PITTSBURGH With HUD's help, city will replace high-rises

There's a national movement to repair or replace the crumbling public housing.
PITTSBURGH (AP) -- At the still-going-strong age of 65, Jessica Wright won't mind if she outlives Garfield Heights. While she figures she still has good years ahead, the best years of the 40-year-old public housing building are long gone.
"I guess it's all right for some people, but there are quite a few things wrong," said Wright, who has lived on the fourth floor of the 14-story building since 1993.
The building resembles a shoe box with walkways running its length, patches of faded orange, green and yellow paint coating the exterior and an art deco fence surrounding it. Residents, most of retirement age, say it has little to recommend itself.
It lacks central air conditioning, rattling radiators provide the only heat, and residents must face the elements -- muggy heat in summer and biting winds in winter -- to do their laundry or get the mail.
"It's an old building, you know. It is not the Hilton. What do people expect?" said Lawrence Regan, a 60-year-old gas station clerk who lives on the fourth floor. "I'd like to live in a newer building. Who wouldn't?"
Plans for replacement
Maybe the occupants of 5330 Fern St. will soon have a chance. Over the next 10 years, Pittsburgh housing officials plan to demolish all the city's public housing high-rises -- six of which house the elderly -- and replace them with smaller, safer buildings.
The shift is part of a national movement to repair or replace the crumbling and unsafe stock of public housing. According to the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, as many as 100,000 units -- 7 percent of the nation's 1.4 million public housing units -- were distressed, most deteriorating or uninhabitable, in 1992.
The change is being fueled partially by HUD's HOPE VI program, which has provided housing authorities with $293.3 million over the past six years to demolish more than 44,000 units. The program has also provided housing authorities with $4.8 billion since 1993 to repair public housing.
Shift in design
As they design new public housing, architects are rejecting towering concrete-slab buildings, popularized in postwar Europe, for the townhouses, bungalows, cottages and walk-up apartments of its beginnings under the Works Progress Administration in 1933.
"It slaps in the face the standard institutional core that was the solution 30 to 40 years ago. It is like walking into a little village," said New Orleans architect Ron Blitch, former chairman of the American Institute of Architects' Designing for Aging Center.
As a third of those living in public housing, the elderly should benefit, said Larry McNickle, chief housing advocate for the American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging.
In some cases, people 65 and older -- a population the AARP estimates will increase by 55 percent to more than 55 million by 2020 -- are molding new public housing.
Besides architects' including senior centers and clinics in new public housing developments, new housing offers subtle changes made with the elderly in mind.
Curbs are gone, outlets are higher and light switches are lower. Doors are wider, bathrooms larger and closets smaller. Stoves have controls on the front rather than back to reduce the risk of burns. Colors are chosen to account for the yellowing of the cornea as people age, which can make it difficult to differentiate between shades of blue, green and purple.
Pittsburgh project
In Pittsburgh, construction of a replacement for Garfield Heights is scheduled for spring. The three-story building will have 60 apartments -- compared with Garfield's 300 apartments, half of which are empty -- plus 14 bungalow-style apartments, all with air conditioning and enclosed hallways. Pittsburgh housing officials also plan to begin building a second, four-story building with 40 apartments in 2004.
The new buildings will not cost residents more than the current rate they're paying -- 30 percent of their monthly income, said Keith Kinard, executive director of the Pittsburgh Housing Authority.