VI program.
“There’s a wide variance in the Hope VI experiences, but in many cases, there has been an incredible turnaround,” said Bruce Katz, director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution.
I was happy to see that Jan Davis said that his top priority is redistributing and de-concentrating public housing in Asheville. That sounds like a great idea to me.
However, in the Mountain Express, Davis said that his top priority was repealing the Sullivan Acts.
Then he listed his second and third priorities as something else entirely. Then he listed a #4 (which he claims is equal with #3) which doesn’t specifically address the subject, but goes all over the map with addressing homelessness, povery, and crime.
I like Davis as a person (in fact, I’m almost 40, and I even knew him when I was a child; I doubt you could find anybody who dislikes Jan Davis), but it looks to me like he told the folks at YMI one thing, and he told the general public something quite different.