Residents Wonder About the Fate of Seth Boyden

The squatters, junkies and prostitutes quickly moved in when several apartments became empty in the Seth Boyden Terrace building where Elaine White lived. So did the rodents and cockroaches.

That was months ago and things did get better after the Newark Housing Authority sealed the abandoned apartments' windows and doors. White eventually adjusted to having three of the six apartments in her section of the building boarded up and empty.

Now she's making another adjustment — the relocation from one building in the South Ward's Seth Boyden public housing complex to another. "They're taking me from a building I know and putting me in a building where I don't know anyone," White said.

In some places, a move like that would represent a simple exercise in domestic acclimation. At Seth Boyden on Frelinghuysen Avenue, notorious for crime and shootings, the stakes are much higher. Tenants say day to day survival depends on knowing what to expect from neighbors: Who to trust? Who's in which gang? Whose apartments the kids can duck into if trouble arises?

 White says she would rather stay where she was, where she already knew the turf.

But the housing authority's relocation schedule has targeted seven Seth Boyden buildings for shutdown and White and the rest of the remaining tenants in those buildings are being moved by the end of July, the conclusion of a consolidation process that started more than a year ago.

For now, here's the housing authority's plan for Seth Boyden Terrace: seven buildings with about 300 apartments will be shut down, their windows and doors sealed with wood, cinderblocks and concrete. About 150 tenants will remain at the complex, left there to live in the five buildings still open. Those five buildings will have about 45 boarded-up, empty apartments as of August 1, but the number of vacant units likely will grow as other folks move out.

Jessica Mills, a 22-year-old who lives alone with her infant twin sons, isn't looking forward it. "Nobody wants to live in a place that looks half deserted," said Mills.

Exactly how long Seth Boyden tenants will continue living in a place that feels abandoned is anybody's guess. The housing authority has not yet applied for permits to demolish Seth Boyden from the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. In the long term, Newark officials hope to make the Seth Boyden site part of a bigger redevelopment called "Weequahic Park East."  For now, though, the only thing happening is the consolidation.

"The consolidation will go a long way to improving the quality of life there," said Lauren Hudock, the housing authority's policy advisor to the executive director. " We will be able to better maintain the remaining buildings."

At an agency that says it has $540 million in capital needs and just $17 million in annual funding, redevelopment projects tend to move slowly.

"We have a lot of buildings that we're trying to redevelop," Hudock said. "We're trying to utilize our limited resources as best as we can."

For example, housing officials announced they would demolish the troubled Baxter Terrace apartment complex back in 1997. They say groundbreaking on the first phase of new homes at Baxter Gardens occurred in mid-July.

What does that mean for Seth Boyden? "Information about future development is subject to change based on future developments and funding," said Hudock. "As redevelopment is a multi-year process, current projections, including total cost, will likely be amended to reflect any change in funding, construction cost, need, etc."

The changes at Seth Boyden Terrace are the latest wave in the ongoing transformation of Newark's public housing, a saga that stretches back more than two decades, has resulted in the demolition of more than 4,000 apartments and triggered numerous legal challenges on behalf of aggrieved tenants.

The city's notorious high-rise projects came down first in a series of demolitions that began in the 1990s and continued far into the 2000s. Now housing officials have turned their attention to problem-plagued low-rise developments. Two complexes - Baxter Terrace along Orange Street and Felix Fuld on Muhammad Ali Avenue - already have been emptied of tenants. Hyatt Court on Roanoke Avenue is much like Seth Boyden, a haunting combination of sealed buildings and inhabited apartments.

Newark has received more than $63 million under the of a national housing initiative known as HOPE VI, which has pumped $6.7 billion worth of federal funding into America's cities over the past 18 years. It's been an effort to replace distressed housing projects — many of them high-rise fortresses that had become bastions of crime — with townhouses and other low-rise developments designed to provide tenants with a cleaner and safer way of life.

New Jersey cities received more than $400 million in revitalization grants under the HOPE VI program, more than any other state in the union. That money has transformed the Garden State's urban skylines.

"To my knowledge, I don't know of a development that hasn't gone well in New Jersey," said Vito Gallo, the former executive director of Summit Housing Authority who serves as New Jersey chairman of American Planning Association's housing committee.

Now the Obama administration is attempting to phase out HOPE VI and replace it with the Choice Neighborhoods program, which supporters say takes a more holistic approach to housing redevelopment by including provisions for transportation, schools, social services and access to jobs.

"HOPE VI was an excellent program and Choice Neighborhoods will build on that," said Donna White, a HUD spokeswoman in Washington, D.C.

But HOPE VI's legacy remains an issue for debate among housing experts, tenant advocates and government officials mainly because of a basic fact — the majority of the places that were rebuilt under the program ended up with fewer public housing units than when they started. Nationwide there are about 100,000 fewer public housing apartments because of HOPE VI redevelopment, said Gallo, who also has taught housing policy classes at Rutgers' Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy.

"For future generations, we have less public housing stock," said Arnold Cohen, policy coordinator of the Trenton-based Housing and Community Development Network of New Jersey, a nonprofit coalition of more than 250 groups. "That's problematic."

Housing officials say the distribution of tens of thousands of federal Section 8 vouchers, which subsidize rents for people with low-incomes and allow them to lease apartments outside government-owned and -operated projects, has more than offset the loss of public housing units.

But tenant advocates say some residents of the buildings demolished through HOPE VI ended up being displaced and sometimes found themselves living in housing that was worse than where they had been.

"When a project is demolished, what ought to be done is that every unit of affordable housing is replaced by another one," said Matt Shapiro, president of the New Jersey Tenants Organization. "Most of the projects are never anywhere close to that. As a result, you have fewer affordable housing units."

"This is gentrification by another name," added Shapiro. "Its purpose is to get rid of poor people."

HUD required local housing authorities to submit relocation plans as part of their applications for HOPE VI funding. But there was no requirement to do follow-up research on what happened to tenants after the new complexes opened, said a New Jersey HUD official.

In few places in New Jersey have public housing tenants and their advocates fought relocation issues as hard as they have in Newark. The looming wave of massive redevelopments prompted a 1989 lawsuit that forced officials to replace more than 1,700 units of the demolished units at two complexes. But it took 19 years before that court mandate was finally fulfilled and tenant advocates say the outcome fell about 30 units short.

The city housing authority operates about 8,000 apartments, roughly two-thirds of them for families and the rest for senior citizens and people with disabilities. Another 4,000 people received Section 8 vouchers through the Newark agency.

But the demand for public housing in the Brick City remains great. Back in June 2009, the Star-Ledger reported that 5,000 people waited in line when the housing authority announced it was adding names to its waiting list for the first time in seven years.

The Newark housing authority's most recent shutdowns have contributed to the need for public housing in the city.

Baxter Terrance had 569 apartments and 341 were still occupied when the tenant relocation process began, officials said. Almost 200 of those tenants transferred to other city public housing developments, while 135 are using Section 8 vouchers in private homes, according to the housing authority.

Felix Fuld, meanwhile, had 300 units with 225 of them occupied when relocation began. Officials said 134 of those tenants moved to other public housing in the city, while 83 took vouchers.

"How can they say they're adding houses when all they're doing is tearing them down," said Glenda Wright, director of the New Jersey Association of Public and Subsidized Housing tenants.

 In the past, Newark redevelopments trigged many tenant complaints.

"I expected to see hundreds of people coming to our offices," when the Baxter Terrace relocation began, said Jose Ortiz, deputy director, Essex-Newark Legal Services. "But we didn't see that."

Ortiz said it seems the current administration of the housing authority has done a better job meeting its obligations to tenants going through relocation process than did its predecessors. For example, Ortiz said, people who were living in the Stella Wright Homes when that complex was about to be razed filed numerous complaints against the housing authority. Some claimed the agency failed to provide proper relocation expenses.

The legal battles went both ways. The housing authority also started eviction proceedings against many Stella Wright tenants before the relocation process began, said Ortiz, who manages the housing unit for the local legal services office. Only tenants "in good standing" are entitled to moving expenses under HUD guidelines, Ortiz said.

"If they could get them evicted, they didn't have to provide relocation assistance," he said. "With the present administration, I don't see that happening as I did in the past."

Ortiz said he had not heard many complaints from tenants at Seth Boyden about the consolidation there. But, he also said, the complex does not have a very strong tenants association.

The type of consolidation at Seth Boyden, when vacant buildings stand among inhabited ones, tends to be a "de facto demolition," Ortiz said. As conditions worsen, families move out as soon as they can, he said.

David Weiner, of the Newark Coalition for Low-Income Housing, said the partial shutdown of Seth Boyden is an approach that's been used before by housing officials in Newark as well as around the country.

"They don't repair them, they allow vandalism, they cut back or privatize the security," said Weiner. "That's the M.O."

When asked about housing officials' assertion that the consolidation will improve maintenance and security by focusing efforts on a handful of buildings, Weiner said, "On its surface, that sounds very logical. But the actual implementation has never turned out that way."

There's no question that Seth Boyden Terrace needed change.

"It's the belly of the beast," said Carol Mitchell, a family service specialist for the Against All Odds nonprofit group, which is located within the troubled housing complex.

 "My son is 10 and he knew what gunshots was when he was four," said White, the tenant being relocated. "He knew to haul ass. As soon as he hears something, he's trained to duck into any building he can."

"We're not talking about pistols, we're talking about automatic weapons," said Mitchell, who lives in West Orange.

"It's not tenants," said Yasmeen Nelson, a former Seth Boyden resident who works for Against All Odds and now lives on Hunterdon Street, blaming many of the problems on outsiders. "You see them coming down here in cabs. They bring their friends and their friends bring their friends."

Back when all 12 building were open, there were pockets of peace at Seth Boyden, tenants said. But that's disappearing under the consolidation, they said.

Some folks have used Section 8 vouchers to escape Seth Boyden. The housing authority also has relocated 11 elderly Seth Boyden tenants to public senior citizen complexes, officials said. About 58 families are being relocated from one building to another within Seth Boyden, according to Hudock.

Mills, the young mother with infant twins, said he doesn't qualify for Section 8 vouchers. She and her two sons were spending time at Against All Odds on a recent afternoon to get a break from the moldy smells of their apartment. She's not sure where she's going to end up living.

"I'm in the dark here," Mills said.