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Professor Karen Gibson was surprised by the number of residents who want to return.	Leslie Esinga is a resident and community liaison for the rebuilding effort.	For mothers and their children, the villa provided safe housing.

Hare in the Gate Productions, a Portland independent film company, contributed photographs and information from its documentary, Imagining Home: Stories of Columbia Villa. See a clip from the film at the Web site www.hareinthegate.com.

Most Americans are just one serious illness away from public housing,” says Marlene Clark, sipping coffee in her cozy north Portland kitchen.

Clark—an articulate community volunteer, devoted grandmother, and lifelong contented homebody—speaks from experience.

Donald, her husband, made a good living as a self-employed electrician. Clark was a stay-at-home mom. The family, she says, felt they could buy whatever they needed.

When Donald’s voice started getting hoarse, they knew it wasn’t good, but without health insurance, they didn’t know what to do.

Finally, a good friend insisted on sending Donald to his own doctor. Four days later, Donald was under the surgeon’s knife to remove the cancer in his throat. After several years of disability, he died in 1999.

Today, Clark, who uses an electric cart to cope with disabling arthritis in her knees, is grateful to be living in public housing.

She’s also lucky.

Across the United States, cities are using federal grants to demolish public housing projects—scattering the poorest of the poor to parts unknown.

Portland is doing things differently. At the often maligned Columbia Villa project—site of Portland’s first drive-by shooting—a phoenix is rising. Attractive new public housing sits beside charming low-cost houses which sit beside thoughtfully designed homes for the disabled and elderly.

It’s an experiment in mixed-income housing. An attempt to deconcentrate poverty, not—as virtually all other cities have done—by subtracting the poor, but by adding higher-income residents to a poor neighborhood. Another rarity: Portland is actually tracking what happens to residents dislocated from their homes.

As a result, Portland’s experiment—success or failure—is being closely watched by cities around the U.S., more than 100 of which have similar demolition projects planned.

Karen Gibson, assistant professor of urban studies and planning, was enlisted by the Housing Authority of Portland (HAP) to track what happens when the disenfranchised are uprooted from their homes and community.

“I was hired to track the social aspects,” says Gibson. In other words, the people side of the project.

In two surveys conducted a year apart, Gibson asked residents how they were doing. A third survey is scheduled for 2006. What she has found to date is a Columbia Villa diaspora made up of residents pining for a sense of community.

Clark, who moved to Columbia Villa in 1997, can attest to that community feeling. “It was a fun thing to move here,” she says. Houses were clustered around central courtyards. If someone chanced to light a barbecue grill, an impromptu potluck often ensued. “I’d take my dog for walks at 2 a.m. and feel comfortable,” says Clark. “It was home.”

But Columbia Villa, where 1,300 people previously lived, was also run-down.

Over the years, major infrastructure like sewers, roads, and water mains had deteriorated. By the 1990s, Columbia Villa was deemed beyond repair.

HAP was the Columbia Villa landlord (See related story about HAP). When federal HOPE VI (See related story about HOPE VI) grants became available in the 1990s, the agency hatched a plan—demolish one of the largest public housing projects between Seattle and San Francisco and rebuild a showcase for doing public housing right.

But HAP had a tightrope to walk—demolish 462 run-down homes without destroying a community. HAP wanted to move people out, raze their homes, rebuild, and move as many of the same people back as wanted to return. Was that even possible?

The agency recruited Columbia Villa residents to act as liaisons between the bureaucracy and the residents. It created on-staff relocation specialists, who served as case managers and advocates for the residents. They went door-to-door to ask heads-of-household what services they needed: Help in finding new housing? Money for moving? Help finding their way around new schools? Whatever need was found, the relocation specialists sought to help.

Residents first began moving out of Columbia Villa in spring of 2003 and by October, the project was deserted. In November 2003, Gibson sent a survey to former residents to see how things had gone.

“My areas of interest were their housing stability, satisfaction with services and their new community, and their interest in returning,” says Gibson. She mailed surveys to 374 heads of household—everyone whose family had been relocated through the HOPE VI process. Forty-six percent responded.

The results were largely positive. “There was a high level of satisfaction with the relocation process and the new neighborhoods,” says Gibson.

Nearly 90 percent said HAP’s relocation staff had been helpful and knowledgeable, and that they were satisfied overall with the services they received.

But residents said they missed the sense of community, their social networks, and the open spaces of Columbia Villa. Nearly half said they wanted to return. Only 15 percent said they did not want to return. Others were unsure.

“I was surprised,” says Gibson, “by the large numbers that wanted to come back.” Nationally, an estimated 11 percent of residents return following HOPE VI renewal projects.

With a second survey a year later, Gibson found that the sense of community remained strong. “Even 10 or 15 months after moving out of Columbia Villa,” she said, 47 percent of the respondents wanted to return and only 16 percent did not. The rest were not sure.

If, she asks wryly, “it’s so much better to be dispersed economically” as social strategists have argued, “then why would so many want to come back?” Gibson says the reason has to do with a basic misunderstanding of poverty and poor people by the middle-class, which sets social policy.

Leslie Esinga, a HAP liaison, has seen that misunderstanding at work from both sides.

Esinga, who grew up in comfortable circumstances in the Midwest, had been married nine years and had two daughters when domestic violence tore her world apart. “We had it all,” she says. “A house, two cars, a dog, a picket fence. I mean, we had it all. But people don’t know what goes on behind the walls of the white house with the picket fence.”

After a stretch in a women’s shelter, Esinga gratefully moved to Columbia Villa in 1998. “It was,” she says, “a godsend.”

When HAP initiated the HOPE VI project, Esinga came on board as a resident and community liaison, a job that required her to attend endless meetings of HAP, city, and public agency officials. Some of the off-the-cuff remarks she heard stung.

“You’re talking about me,” she would say. “The people who live in public housing—that’s who I am. I had to give that a voice. Their mouths would literally drop. People here are no different than anywhere. We cry the same tears. We have the same fears. It’s a human element.”

Columbia Villa, built in 1942, looked well kept from the outside, but infrastructure problems were deemed beyond repair.	In 2003, Columbia Villa's 462 housing units, scattered over 82 acres, were razed.	The first residents of New Columbia moved in during May 2005. By December 2006, 854 mixed-income units should be complete.

In the two years since demolition began, New Columbia, as the project is now called, has sprouted new homes along orderly streets. Sturdy play sets sprang up in a scattering of pocket parks. A “main street” with a community center, new elementary school, and local businesses is planned.

In spring 2005, the first families began returning. HAP will learn these residents’ opinions when Gibson’s final survey is completed sometime after the last housing unit is occupied in late 2006. But HAP knows that some former residents will not return, and Gibson will survey them as well.

Sarah Hobbs is one of those not returning. Hobbs raised two children during her nine years at Columbia Villa. A military brat, she says her years at Columbia Villa were the longest she had ever lived anywhere. “As dilapidated as those units were—rusty water, hard to heat—that was my home.”

When she was forced out by the rebuilding effort, Hobbs, who is disabled, landed in multi-unit public housing in a swank section of Northwest Portland.

The transition was rough. Used to having her own house, Hobbs now shared a lobby, elevators, and community rooms with people, many of whom, she says, suffer from mental illness. Some had “boundary issues”—and invited themselves into any conversation Hobbs might be having in a common room. Others screamed obscenities about and at nothing in particular.

But in the two years since she moved out of Columbia Villa, Hobbs has discovered a startling fact. “People’s attitudes toward me,” she says, “have completely changed since I got a Northwest address.”

Gibson can relate. She grew up in a poor section of San Francisco and saw firsthand the daily hardships facing people in poverty.

“For me it’s a very complicated story,” she says. “The population in Columbia Villa was not monolithic, just as the poor are not monolithic. Columbia Villa residents were poor people, elderly, disabled—just like outside.”

In fact, 46 percent of the residents in Columbia Villa were either disabled or elderly and not able to work, according to HAP data.

Has the HAP experiment succeeded? Even before the project is completely finished, Gibson says the answer is yes.

“Public housing has been lambasted as a failure and this shows it doesn’t have to be,” says Gibson. The difference between success or failure seems to be what she calls “fighting poverty with a heart.” “Having caring individuals who treat the poor with dignity is part of the reason for success with the people side of the HOPE VI project.”

If Portland’s case-managed mixed-income housing approach works, it could influence dozens of projects elsewhere. Gibson said that of the 200 HOPE VI grants given, two-thirds have yet to be completed because of the complexity of the process. Recipients of those grants are looking for solutions to their problems. Portland’s results—backed by survey statistics—will offer a model.

And the story of New Colombia will spread outside government circles with a documentary filmed by a local company, Hare in the Gate Productions. The film, Imagining Home: Stories of Columbia Villa, shown at national planning conferences, will be marketed to universities for use in class discussions.

Gibson hopes all the attention will help middle-class policy makers understand the effects their unrecognized biases have on low-income people.

“Poverty has a lot to do with shame,” Gibson told the documentary crew. “We shame people who are in poverty. It’s supposed to represent some individual failing: opportunities are abundant out here in our society and if you can’t make it on your own, it is really a problem within you that you cannot adapt. Whereas we know that in Portland, for example, housing prices doubled in some neighborhoods over the past few years and yet wages have remained the same if not declined. And this is true across our nation.”

Marlene Clark, cozy in her New Columbia apartment, is just happy to be back. “I could hardly wait,” she says. “This is home.”

Melissa Steineger, a Portland freelance writer, wrote the articles “At the Expense of Health” and “Power Currents” in the fall 2005 PSU Magazine.