Tower Wreckers

Their 368 apartments would be completely renovated. They would temporarily move into newly built townhouses nearby and return to their former homes once the work was done. The townhouses would bring new life to the vacant lots that surround their housing project. They were promised a leg up on getting jobs from the construction contractors. And, after renovating their buildings, the government would chip in millions of dollars for social services--giving them a chance to learn computers, to train for home ownership opportunities, and to get their kids enrolled in academic, arts, and recreational programs. All told, $75 million in public and private money would make their central Brooklyn community bloom.

All they had to do was sign on the dotted line.

But just five years after approving plans to use a $22 million grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development HOPE VI program to renovate their deteriorating houses, the tenants of Brownsville’s Prospect Plaza look back at a deal they couldn’t refuse and find themselves puzzled and dispirited. They’re getting the reconstruction and some money to move--and almost nothing of anything else.

First, their entire four-building complex will be emptied, a process that is already underway and should be wrapped up by the middle of next year. One of the buildings, containing 102 apartments, will be demolished. The other three will be renovated. The tenants will be relocated, but not to nearby townhouses. Those have yet to be built--and when they are, most will be offered for sale at prices far beyond the reach of the overwhelmingly poor residents of the projects.

Instead, Prospect Plaza’s tenants are being offered replacement apartments in other housing projects or Section 8 vouchers they can use to rent apartments on the private market. They have been promised the right to return to Prospect Plaza, which defines the area around Saratoga and Prospect avenues, but most doubt they will ever be able to move back. And the social services that were supposed to be up and running already are nowhere in sight. A consortium of community groups and churches, which joined with project tenants to jointly administer the funds, are now duking it out for control of the money.

All told, many Prospect Plaza tenants have lost faith in the plan that once seemed like their salvation. “I don’t know anything, except we have to get out,” says Joanne Jones as she sits in the sun in front of 1765 Prospect Place, where she has lived for 13 years.

“I think they’re full of shit--straight cheese,” says Keisha Washington, as her children rollerblade through the dirty halls of 1750 Prospect Place. Several of the apartments are already empty, their doors padlocked. Washington, who grew up in the apartment where she is now raising her seven kids, believes that the HOPE VI deal is simply a plan to remove the existing tenants and bring in higher-income people.

Washington’s got reason to worry. Strictly interpreting a 1998 federal law, the New York City Housing Authority, which manages the city’s 346 housing projects and is in charge of the Prospect Plaza deal, now requires that half the vacancies in all public housing developments go to what it calls “working families”--with incomes between $31,450 and $66,550, depending on family size. The 1999 Housing and Vacancy Survey found the median income in city housing projects was $9,704. Such “deconcentration” is an explicit goal of HOPE VI, too. When the development reopens, it will have the elusive income mix that NYCHA officials are sweating to achieve at other complexes.