Dollar Chain Sets Up Shop in Housing Project : Retailer hopes to learn how to operate in high-risk area. Store is built by city with federal funds, staffed by residents.

Cal Turner admits that he is a little nervous. No, make that very nervous. And for good reason. He’s never done this sort of thing before.

The Dollar General Corp., the company his grandfather founded more than 50 years ago in Scottsville, Ky., and which Turner now runs, has a carefully crafted corporate image that emphasizes down-home values and roots. Its 1,600 stores, scattered across 24 states, are located mostly in strip malls and on small-town Main Streets.

So what’s Dollar General doing setting up shop in the heart of one of Nashville’s most forbidding housing projects.

Sitting the other day in a well-appointed office studded with giant potted cacti, Turner spent some time pondering that question.

Admitting fear of possible failure, he said: “We haven’t been able to succeed before in high-risk areas.” But he added: “This company’s mission has always been to provide basic merchandise to consumers at the lowest everyday price. If there’s ever anybody who needs the lowest everyday price on the basics, it’s the people in Sam Levy Homes. They really are struggling.”

In an unusual partnership between the private and public sectors, the store is being built by the city housing authority to serve its tenants. It is designed to blend in with the surrounding low-lying, red-brick structures.

Dollar General will provide the merchandise and staff the store with project residents, who will receive free training, free child care and free classroom instruction to get them to a ninth-grade education level, all provided either by government agencies or by Dollar General. The store’s profits will be reinvested in the community.

After receiving training, residents who decide not to work in retail sales will be offered jobs with other companies, said Joan Clayton, director of the Family Resource Center, a social-service organization that is connected with the project and operates in a preschool next to the store.

“It’s a golden opportunity for the people of this community,” said Angela Claybrooks, 28, an unmarried mother of three who has lived in the Sam Levy Homes eight years. “We have a lot of violence and stuff around here, but Dollar General is something positive that will come to the community.”

It isn’t entirely an altruistic move on Dollar General’s part. Because federal funds will be used to build the store, the risk isn’t as great as it would be if the company were acting alone. Also, Turner said, lessons learned in this venture will help the company operate profitably in other low-income areas.

Citing their fear of crime, businesses traditionally shun neighborhoods like Sam Levy Homes. That means that poor people must travel outside their communities to shop and find work.

But Claybrooks said she didn’t think theft and vandalism would be much of a problem. “People around here, they want the store so they’ll probably help protect it,” she said.

That is Turner’s hope. Because everyone who works in the store, except the manager, will be a resident of the community, company officials say they believe that there will be a greater sense of proprietorship among residents.

The manager, herself a former resident of public housing with experience working in low-income areas, is being brought in from Florida.

Turner said the idea for the store came about during a brainstorming session among individuals involved in combatting illiteracy in Nashville.

Andrea Conti, wife of Nashville Mayor Phil Bredesen and a participant in the meeting, took the idea to Sam Levy Homes residents who participate in the Parents Club, which meets twice weekly to deal with educational issues and problems in the community.

The residents saw it as a vehicle to help them “get out of the projects, get a job, get a place of their own,” said Bernice Frazier, a Parents Club member.

The center of all this activity in the community, at least until the store and a new training center open July 26, is the Caldwell Early Childhood Center, an unusual “one-stop shopping center” for the delivery of services to residents of Sam Levy Homes, said its principal, Myron Oglesby-Pitts.

The 60-year-old building not only houses a preschool but also classrooms for training adult residents who will work at Dollar General. The building is also shared by a team of social workers and a clinic operated by a nurse practitioner on loan from St. Thomas Hospital. The Parents Club also uses the building.

“That store is going to bring a lot of hope to parents who come here to receive classroom training,” Oglesby-Pitts said.