When Tenants Take Over

Give people in the underclass the chance to run the aging tenements and public projects in which they live, and they might turn their wretched housing into relatively pleasant homes. Such is the lesson of five mammoth public housing complexes. All are in St. Louis' blighted neighborhoods of abandoned shops and factories and acres of rubble bulldozed in the name of urban renewal. "It looks like a war was held here," says Richard Baron, an attorney and public housing tenants' consultant. But by now some ghetto dwellers can claim a measure of tactical success, if not long-range victory over their environment.

A pilot tenant management program for the five projects--which contain 2,699 units sheltering 8,113 people, mostly welfare recipients--was born four years ago almost literally in the ashes of defeat. The city had dynamited to the ground every building in the near north side's Pruitt-Igoe project, nicknamed "the monster." There was no other escape from a pattern of violence and destruction that had driven out most of the project's inhabitants. The picture was almost as bad at neighboring Carr Square, a 658-unit town-house complex built 35 years ago. "The whole thing was a hellhole," says City Housing Director Tom Costello, summarizing the drug trafficking, shootings and knifings, petty thievery and filth in the sidewalks. "It was bordering on complete chaos. If we hadn't done something we would have had a whole city full of Pruitt-Igoes."

But something indeed was done. Tenant leaders, veterans of a nine-month rent strike in 1968 and 1969, asked the city housing authority to let them manage Carr Square and four other problem projects--three on the near south side. An agreement was struck allowing tenants to elect boards of directors for independent tenant management corporations in each complex. The boards in turn selected full-time managers--all project residents--and assumed responsibility for renting apartments, pressing tenants for late payments, fielding complaints, making repairs and even running tenant security patrols. The Ford Foundation contributed $130,000 to begin training managers of two of the projects, and by now has put up $500,000 for all five. The city housing authority pays the tenant managers and their small staffs a modest total of $258,600 annually; it also pays for maintenance and utilities, just as it did before the start of the tenant management system.

Carr Square, home for 1,698 people, seems to bear out the potential of the tenant management concept. The manager, Loretta Hall, who had previously worked for an open-housing program in the city, and her staff have created some semblance of order and tranquillity. Reports TIME Correspondent Anne Constable: "Tiny gardens blossom with brightly colored zinnias. Exteriors of the crumbling buildings have been refurbished, windows replaced, kitchens modernized, grass planted and wooden fencing built to increase privacy."

The management corporation organized a day care center for preschool children--essential for a project in which 189 families are headed by women. For the benefit of elderly shut-ins, a home care service hires teen-age girls to deliver meals and do household chores. "I love it," says Susie Humphreys, 66, "because here they treat you like a human being, and they talk to you in words you can understand." Adds Richard Henderson: "You can always call and get the tenant manager at night if something goes wrong."

Not everyone is entirely happy. Teen-agers complain of not enough to do after school, and few of the aged dare walk the streets at night. Nonetheless, crime in the Carr Square area fell from 319 major offenses (murders, rapes, burglaries and armed robberies) in 1969 to 146 last year. Such incidents in the other four projects declined from 973 to 272 in the same period.

What has happened is so encouraging that Attorney Baron is convinced that "the only way low-income communities can ever pull themselves together is when people inside them decide to do it on their own." HUD and the Ford Foundation last year opened similar projects in Jersey City, Louisville, New Haven, New Orleans, Oklahoma City and Rochester. Results are uneven so far, but the program spread across the country.

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