Washington D.C. Turning Public Housing Over to Resident Owners

By Jerome Cramer

On a sunny day in October, Kimi Gray was handed a gold key in a celebration marking the first time in U.S. history that public-housing residents could become the owners of their homes. To her, it was an occasion rich with meaning. "Poor people," she says, "are allowed the same dreams as everyone else." The event was a significant step in a revolution that has been moving through more than a dozen public-housing projects across America for 15 years. In these complexes, tenants have balked at the notion that poverty means helplessness, and are taking over the management of their housing.

Getting the poor and mostly undereducated residents of public housing to assume responsibility for their dwellings has been hard, but not nearly so difficult as convincing politicians that it can be done. Gray, chairwoman of the Kenilworth-Parkside Resident Management Corp. in Washington, has been leading this fight since 1972. The decision to take control of the project was forced on Gray and her neighbors, she says. Plumbing was broken and heating was, at best, intermittent. So in 1981, deciding "things couldn't get much worse and we had to do something," Gray petitioned the District government to let residents take control. The mayor eventually agreed, and in January 1982 Gray's tenant management corporation began collecting rents, making repairs and running things for itself. What the corporation got was a run-down facility with bursting pipes, flooding basements and no one trained in physical-plant management. "It was crisis that brought us together," Gray says. Welfare mothers learned plumbing skills, children were pressed into clean-up patrols. The residents thrived, and Gray became a national spokeswoman for the movement.

This success led Gray to lobby Congress for changes in housing laws giving tenants the right to buy their homes from the government. The law went into effect in 1987. Prominent Republicans, including Ronald Reagan, flocked to her cause, but Kimi Gray is no conservative ideologue. Her success depends on Great Society programs such as job training to drive home traditional conservative values. "We want to bring families back together, restore our pride and respect," she says. Congressman Jack Kemp, another fan of Gray's who co-sponsored the 1987 legislation, calls tenant management a "synthesis of New Deal programs and conservative thinking." Selling public-housing tenants their homes, he says, "gives the poor dignity and a stake in the American dream." The management association paid $1 for the title to Kenilworth-Parkside. In 1990 residents will be able to buy shares in their units.

Kenilworth-Parkside is a hub of activity. The grounds are clean and graffiti-free, and more than 100 residents work in businesses created by Gray's management corporation. These include the day-care center, a barber and beauty shop, a moving company and a construction-managemen t firm. Gray's plans are boundless: she has started negotiations with the Department of Transportation to establish a "reverse commute" system for driving residents in vans to unfilled jobs in nearby suburbs.

At first glance, Gray seems an unlikely leader of a growing national movement. She spent many of her 42 years living on welfare. Raised in a public-housing complex in Washington, Gray at 19 was the mother of five children with no husband. Self-pity, however, rarely troubled her. "My grandmother taught me I had to lie in my own bed and be responsible for my life."

The lesson was well learned, and since moving to Kenilworth-Parkside 22 years ago, Gray has rarely stopped pushing for her dreams. Soon after she arrived, she became president of the local day-care center. Later she organized "College Here We Come," a program that has helped send nearly 600 academically gifted youngsters from public housing to colleges throughout the U.S. Since 1981 Gray has helped create a wide range of programs for the 3,500 residents of the project that have paid off in myriad ways: in the past six years dependence on welfare has dwindled from 85% to 2%, administrative costs of the project have dropped by nearly two-thirds, and teenage pregnancies have been cut in half. Along the way, Gray's brand of tenant management has saved the District and Federal Government about $5.7 million in operating expenses. Says Congressman Kemp: "She is inspirational, and her mind is breathtaking. She might have been born poor, but there is no poverty in her."

Such praise has been hard won. In the early years, Gray was considered a radical and troublemaker. "I'd go to meetings and get so mad I'd yell and turn the place out," she says. Politicians tried to block her plans, so Gray used a tool no politician can ignore: votes. In 1976 she organized and registered to vote 12,000 public-housing tenants. As chairman of the citywide public-housing board, Gray is now a local political power of the first order. The success at Kenilworth-Parkside hasn't come without struggle. Poverty can % drive out hope, and Gray admits that at the start of the tenant management struggle, "there were nights I cried myself to sleep because people wouldn't listen, didn't trust me or themselves."

Slowly, attitudes began to change, aided by new tenant rules that Gray admits are neither gentle nor subtle. Example: residents must take turns serving as hall and building captains. "People don't throw trash on the ground when they know it soon will be their turn to pick it up," she says. Tenants can use the day-care center, but only if they are working or looking for work. Residents are expected to take care of their property, which means fixing broken toilets and sinks themselves. One member of each family must take six weeks of training in such subjects as personal budgeting, pest control and basic home repairs. A system of fines is imposed on residents who break the rules. "Being poor doesn't give you the right to be dirty or lazy," she says. Though the bylaws seem downright harsh, in six years only five families have been evicted for breaking them.

Conservative black scholar Robert Woodson argues that "people change their behavior in order to stay in Kenilworth-Parkside. It's a class-specific solution in which poor people help themselves." Woodson, whose National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise helps promote tenant management throughout the U.S., says that "the federal and state governments have spent nearly $1 trillion over the past 20 years in a largely failed effort to fight poverty. Now Kimi and others are taking it out of the hands of professionals and giving jobs to tenants."

Gray is the first to admit that tenant management and ownership are not the only antidotes to public housing and welfare, but she insists that her efforts can be duplicated elsewhere. "There are thousands of Kimi Grays in America who are willing to try," she says. Woodson agrees: "Kimi and other leaders are the last best hope for many of these public-housing projects. Tenant managers can't offer guarantees, but they hold great promise. The only thing worse than poverty is accepting the status quo."