Worry Over Public Housing

Still, the housing authority has been able to move just 151 families off the subsidy rolls and into homes of their own in the program's first four years. Officials hope to accelerate that shift, in part, by encouraging tenants to get jobs in places such as retail outlets that would pay enough to make them afford a mortgage with down payment and other help from the PHA.

But perhaps the toughest obstacle officials here confront in getting people off subsidized housing is the stubborn pervasiveness of deep poverty. Nearly half of the families receiving public housing aid in Philadelphia have incomes under $8,000 a year; and only a fifth reported annual incomes above $16,000, according to PHA statistics.

Maxine Singletary moved into South Philadelphia's Tasker Homes when she was 13 months old and, except for a brief period, she never left. That is where she grew up, raised five children, retired and plans to spend the rest of her life.

"I like South Philly," said Singletary, 65, as she sat in her spacious dining room in the newly rebuilt development, rechristened Greater Grays Ferry Estates. "This is where I want to be."

That was fortunate, because with the federal government requiring her to use less than a third of her meager income to pay rent, public housing was one of the few places Singletary could afford, as she bounced from work as a hotel maid to welfare and, finally, to disability.

Even if the PHA can move some of its 80,000 tenants off its rolls, thousands of others are waiting in line to take their place. Later this year, when the PHA's waiting list for housing subsidy vouchers is likely to reopen after being closed for four years, the agency projects a flood of about 20,000 new applicants.

"Public housing has been a lifetime thing, and sometimes a multi-generational for many of our families," said Executive Director Carl R. Greene said. "We're working to change that paradigm."

The Bush administration's public housing proposal comes after a series of changes that dramatically improved crumbling public housing developments such as Tasker since their crack-induced nadir of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Then, drugs and wanton violence drove the last of the working families out of public housing in many cities and made living conditions all but unbearable for those left behind.

Since 1992, programs such as the federal government's HOPE VI initiative, which is slated for elimination in the Bush budget, have provided billions of dollars to demolish some of the nation's most distressed developments and to rebuild them as mixed-income communities. In the District, the program has helped remake half a dozen public housing developments, and other improvements are on the drawing board.

Many of the newly rebuilt developments combine low-income rentals and homes for sale. The new communities are clean and safe -- a far cry from the recent past. "We used to have to duck and dodge bullets around here," said Belinda Stanley as she sat in the living room of her family's new, four-bedroom home at Greater Grays Ferry Estates. "You knew to hit the floor when you heard the shots."

Now, she said, the development has the feel of a community. School kids are out in the afternoons shooting baskets, riding their bikes or playing double Dutch. Residents can now relax on front porches, and some have erected little fences around their postage-stamp lawns or adorned them with plastic tulips. "If somebody isn't doing right, the neighbors don't mind reporting you," Stanley said. "Before, they were leery to do that. It was too wild."

The community has become so desirable that Greene says it is lifting property values in adjoining neighborhoods. Working- and middle-class people are beginning to buy homes where only the poor lived just a few years ago. That is all good, Greene said, except for those who remain desperately poor -- as are most of his tenants.

"We like a lot of the president's proposals, because they are similar to what we're already doing," Greene said. "The biggest shortcoming I see with them is the funding limits."