From the front stoop of her modest but neat little townhouse on Huger Street, Sheila Simmons has had a front-row seat as developers built the swanky new neighborhood all around her on upper Meeting.
The new apartments have jazzy names like the East Central Lofts, Meeting Street Lofts and Element 29, and are filled with young professionals who can pay the rent. There’s the Palmetto Brewing Co. and yet another copycat apartment building rising next door. One day, the Lowline, a fabulous idea whose time has come, will run right by here.
But here is the news: While you can’t see it yet, Sheila Simmons and her family — her husband and four kids — and her neighbors who call these two-story townhouses home stand to become pioneers of public housing on the peninsula. This is very good and very overdue. And, most importantly, it could be just the beginning.
In October, the Charleston Housing Authority will ask developers for proposals to bulldoze the 12 townhouses at 275 Huger and replace them with as many as 60 apartments, a mix of low-income and affordable units. When it’s done, the tired public housing units will be rebuilt one-for-one, and all the current tenants will be guaranteed they can return, the authority says.
With the federal government long ago walking away from building new housing, this is a model being used across the country. The housing authority will continue to ensure affordability by holding long-term ground leases and managing the low-income units.
But by doubling or tripling the density — building up — developers will use the affordable and market-rate apartments to subsidize the low-income units. Those tax credits won’t hurt, either.
Another nice touch: All the units will be scrambled. No putting the poor folk out back, and the not-so-poor folk in front. The finishes will be the same, too.
This is a concept Don Cameron, the housing authority’s chief executive, and I first butted heads over four years ago. In a column in 2016, I cited the example of how Boston was rebuilding its massive 1,100-unit Bunker Hill housing project in the city’s Charlestown neighborhood, and adding 2,100 market-rate apartments.
Cameron — who at 72 has helped run the housing authority for 45 years, longer than Joe Riley ran the city — rejected the idea. But to his credit he and the authority’s board changed their minds. “The model for this is Boston,” he told me. (Next: convincing Cameron to expand the use of security cameras like most other housing authorities have done.)
The Huger Street project is part of a sea change ahead in Charleston public housing as the authority transitions to a federal program that will rely on the private sector to rehab and expand aging developments. The 61-unit Kiawah Homes near Wagener Terrace, the 201-unit Meeting Street Manor and the 222-unit Robert Mills Manor on Beaufain are all to be renovated using the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development program.
If Huger Street goes well, the big prize isn’t far behind: Replacing the 128 units at Wraggborough and the 216 units of Cooper River Court, both in the Eastside, and finally, and probably last, the 264 units at Gadsden Green, the most decrepit of the city’s decrepit housing projects. The opportunities are huge.
The city’s public housing, for the most part, is a disgraceful anachronism, segregated — it’s 99% African American — and cut off from the rest of the community. WestEdge, right next door to Gadsden Green, and Morrison Yard, going up across from Cooper River Court, testify to what is possible in Charleston’s strong real estate market.
If the possibilities are obvious, so are the risks. Gentrification has helped reduce the peninsula’s African American population by half; today about 30% of black people downtown rely on the housing authority.
Any plan to remake public housing will have to ensure low-income units are replaced one-for-one, or more, and residents aren’t lost in the transition. Wraggborough can’t disappear like Ansonborough Homes did after Hugo.
Cameron says that won’t happen; he thinks we can rebuild all the low-income units and add 1,000 affordable homes. And it can be done in six to eight years, he says.
Sheila Simmons is anxious. She and her family have been on Huger Street for nine years, and she doesn’t want to move: ‘’I love it here.’’
But she has already gotten a notice in the mail from the housing authority, and can see the handwriting on the wall. ‘’If I were truly guaranteed a spot, I would come back,’’ she says.
Steve Bailey can be reached at sjbailey1060@yahoo.com. Follow on Twitter@sjbailey1060.
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