SOCIAL ISSUES : Dallas Divided Over Plan for Housing Project in Affluent Area : Design for 75 garden apartments is seen as a model for nation. But the answer to a bias lawsuit brings another legal action from neighbors.

On a vacant patch of prairie near the affluent northern edge of Dallas, powerful forces are doing battle over the future of public housing in America.

The Dallas Housing Authority, with the blessing of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, has purchased an eight-acre site where it plans to build 75 garden apartments for qualifying low-income people.

But in the nearby neighborhoods of large single-family homes, the residents, with the tacit support of city leaders, are suing to prevent what they see as threatening encroachment.

The arguments illustrate the racial and economic fault lines facing local and national policy-makers as they try to reform public housing by replacing dilapidated high-rise projects, which have fomented segregation and rampant crime, with low-density apartment units in suburban settings.

Although similar to a growing list of public housing disputes around the country, the Dallas standoff reverberates with political overtones that almost certainly will shape the outcome of the Clinton Administration’s vaunted housing program.

HUD Secretary Henry G. Cisneros, an influential figure in Texas Democratic circles, cites the housing development as an example of how the Administration intends to rebuild the widely discredited federal program.

House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Tex.), whose district includes the site, insists that community residents should not have to accept a low-income housing project in their back yard. Armey is among the congressional leaders challenging HUD policies and seeking to cut its budget.

Armey recently sent a letter to Cisneros questioning the North Dallas plan and the use of federal funds for the construction. “I believe the purchase in question may represent a flagrant misuse of taxpayer dollars,” Armey wrote in a letter political analysts say threatens even greater legislative battles over HUD funding if Cisneros refuses to yield.

The struggle to spread public housing beyond predominantly black and minority communities is an old one. In the late 1960s, activists compelled the Chicago Housing Authority to disperse public housing tenants in low-rise buildings throughout the city instead of concentrating them in inner-city projects. But only a few other cities followed Chicago’s example--notably Toledo, Ohio, and Yonkers, N.Y.

The genesis of the Dallas debate stretches back to 1985, when black public housing residents and activists filed a class-action suit alleging racial bias by HUD and the Housing Authority, which operates under the supervision of the City Council.

The lawsuit argued that local and federal authorities had systematically grouped blacks and Latinos in poorly administered public housing complexes, most of them in low-income neighborhoods to the west and south of downtown Dallas. Low-income whites, they argued, were generally placed in other parts of the metropolitan area in housing that was better built and maintained.

“Dallas has a long and bitter history of racial oppression, and much of it has involved public housing,” said Mike Daniel, the Dallas attorney for those who brought the lawsuit.

“We found records that showed the city made a conscious effort to keep whites and blacks separated in public housing since shortly after World War II,” Daniel said. “Back then, when blacks wanted to buy homes under the GI Bill, they were told to go out into the countryside to get as far away from whites as possible. It turns out that wherever blacks moved, there was nowhere to go that was far enough from whites.”

In 1987, buried by an avalanche of historical documents and anecdotal evidence supporting the charges, HUD and housing authority officials drafted a consent decree that called for improving the housing opportunities available to minorities in Dallas.

The agreement provided for shuttering more than 2,600 units in a predominantly black and impoverished West Dallas public housing development that was contaminated by lead fumes from a nearby smelter. Local and federal officials pledged to cooperate in building or buying 3,205 units for the displaced families.

For years, the city did little other than to close most of the 2,600 units. But the pressure intensified this year when Jerry Buchmeyer, a federal judge overseeing the lawsuit, ruled the government was violating the Constitution by confining public housing to low-income areas.

The most controversial part of Buchmeyer’s decision dealt with where to house the black families forced out when the West Dallas projects closed. Buchmeyer made it clear the new housing should be in one of the affluent, white neighborhoods of North Dallas.

But which one? He left that explosive political decision to the housing authority.

“There will never be a community where public housing will be acceptable,” said Alphonso Jackson, housing authority president. “It has become clear that the people in North Dallas don’t want any public housing . . . anywhere near them.”

Jackson, a black Republican, is the city’s leading advocate for dispersing small-scale public housing developments in white neighborhoods--a stance that has earned him the ire of city leaders.

Jackson believes that race and class conflicts have prevented many local white political leaders from making the case to voters that the burden of public housing must be spread across the city.

“They are responding to the demands of their constituents, so I don’t see politicians taking the responsibility for doing the right thing in this matter. It’s sad that a judge has to make them do what they know is right.”

But City Councilman Max Wells, who represents North Dallas, said opposition to the judge’s decree doesn’t necessarily reflect lack of courage by public officials or reluctance to provide public housing in white communities.

Rather, he said, the city wanted to work with private lenders willing to build public housing, a strategy that might have kept conflict to a minimum by allowing market forces to guide decisions about where to build.

But Wells conceded that the free-market approach “has not worked too well because there was not a willingness on the part of lenders to build low-cost housing” in places where they could build more expensive homes.

Wells said the housing authority made matters worse by “operating in such a way to maximize community concerns over building public housing.” Jackson, he said, has been unwilling to meet with residents of North Dallas and has used racial arguments that offended white homeowners.

In May, Jackson stoked the political fires even more by announcing that the housing authority had spent $1.3 million in public money to buy eight acres at Frankford Road and Marsh Lane in Denton County, and planned to build 75 townhomes for low-income residents in the affluent and politically powerful area at the northern tip of Dallas.

The site is now home to a ramshackle farmhouse and two sway-back horses grazing on overgrown grass. Less than a mile away, the housing authority has already built about a dozen apartments hidden behind a clump of huge single-family houses.

The housing authority intends to build the complex at a maximum cost of $45,000 per unit, or $3.4 million altogether. An artist’s rendition of the project shows a tableau of red-brick townhomes with pitched roofs, white gables and wrought-iron gates.

Nearly all sides agree development is virtually a done deal.

The North Dallas Neighborhood Alliance, an umbrella group for area homeowner associations, originally opposed the site but has lost the will to fight any longer.

“Our concern is that the housing authority properly maintain their properties,” said Sandy Gregson, the group’s president.

But not all opponents have thrown in the towel. Those who vow to fight cite two concerns.

First, they suspect that Jackson and the housing authority met in secret to buy the site and agree on the construction. “Some of the homeowners . . . are convinced the board violated the Texas Open Meetings Law,” Wells said.

Some also are worried about the geographic isolation of black families who would relocate far away from friends and familiar churches and hospitals.

“In and of itself, desegregation doesn’t accomplish anything,” said Mark Wilkerson, director of the Public Housing Steering Committee, an ad hoc group representing about 2,400 North Dallas families who oppose the Frankford-Marsh project. “The real goal is equality, and we feel the low-income people will need transportation and amenities that will make them self-reliant. . . . That’s not going to happen if you just take these people and put them in a pile out here.”

Wilkerson’s group has filed a lawsuit to stop the project and to determine whether the housing authority broke any laws.

Jackson said such efforts are misguided attempts to stall the inevitable. He dismissed the concerns about isolating the new residents as racism cloaked to hide fundamental opposition to racial and economic integration.

“Nobody made that hue-and-cry when they built those projects in South Dallas,” he said, noting that whites raised similar questions about whether black students would enjoy going to white schools during fights over the desegregation of Dallas schools.

Jackson said many of the potential residents may not survive a screening process intended to ensure that tenants have personal transportation and jobs, or the immediate promise of employment after completing college or training programs.

Jackson said he is mindful of the concerns of North Dallas residents. He stressed that the planned buildings would resemble apartment complexes already built in the neighborhood and noted that the housing authority makes it clear to residents that they are exercising a privilege, not a right to live in public housing. “If you don’t do right, we will put you out,” he said.