Community Displacement

New MLK Plaza--Site of Old MLK Towers

Implosion of MLK Towers-Hawthorne

Implosion of the MLK Towers causes community displacement.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Towers (MLK) was located in the 700-block of South 13th Street in the shadows of Philadelphia’s City Hall and the renowned skyline of Center City. “The complex was opened in 1960 and renamed in 1970 in honor of the slain civil rights leader.”–www.pha.phila.gov

Similar to the problems many public housing high rise buildings faced in America, MLK Towers eventually became plagued with crime and violence. Public housing at that time was in severe distress. The United States Congress appointed the National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing in 1989 to review the current state of America’s public housing. The commission reported that 86,000 of the nation’s 1.2 million public housing units were severely distressed, “because of their physical deterioration and uninhabitable living conditions, increasing levels of poverty, inadequate and fragmented services reaching only a portion of the residents, institutional abandonment, and location in neighborhoods often as blighted as the sites themselves.” Due to lack of maintenance and proper upkeep, by the time the MLK Towers were imploded in 1999,almost half of the 600 units in the towers were deemed uninhabitable.

The new MLK Plaza that rests on the grounds of the fallen towers is a mixed-income HOPE VI residential development. HOPE VI is the United States Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) golden housing initiative. HOPE VI is the forefront for public housing renewal.

“Touting HOPE VI as “more than bricks and mortar,” HUD lays out five objectives for the program:

Changing the physical shape of public housing by replacing the worst public housing developments with apartments or townhouses that become part of their surrounding communities.
Reducing concentrations of poverty by encouraging a greater income mix among public housing residents and by encouraging working families to move into public housing and into new market-rate housing being built as part of the neighborhoods where public housing is located.
Establishing support services to help public housing residents get and keep jobs.
Establishing and enforcing high standards of personal and community responsibility.
Forging broad-based partnerships in planning and implementing improvements in public housing. “—New Hope for Public Housing (see article below)

What about the displaced residents in the towers? Where did they go or did they return?

It appears most residents were placed in other PHA units throughout the city, some through the Section 8 Voucher program. There is no specific number of how many MLK Towers residents returned to, or even applied, to live in one of the homes at MLK Plaza. The efforts to ensure HOPE VI developments are mixed-income have raised concerns about whether families at the lowest end of the income scale will have access to these units. “While many of HOPE VI’s goals make great sense, says NLIHC’s Crowley, the flaw lies in the inability of HOPE VI projects to accommodate people who are displaced and people with worst case housing needs. HOPE VI doesn’t solve the critical housing problems of the very poor, she says, and exacerbates them by making fewer units accessible.”–New Hope for Public Housing (see article below)

A close look at the national numbers reveals that HOPE VI developments usually create fewer units than they tear down, and many of the new units are not within financial reach of families being displaced. The MLK Plaza has 314 units, cutting density by over 200 units from the towers. Even though many buildings being demolished have high vacancy rates, with many units in disrepair and deemed uninhabitable (i.e. MLK Towers) – often by design so that the public housing authorities can justify demolition – “HOPE VI is still displacing more families than there are new units being built. Federal housing laws no longer require one-for-one replacement of units. HUD’s numbers indicate that the 1998 HOPE VI grant recipients will relocate 8,291 families, of which 3,976 will move back into the new public housing units. Another 3,607 households will receive Section 8 vouchers, and the rest will be placed in other existing public housing units.”—New Hope for Public Housing (see article below)

HOPE VI is supposed to allow displaced residents to return to the new units, but the fact that fewer public housing units are built at each site implies an assumption that not everyone can return. Majority of the previous residents do not meet the income standards of the new HOPE VI complex. Many residents do not want to move twice, especially after the new development takes years to complete after the original complex was demolished. Some families don’t have the means to move again and have already changed their lifestyle (i.e change in children’s school, becoming used to new local resources, new neighbors, etc.) .

“Ultimately, many residents with very low incomes end up in other public housing developments elsewhere in the city – perhaps to begin the cycle again, since the units they end up in are usually the very kind HOPE VI seeks to eliminate, or replace with Section 8 vouchers.”

“While the blueprint for HOPE VI seeks to address what residents, advocates, and HUD agree are the issues at the root of the crisis, program implementation has raised questions about the combination of strategies that seem to disrupt more lives than they help. Until the program addresses concerns that those who most need assistance aren’t being served, many will remain unconvinced that the effort is more than symbolic.”—New Hope for Public Housing (see article below)

MLK Plaza is a mixed-used development providing townhouses, duplexes, retail space, green space, and one apartment building for various families. Just as the man it is named for, Martin Luther King Plaza brings together many families with various ethnicities and lifestyles. It is a valuable Philadelphia community. It is unfortunate, however, that majority of the previous residents in the MLK Towers are not a part of the new development, the very place for which they had to move to make room for.