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.

At the helm of HANO sits Ronald Mason, senior vice-president and general counsel of Tulane University, as the agency's executive monitor. Mason's appointment to the position, the result of a compromise between HUD and New Orleans city officials, put the dapper New Orleans native in charge of overseeing the overhaul and restructuring of HANO during the past two years.

"I ended up being the guy in charge because I was acceptable to both HUD and the city," says Mason, who grew up only blocks away from both the Iberville and Lafitte projects.

Mason says the decision to separate the social services and property management functions was made early on. A restructured HANO has greatly improved its property management performance, according to observers, while Tulane and Xavier have taken responsibility for delivering social services to public housing residents.

"HANO was trying to do both, but it wasn't doing either very well," lie says.

The origin of the HUD program stemmed from separate conversations former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros had with New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial and Tulane President Dr. Eamon Kelly, according to Mason.

Earlier this decade, Morial and Kelly discussed the precipitous decline of the city's housing projects. Violent crime soared and many of the structures had become rat havens filled with garbage. Combined with the chaos of administrative instability at the housing authority and the general state of disrepair of the buildings, these factors caused an exodus of thousands of residents who could no longer stomach the situation.

After HUD threatened to place HANO in federal receivership, New orleans officials struck a deal with the department in 1996. Tulane and Xavier were brought in as management partners, and they appointed Mason to be executive monitor of HANO. The appointment, which has elevated Mason to a highly visible public role, has also given Tulane an influential voice in the management of the city's public housing.

Revitalizing Structures and Lives

A survey of the city's public housing developments reveal considerable diversity among its buildings and architectural challenges. Since the agency's reorganization, officials have devised a fifteen-year plan to revitalize all HANO properties.

At Guste, both the high- and low-rise developments are the products an intricate, multi-layered web of public housing projects that dot the New Orleans landscape. The St. Thomas Projects, situated near the docks of the Port of New Orleans, and the Iberville Projects, just blocks away from the historic French Quarter, are among the oldest -- dating back to the late 1930s, the pioneer days of the Housing Authority of New Orleans. Curiously, these older clusters of oak-tree shaded, brown brick buildings trimmed with decorative wrought-iron finishings have fared better than their successors. Some have housed three or four generations of the same family.

Toward the eastern side of the city, however, newer structures -- like those of the mammoth Desire and Fischer developments -- have not fared as well. Now only in their third decade, many are already boarded up and abandoned. Their likely destiny is a yet unscheduled visit from the wrecker's ball.

Under the supervision of HANO, those buildings judged to be solid and requiring minimal repairs will remain. However, it is projected that nearly one third of the units, such as the badly decaying ones that comprise Desire, will likely be demolished. An estimated $750 million in construction will be needed to revitalize HANO properties.

"Every one of the projects that I know of was going through some bad times, " says Phelan White, thirty-two, who lives in the St. Thomas Projects and is now a technical assistant for the St. Thomas Resident Council, which attempts to find solutions to the dozens of repair, crime, and management problems that face the residents of any big-city housing complex.

"It seemed pretty hopeless for a while, but it has gotten a lot better since then," White says.

While dozens of structures are undergoing rehabilitation, their 30,000 inhabitants are also getting a new lease on life. With help from Xavier, Tulane is making a concerted effort to train the residents of the now crumbling, once drug-infested projects to solve their problems themselves.

The HUD pact led to the emergence of the Institute for Resident Initiatives at Tulane -- where some three-dozen people, most of whom are either current or former public housing residents, were trained and stationed at each of the city's project sites. The institute offers an assortment of services to the current residents, ranging from employment and education counseling to business development advice.

"I like that approach," says the younger Wiggins, who is a pre-med student and works in the school's Institute for Resident Initiatives, which is also funded by the multi-million-dollar HUD grant. "Now it is the residents who are keeping things up around here. We have our own beautification program, and you can see the entire development is much cleaner than it was before. That is because the people here are now taking care of our own business, not some people on the outside."

Applying "People-Oriented" Solutions

An equally vital, if not more intensely focused, part of the HUD program is the Tulane-Xavier Campus Affiliates Program (CAP), which aims to address the needs of the C.J. Peete public housing development. Located near what locals call the "Central City," Peete consists of a stately row of formidable brick buildings constructed during World War II. The project currently houses approximately 4,000 people.

"This part of the program has gotten bigger and changed in more innovative ways than I think anyone could have anticipated when it was all being drawn up," says John Pecoul, acting vice president for development at Xavier. "It is very people-oriented in that a wide variety of faculty and students from both Tulane and Xavier have gotten involved and are doing things like mentoring, tutoring, reading, and college readiness programs. This has turned out to be one of those things, I think, that has been rewarding for both sides."

"At any given time, we probably have upwards of around 100 students who are committed to working on public housing as an issue on a regular basis," says James Wright, a professor of sociology at Tulane and the director of CAP.

Wright, who has been a New Orleans resident for more than a decade and is an expert on urban poverty and homelessness, estimates that since CAP began two years ago, at least 600 Tulane students have been involved in either studying public housing or visiting one of the projects -- primarily C.J. Peete -- for after-school mentoring.

That mentoring has touched the lives of some 2,000 children.

"It is really a very satisfying thing to see so many young people committed to change," Wright says. "We have vans running a regular shuttle route from Tulane and Xavier universities over to C.J. Peete, where most of our programs are located.

"And I can tell you for a fact that there is nothing I can teach in a class that is quite as effective as bringing students over to a development like C.J. Peete and showing them what the deal is," he continues. "You can talk until you are blue in the face about urban poverty, but until you go up and look into the belly of the beast, you don't understand it."

Some of the supporters of the Tulane and Xavier initiatives, however, worry about the risks associated with placing students -- many of whom are not only new to New Orleans, but have never seen a public housing project before -- in parts of the town that have historically high rates of violent crime.

"There are many things that could still go wrong with our efforts down here," admits Mason. "I dread the example of one of our student catching a bullet at one of these housing sites. That would put panic [in] everyone."

Emergence of a New Spirit

One factor, however, that may help stave off such a tragedy is the five HUD-funded community police substations that are now located on project sites. After the first year substations were opened on the sites of the Desire, B.W. Cooper, and Florida projects, the murder rate dropped by a stunning 73 percent.

Police are additionally supported by the newly vigilant efforts of the residents, who today are much more likely to monitor and report suspicious activities.

Mason believes there is a newly emerging spirit among many of the projects' residents. He cites their willingness to help sop crime and their participation in the daily management of their projects as evidence that they are more willing now to get involved in the fortunes and fate of their communities.

An increasing number have also begun to express interest in buying their units. The prospect that more than a third of the city's housing units could one day be privately owned is one that even the most fervent project supporter would have once had a hard time believing.

Cynthia Wiggins is among those advocating home ownership for public housing residents.

"We had a meeting about this just the other day and sent out fliers asking people if they would be interested in owning public housing and the response was big -- we got seventy-two people to our meeting who said yes," she recalls.

Mason, who plans to step down from his Tulane administrative duties this year, is spearheading the establishment of a National Center for the Urban Community, which will be based at the Tulane campus. The center, under Mason's leadership, will coordinate activities Tulane and Xavier now support through its cooperative agreement with HANO. It will also allow faculty members and researchers to test and evaluate policy proposals within city neighborhoods and public housing developments. Mason says the center will become a national resource for public officials and academics seeking policy research and community development models to implement in their own communities.

For Cynthia Wiggins, who has seen the worst and best of times at the Guste Project, the cooperative effort by the universities, HUD, and the city has had an impact that she sees and feels each day.

"I can see the difference in daily life around here," she says. "People are working together more. There is less crime. Things are cleaner.... You always feel good when you do something that makes things better."