Armory Square Apartments residents attend a meeting in January to learn more about the possible purchase and renovation of the building by the Rockingham Area Community Land Trust and Housing Vermont.
Fixing the Block
Story by Peter Jamison — photograph by Channing Johnson
Epilogue
Windsor — The problems of the Armory Square Apartments are not insoluble. Those familiar with subsidized housing redevelopment projects say just the opposite: that turmoil at such complexes is a predictable result of several reversible factors.
First and last, experts stress the importance of good management.
"The key has always been with affordable housing, or quite frankly any type of housing, that management makes the difference," says Alfredo Izmajtovich, vice president of acquisitions at National Community Renaissance, a national, nonprofit housing developer that specializes in overhauling troubled complexes or areas. "You can rehab it and have a beautiful building, and if the management isn't different," problems persist, Izmajtovich said.
What does good management involve? Izmajtovich, a former housing manager for Los Angeles County, said that weeding out bad tenants — first through a screening process, and then through aggressive responses to tenant complaints — is key. Izmajtovich said that at his company's affordable-housing projects, many of which are in California, managers perform twice-a-year inspections of units, monitor for suspicious car activity, and even keep an eye out for anything suspicious in tenants' garbage, such as chemicals that could be used to make drugs.
Fred Fuchs, an attorney with Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid and adjunct professor at the University of Texas School of Law who often represents tenants at low-income housing projects, said that tenant associations are another feature of successful subsidized housing. It's easy to see, after a few visits to the Block, that tenants are atomized in the extreme: most people, hoping to avoid trouble for themselves or their children, simply stay inside most of the time. As a result, those from whom they hide have the run of the place.
A strong tenants' council, Fuchs said, gives residents a forum to talk about their problems, and to confront the property managers or other tenants in order to solve them.
Another component, he said, is simple upkeep.
"It creates an atmosphere of alienation on the part of the tenants," Fuchs said of run-down buildings. "It gives the distinct impression, 'management doesn't care,' and it gives negative connotations, period. If you drive onto a property and there's trash around the apartments, and it's not maintained, and the dumpsters are overflowing, that's going to create a negative image, and it's going to affect tenant behavior and perception of management."
Both Izmajtovich and Fuchs said that, contrary to the opinions of some, the concentration of low-income families in large Section 8 housing blocks is not in itself a recipe for disaster. While acknowledging that smaller, mixed-income complexes are generally easier to manage, they said that the basic tasks of management remain the same, regardless of a project's composition or size, and that even projects devoted entirely to Section 8 housing can work if run well.
"Is it designed to fail the way it is? No," Fuchs said. "The key, it seems to me, is good active management. Management can do a lot. Management can have good security lights. Management can have security. Management can have good tenant selection. Management can track drug activity."
Herbert Berezin, who has owned the building as a partner in the Armory Square Limited Partnership since 1985 and who heads the two management companies that have overseen Armory Square in recent years, did not respond to repeated requests, by telephone and in writing, for an interview.
According to Berezin's letters to state housing officials, however, the Block's management has made steps in the past toward some of the goals Fuchs and Izmajtovich describe. Starting in 1999, Armory Square obtained federal grants designed to fight drug crime. Berezin said those grants paid for a number of security measures, including extra police patrols at the complex and surveillance cameras in the building's halls and parking lot. New security doors were also installed in the building, according to Berezin's letter.
But at least some of these measures appear to have lapsed. Throughout the past winter, one of the front doors at the Block had its front windowpane broken out, permitting people to step in and out of the building at will. Residents say some of the cameras no longer work. Tenants complain that building security is virtually non-existent. The larger and persistent pattern at the Armory Square Apartments over the years, state housing officials say, has been one of neglect.
"Efforts to put pressure on the owner to improve the physical and social conditions at the property had no effect," Vermont Housing Finance Agency (VHFA) staff member Cynthia Reid wrote in a May 29, 2007, report to the agency's directors on the Block. "The owner has operated the property within the terms of the law and the Section 8 Contract — albeit at the bare minimum."
Yet responsibility for failed subsidized-housing projects doesn't lie solely with a building's owners, according to Robert Voyles, Director of Planning in North Little Rock, Ark., a city that has gained attention for revitalizing troubled neighborhoods in recent years. Voyles said that public agencies also have a part to play, whether through beefed-up police presence or special youth programs.
"The restoration of these areas needs a concerted effort," Voyles said. "It can't just be, 'New buildings and hope things will improve.' It has to be a focused effort of all the public works and city services to look at what's going on in an area and make a difference."
For instance, in North Little Rock's downtown, an area Voyles said was once a classic case of urban blight, the city government set up regular police patrols — on bicycles, not in cruisers — and midnight youth basketball games.
Berezin, in past letters to state officials, has asserted that the town has not done enough in this vein to help tenants at the Block. Windsor Town Administrator Don Howard, for his part, told the Vermont Housing Finance Agency board in June that the town had tried to work with Berezin to address problems at the Block, to no effect. Howard said Windsor would do whatever it could to aid the redevelopment proposal. The two nonprofit developers seeking to buy and rebuild the complex have plans containing the key components outlined by housing experts such as Izmajtovich and Fuchs. Andy Broderick, president of Burlington-based Housing Vermont, said that the new building will have a street-side, first-floor office, staffed 40 hours a week by a property manager; in the off-hours, he said, a management representative — who will live on-site — will be on call for residents' needs.
Broderick said he hopes that simply improving the building's looks and design, as per Fuchs' suggestions, will make it a better place to live. The current renovation plans call for decreasing the building's density — reducing the number of units from 72 to 58 — and giving it a more open feel, with balconies that span the entire length of each floor, rather than the separate staircases that serve each of the Block's nine connected buildings at present.
But not before the crime problem is solved. Jeff Staudinger, executive director of the Rockingham Area Community Land Trust (RACLT), Housing Vermont's partner on the project, said that an aggressive approach would be taken to tenant screening and rule enforcement. While the renovated building's rules have not been drafted yet, Staudinger said that proven drug use would get people evicted.
Berezin has asserted that he conducts a full screening process of tenants in accordance with Section 8 criteria, but some dispute that claim. William Rines, a Block tenant who said he has done maintenance work for Berezin for the past three years, characterized the tenant-screening process as too lax. He said that in recent years managers "weren't even screening people" at all for criminal records.
Rines said he personally knew one person who had been admitted to the building with "a rap sheet larger than my body." In the rush to fill the building, Rines said, "they were pushin' 'em through."
Staudinger likewise attributed many of the Block's problems to managers' indifference as to whom they let into the building. "It's a dangerous place right now, because there's been very little attention paid to tenant selection aside from meeting the Section 8 criteria," he told the board of the Vermont Housing Finance Agency in June.
"It's the management," Broderick told the same board. "You have some tough tenants who live there, but you have tough tenants because there's no management."
Staudinger said that that a less-than-comfortable game of musical chairs that would ensue if the Block is renovated — residents would be shuffled, with all their belongs, among different apartments as the complex is rebuilt in phases — might sift out some of the troublemakers, particularly drug users or dealers, who are already there. Such people generally don't relish the scrutiny that necessarily comes with moving the contents your life among apartments, he said.
"I think our hope is that the transition itself will lead some folks to think that it would be better if they didn't stick around," he said.
Staudinger has also held a series of meetings this summer with residents to elicit their concerns about how the building is run. He said he hopes this group will lead to the formation of a tenant association under the building's new ownership. Broderick said he hopes to institute tracking of individual tenants, to see how they fare at the building over time.
Broderick and Staudinger are confident they can get the Block back on its feet. But they acknowledge that one of the more intractable issues in this redevelopment project, even if the renovation goes off without a hitch and those tenants involved in drugs and crime slowly leak away, will be convincing people that the Block, after years of failed promises, has actually changed.
"I think the place is going to be really nice," Staudinger said. "I think we can all acknowledge that the issue of changing the community's perception, the residents' perception, and the market perception of Armory Square is one of our biggest challenges."