On September 2, Charlottesville resident Raymond Mason addressed City Council, decrying the disrepair and mess at Westhaven, the city’s oldest public housing project. The next day, Mason toured Westhaven with a Charlottesville Newsplex TV crew and two members of Council. A day after that, cleaning crews from the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority (CRHA) swept through Hardy Drive.
Mason was ticked off by unkempt lawns, erosion problems, dangerous debris in the playground and hanging cable wires. “These conditions are horrible,” he says. “This is not the way people should live.” Some of the structures, says Mason, have been there since the late ’60s.
When City Council next met on September 15, the state of the city’s public housing stock was on the agenda. Jason Halbert, chair of the Board of Commissioners for CRHA, reported that the housing authority has had problems keeping up with the physical conditions of its seven sites for some time. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has categorized Charlottesville’s public housing sites as “troubled.”
The timeline seems to suggest that Mason’s reprimands earlier this month contributed to CRHA’s clean-up and Council’s most recent discussion. But officials say the timing is coincidental.
“The Housing Authority report is an annual one and had been scheduled prior to Mr. Mason’s concerns,” says city spokesperson Ric Barrick. CRHA operates as a separate organization from the city but does receive funds from the city, and is thus required to file a report annually.
Noah Schwartz, CRHA’s executive director, says that HUD conducts physical inspections of each site and of 10 percent of the units to ensure that families have housing that is decent, safe, sanitary and in good repair.
“At the last inspection, out of 30 points, our score was 14,” he says, forcing the agency to comply with HUD’s required steps to improve the sites.
“These are serious conditions,” says Schwartz. “But we have been doing the best we can to keep up with each site.” Schwartz says the agency recognized the erosion problem at Westhaven and is in the process of fixing the gap created in the soil underneath a parking lot. “And as for the playground, the cleaning was already scheduled,” he says, noting that the day the TV crews documented the conditions, was “the worst day to look at the issue, being after a holiday weekend.”
HUD has instructed the CRHA to hire a maintenance manager, a position that the Board of Commissioners has approved and is now in the process of filling, and a capital budget manager, in charge of the roughly $600,000 in HUD grants. The problem is that money for operating costs hasn’t been received in full for the past few years. “The money is not there,” says Schwartz, so the agency is eliminating the vacant Deputy Director position.
“I drive through Westhaven every day, because it’s important for me to see the sites,” says Schwartz. “There are days, like today, when it doesn’t look good and we have to fix it.” Schwartz says the agency held at least two meetings with Westhaven residents to address litter issues.
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Raymond Mason, a city resident who doesn’t live in public housing, started a one-man campaign to improve the conditions of Westhaven. |
Through community development block grants, federal money given to the agency for improvements, Crescent Hall on Monticello Avenue is slated to have its windows replaced, in addition to the almost complete replacement of two elevators. The roofs at Westhaven are also scheduled for replacement.
But Mason wonders why it took so long to take action. “It didn’t happen overnight, and if they were aware of the problems, that should have been a priority,” he says, suggesting, for instance, that the housing authority should have put up signs to inform tenants of the dangers or erosion.
Councilor Satyendra Huja said at the Council meeting that he hopes the agency is making sure it is involving the residents in each plan of an improvement process. “It is important for the people who live there, to live in a decent environment.”
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