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93 chapter The author visited Seattle December 10-11, 2007, to tour New Holly, interview Seattle Housing Authority officials and other partners and observers, and review planning and evaluation documents. This case study is based in part on that visit. Recent immigrants to this country perceive the community in which they live and the United States as one and the same. For the many immigrants residing in Seattle’s Holly Park public housing project in the early 1990s, the United States must have seemed far from a land of opportunity. Built with haste during World War II as temporary housing for shipyard workers, the barracks-style Holly Park community was largely falling apart by the early 1990s. A disheartening degree of physical decrepitude, socioeconomic distress, and crime was borne resolutely by inhabitants, many of whom had experienced far worse in the refugee camps, political prisons, and desperately poor countries from which they came. To be sure, Holly Park was not nearly as bad as such notorious public housing high-rises as Cabrini Green in Chicago and Lafayette Courts in Baltimore, where children learned young to hit the floor at the sound of gunshots.1 But, with one of the highest homicide rates in the city, Holly Park was a place where residents locked their doors and windows, pulled the drapes, and avoided the streets after sundown.2 The American Dream was a remote notion for the more than eight in ten heads of household in Holly Park who, although they were able to work, were unemployed, cut off from job opportunities by their physical isolation from the surrounding neighborhoods, their lack of social connections outside their own ethnic group, and, often, their limited grasp of English. Life prospects also appeared dim for the more than six in ten Holly Park children living in poverty. Holly Park’s transformation into a stable working community that offers opportunities for a better future was enabled by the $48 million HOPE VI grant awarded the Seattle Housing Authority (SHA) in 1995. The housing authority was among the handful of early HOPE VI grantees to spot the potential for lora engdahl New Holly, Seattle 7 The multilingual offerings of a busy branch of the Seattle Public Library and many other services make the New Holly neighborhood campus a central gathering place. 94 lora engdahl leveraging redevelopment resources by building mixed-income housing and thereby deconcentrating poverty. By some accounts, early opposition and obstacles almost derailed the effort. However, leaders’ handling of such issues as resident displacement and replacement housing created a model of mixed-income public housing redevelopment that spread through the Pacific Northwest. The successful redevelopment of Holly Park into New Holly led in turn to the transformation of the housing authority as financing and management approaches first tested at New Holly spread throughout the agency. The Need for a New Holly Park In early 1993, HUD issued the first notice of funding availability (NOFA) for the Urban Revitalization Demonstration, later known as HOPE VI. The NOFA invited public housing authorities in the forty most populous U.S. cities or on HUD’s list of troubled housing authorities to apply for a total of $300 million in grants to plan or implement a public housing revitalization effort.3 Implementation grants could cover no more than 500 units in no more than three areas of the city, although grantees were welcome to undertake the redevelopment of sites with more than 500 units as long as the additional units were funded from other sources. The Seattle Housing Authority—not on HUD’s troubled list but serving one of the forty biggest U.S. cities—had been frustrated by limitations in existing funding programs, which essentially allowed only piecemeal patch-ups of what it considered unsustainable housing stock.4 In the new program, the authority saw the opportunity to undertake the kind of comprehensive overhaul of both housing and services that previously had been out of financial reach. 5 Holly Park, in southeast Seattle, was selected for the first application for funds because it was the SHA’s most distressed complex and because it was not very densely developed, allowing for a net gain of housing units on the development site.6 To be eligible for funding under the program, a development had to exhibit one of four indicators of severe distress: concentrated poverty; serious crime; lack of management control of the development or failure of the development to meet residents’ needs; and physical deterioration.7 In...

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