New Orleans

At night, from the third floor landing of her three-bedroom apartment, Keywanda Wiggins has a view of the glittering New Orleans skyline. Visible from her window are the bulbous Superdome, most of the city's modern high-rises, and a slice of the Mississippi River.

The view immediately below, however, is less spectacular. Stray dogs wander on a wide street that separates two solid orange-brown columns of buildings. During the day, music blares from car windows as groups of too-often unsupervised children ride bikes and play ball.

This is the heart of the Guste Low Rise Housing Development.

Near the backyard fence of the neighboring Guste High Rise is an unsightly dumpster packed with garbage. A collection of old bathtubs, stoves, and refrigerators offers visual testimony to a recent spate of apartment renovations.

"This place is much better than it used to be," says the twenty-three-year-old who like her mother and grandmother, has spent most of her life at Guste. "There is just more work going on here now, more things getting Gleaned up and fixed up."

"I don't even want to tell you what it used to be like," says Cynthia Wiggins, Keywanda's mother. "It wasn't just that we had problems, we couldn't seem to get anything done about them. The management around here was always changing, and if you needed something taken care of, nobody could help you or had the authority to do so. It was a mess."

For the younger Wiggins, a student at Tulane University, and her mother, renovations at Guste housing development represent the most visible sign of an innovative urban experiment underway in New Orleans. At the heart of this unique experiment are Tulane and Xavier Universities. The two institutions are taking community involvement to new heights with each playing a major role in revitalizing the nation's sixth-largest public housing authority.

Today, nearly every building among the city's thirteen public housing developments is under renovation, thanks to an unprecedented $10-million program funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The program, which began in 1996, has transferred responsibility of New Orleans's housing projects -- a job once thought by many in the city's political leadership to be hopelessly knotty -- from the auspices of the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) to a cooperative agreement among Tulane, HUD, and the city of New Orleans. The federal funds will be paid out in $2-million annual installments over five years.