Turnabout for the Tenant : Training tenants to run public housing makes debut in L.A.

Housing Secretary Jack Kemp returned this week to the Nickerson Gardens housing project in Watts to make good on a promise--tenant management. Kemp, a staunch advocate of teaching poor people how to help themselves, kicked off a federally funded program that will train tenants to run the public complex like a business.

If tenant management works in Los Angeles as in other cities, it can reduce vacancies, increase rent collections, provide jobs and save government hundreds of thousands of dollars.

That certainly was the case at a housing project in Washington, D.C. The Kenilworth-Parkside Resident Management Corp.--led by a charismatic and forceful tenants activist, Kimi Gray--took over the housing project in 1982. After three years, an audit reported rent collections had risen by 77%, and the vacancy rate had dropped to a mere 5%. By the fourth year of tenant management, the government had saved $785,000.

Bertha Gilkey started another tenant management success story at Cochran Gardens in St. Louis. Her family moved there 30 years ago when public housing was a way out of a slum and an attractive step up for poor families. But public housing took on a stigma as the working poor fled drugs, bullets, fear and filth.

Led by Gilkey, the Cochran Tenant Management Corp. imposes strict rules: No littering, loitering, spitting, walking on the grass or hosting guests longer than one month. Infractions produce eviction.

The tenants collect the rent, sweep the hallways, hire maintenance workers--and provide 250 jobs through their catering firm, five day-care centers and cable television installation service for poor neighborhoods avoided by the traditional cable franchises. Those successes can be duplicated in other cities, Gilkey insists. To prove her point, she will run the training program at Nickerson Gardens herself.

Public housing is not beyond redemption. Strong tenant management coupled with adequate funds can again make it a source of pride.