Hampton Roads reduces areas of extreme poverty

After two decades of calling it home, Kaye Long had grown comfortable in public housing, so much so that she was scared to move out, she said.

But in 2009, she and her husband, Alton, bought a house in Norfolk's new Broad Creek neighborhood with down-payment help and other assistance from the city's housing authority. They started a small trucking business, and Long, who spent the '90s relying on food stamps, said their income now far exceeds the poverty level.

"You've got to go out there to know what's out there," she said of her move.

Long's experience highlights a dramatic trend in the region: While most metro areas in the United States have seen an increase in the number of neighborhoods with extremely high poverty rates, HamptonRoads saw the opposite.

Spurred by millions of dollars in federal grants and the demolition of public housing projects, the region produced one of the biggest decreases in concentrated poverty anywhere in the country over the last decade, a recent study by the Brookings Institution showed.

Between 2000 and the last half of the decade, the number of poor people in Hampton Roads living in a census tract of "extreme poverty" was cut from about 20,000 to 10,000. Such areas are defined as places where more than 40 percent of the population is below the poverty line. Federal guidelines put that threshold at $10,890 for a single person and $22,350 for a family of four this year in Virginia.

Among the nation's 100 largest metro areas, only eight others had larger declines than Hampton Roads in the number of poor people in "extreme poverty" tracts - and all but two of those had much larger total populations.

Despite the trend locally, about 160,000 people still lived in poverty in Hampton Roads at the end of the decade, the study said. That's about 1 in every 10 people.

Nevertheless, the dispersal of the region's poor is viewed as a positive sign. Local housing officials and the Brookings researchers point to the negative consequences that highly concentrated areas of poverty can have on residents, including poorer schools, higher crime rates, less private investment and fewer job opportunities.

In Portsmouth, the redevelopment and housing authority spent much of the last decade on a drastic overhaul of its housing stock. It demolished three of its traditional public housing complexes and built new neighborhoods in place of two of them. Two federal HOPE VI grants totaling $45 million helped fund the work.

One of the new neighborhoods, Westbury, features houses that can be resold at market rates. The other, Seaboard Square, has apartments that carry tighter restrictions for applicants than the housing authority's older, traditional public housing complexes.

New statistics show that crime rates have plummeted in those areas, said Kathy Warren, deputy executive director of the Portsmouth housing authority.

Portsmouth also saw the demolition of three privately owned neighborhoods of run-down apartments - Fairwood Homes, Howard Homes and Chase View - adding to the dispersal of poor residents in the city.

"I think it reflects a lot of hard work over the last decade," Warren said.

There's more to be done: The city has three traditional public housing complexes remaining, and the housing authority is looking at ways to address those neighborhoods, whether through demolition or major renovation, Warren said.

About the same time that Portsmouth was working on Westbury, the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority was moving ahead with its own massive demolition and construction project. Using a $35 million federal HOPE VI grant, it wiped away the Roberts Village and Bowling Green public housing communities and built Broad Creek, a neighborhood of mixed-income households for people both on and off public assistance.

Norfolk's housing authority also made a much more concerted effort in the last decade to disperse recipients of its housing voucher program throughout the city, said Ed Ware, the agency's director.

In Norfolk, there are about 5,700 recipients of housing assistance vouchers, the program also known as Section 8,according to Scott Swan, an associate professor at the College of William and Mary who has been studying the economic impact of the program for the housing authority. Portsmouth has about 1,600 recipients.

"They have dispersed those in almost every community in Norfolk," Swan said.

The housing authority has done that in part by promoting the program to landlords throughout the city, he said.

Ware pointed to the private investment that a project such as Broad Creek can generate. He said public and private investment in that area now exceeds $300 million, including the Salvation Army's planned $80 million Kroc community center.

Dave Forster, (757) 446-2627, dave.forster@pilotonline.com