Tenants to Learn to Run Public Housing
Some of the thousands of people who live in Nickerson Gardens will start going to class this week for lessons in how to take over their housing project, the largest in Los Angeles and one of the most troubled.
About 50 Nickerson Gardens residents are expected to show up for the beginning of a yearlong series of training sessions intended to help them form a management corporation that would gradually replace the Los Angeles Housing Authority in running the Watts housing project.
The program is one of many being launched in public housing projects around the country as the Bush Administration promotes tenant management and even ownership as answers to the festering problems of crime and vandalism that riddle many public housing projects.
“(We) want to make sure that every resident of public housing in the United States of America from Watts to East Los Angeles to the South Bronx to East Harlem has the opportunity to manage their own public housing and someday to own it if that’s their dream,” Jack Kemp, U.S. secretary of housing and urban development, said Tuesday before a crowd that filled a gymnasium at Nickerson Gardens to mark the official start of the training program.
Kemp shared the stage with several other dignitaries, including Mayor Tom Bradley and Assemblywoman Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), all of whom praised the trend toward tenant management as the beginning of a new era in public housing. “Nickerson is ready,” declared Waters, who described herself as a child of St. Louis’ housing projects.
The management training--open to all adult Nickerson residents--is being paid for by a $93,000 HUD grant, one of five such grants given to Los Angeles public housing projects. The others will go to the Estrada Courts, Jordan Downs, Normont Terrace and Pico Aliso projects.
Nickerson has hired Bertha Gilkey to run the sessions, which will be held three times a month for the next year. Gilkey, a seemingly irrepressible advocate of tenant rights, is known nationally for helping notoriously bad housing projects, such as Cochran Gardens in St. Louis, clean up by putting the people who live there in charge.
“I say to the 6 million people in public housing in this country . . . it is time to challenge the system. . . . Who can better manage us than us?” Gilkey said.
There are now more than a dozen public housing developments around the country that are run at least in part by tenants, and efforts are under way to start similar programs at more than 100 other housing projects.
Kemp also announced that the Los Angeles Housing Authority will get $18 million this fiscal year to make improvements at its housing projects. Last year the authority received nearly $15 million for repairs and improvements, but housing officials say it would take more than $200 million to do all the improvement work they would like to do.
