From Despair to Hope: Hope VI and the New Promise of Public Housing in America's Cities

8. The Villages of Park DuValle, Louisville

121 chapter The author visited Louisville December 3–4, 2007, to tour Park DuValle, interview officials of the Housing Authority of Louisville and other partners and observers, and review planning and evaluation documents. This case study is based in part on that visit. It is hard to believe that a pretty yellow house with a basket of pink flowers suspended between its porch columns now sits at 32nd Street and Young Avenue, once the “the meanest street corner in Louisville.”1 On a weekday afternoon in December 2007, the green chairs on the front porch are empty and all is quiet. Similarly well-tended homes up and down the block also are quiet—although the sight of a school bus rounding the corner a few blocks away suggests that the scene may soon get livelier. According to the Louisville Courier-Journal, on any given day in the mid1980s you would have been likely to see as many as 200 people at this intersection , mostly men gathered in and around a trash-covered lot by ThirtySecond Street Liquors. The older folks would be sipping whiskey out of paper bags as they warily eyed the younger men cutting deals or fencing stolen property . In the first half of 1986, city emergency medical services crews made sixty-one runs to this corner, nine times for stabbings.2 In fact, the entire Park DuValle neighborhood, at the southeastern edge of Louisville’s West End, was a crime zone. Although there were churches, community centers, and some decent residential areas in the vicinity, residents of the dingy barracks that were the Cotter Homes and Lang Homes public housing projects told Courier-Journal reporters stories of sleeping under their beds to avoid gunshots and finding toddlers playing with bloody hypodermic needles. But in the mid- to late 1990s, under the federal HOPE VI program, the liquor store, Cotter and Lang Homes, and other distressed properties spanning 125 acres were demolished and replaced by a stable mixed-income neighborhood that includes public housing. With its tree-lined streets, wide boulevards , and homes in a variety of sizes and styles, the Villages of Park DuValle The Villages of Park DuValle, Louisville lora engdahl 8 A yellow house now sits as what was once Louisville’s most notorious intersection. 122 lora engdahl has the same slightly suburban feel of other, older Louisville neighborhoods. As this case study shows, the physical transformation of the site has been accompanied by a striking drop in crime and poverty and a spike in income, employment, homeownership, and home values. New housing, stores, and community services have come to the surrounding areas for the first time in years. The redevelopment demonstrated the potential of HOPE VI to spur comprehensive community revitalization. It also showed how a new urbanist–style community erected in a part of town that had seen little new residential development of any kind in fifty years could uncover a “hidden market for housing .”3 The well-publicized success of the Villages of Park DuValle, with home sales that have exceeded expectations and confounded skeptics, helped fuel the trend for urban infill projects that draw people back to city living. An Opportunity for West Louisville HOPE VI provided Louisville with the opportunity to eradicate the dire conditions at Cotter and Lang and to bring homeownership and stability back to its historically strong but threatened western section. Six miles from downtown, West Louisville had significant assets, befitting its status as a home to workingclass African Americans. Among those assets were some healthy residential areas; pockets of strong commercial activity; proximity to Jefferson Riverport International, one of the fastest-growing employment areas; and parks and parkways that linked to the citywide parkway system, which was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the famed nineteenth-century landscape architect.4 But the area was suffering from the crime and blight spreading out from the Park DuValle neighborhood at its southeastern edge. Park DuValle was As part of the HOPE VI redevelopment of Park DuValle, a liquor store and lot dubbed “the meanest street corner in Louisville” because of frequent stabbings and other violent crimes has been replaced with singlefamily homes on a quiet residential street. Photo at right,© The Courier-Journal the villages of park duvalle, louisville 123 dominated by the Cotter and Lang public housing projects, 118 barracks-like structures built in the 1950s that included 1,116 units and spanned seventyfive contiguous acres...