Pleasantview Homes Are Coming Down

By Judith Nygren and Erin Grace, Omaha World-Herald, Neb.

Jul. 26–One of Omaha’s last remaining housing projects will be torn down to make way for development that better integrates affordable housing with the city’s vision for a revitalized North 30th Street.

Omaha Housing Authority board members agreed today that Pleasantview Homes will come down in the next couple of years, allowing its roughly 14 acres near 30th and Parker Streets to be rebuilt with businesses and housing.

Brad Ashford, OHA’s executive director, characterized the decision as a new era for his agency. His agency is now in the position to use its land to better mix income levels, provide services within walking distance and reinvigorate a neighborhood, he said.

OHA has a long way to go before it moves from concept to development.

The board’s decision today allows OHA to hire a Lincoln firm, Excel Development Group, to design a master plan for the land. It also opens the way for the relocation of Pleasantview’s 171 families, with Housing In Omaha providing outreach and relocation counseling to the residents.

Minus Pleasantview, OHA will have two barracks-style family housing complexes left: the 113-unit Spencer Homes, built in 1952 in north Omaha, and South Side Terrace, which is the oldest at 62 years and largest at 363 homes. Southside’s two-story red-brick buildings sit row-by-row in south Omaha.

OHA also has 11 towers with efficiency-style apartments for the elderly and disabled.

The agency doesn’t plan to tear down any other buildings for now. OHA has poured too much money into renovations at both Spencer and South Side in recent years, Ashford said.

Pleasantview, by comparison, needs about $1.7 million in work just to bring it up to federal housing standards. It would take an additional $52 million to maintain the 1950s complex over the next 30 years.

Pleasantview’s concentration of low-income residents also is an outdated approach to public housing that is being replaced nationally with mixed-use developments, Ashford said.

The vision for a redeveloped Pleasantview would integrate OHA residents with higher-earning families, providing a model for residents to leave poverty behind, he said.

Some Pleasantview residents already have moved to the recently remodeled Chambers Court. More will move during the next year or two, particularly as OHA makes 252 additional housing units available in the next several months, OHA officials said.

Ashford didn’t put specific dates on the demolition and redevelopment of Pleasantview. But he said he didn’t envision this as a project that drags on for years. Omaha should see signs of redevelopment within two years, he said.

OHA expects to retain ownership of the land but will invite private people to develop housing and businesses on the site, Ashford said. So far, the agency has not received any commitments. It still needs federal approval to proceed with its plan.

OHA began its effort of knocking down high-poverty projects in 1991 and 1992, when the northern half of Omaha’s first public-housing project, Logan Fontenelle in north Omaha, was demolished. The rest of that complex was demolished in 1995.

A year later, OHA tore down the 225-unit Hilltop Homes at 30th and Lake Streets and the 102-unit Pleasantview Towers, 30th and Parker Streets.

Demolition was spurred in part by a 1990 civil rights lawsuit on behalf of black residents of Logan Fontenelle who alleged that the city’s public housing discriminated against racial minorities.

That lawsuit was eventually settled, but OHA is still replacing the units that were torn down with renovated apartments or new-home construction primarily downtown and in north Omaha and the Keystone area.

Where those now-demolished projects sat, new life grows.

Logan Fontenelle’s old campus, bounded by 20th, 24th, Paul and Clark Streets, is now home to businesses, an assisted-living facility, a park, the kind of single-family houses one more often finds in west Omaha and an organized neighborhood association, Concord Square.

Hilltop Homes’ perch atop a Lake Street hill is the spot where Salem Baptist Church planted its $7.2 million new sanctuary six years ago. Walgreens also built there in recent years.

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Copyright (c) 2006, Omaha World-Herald, Neb.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.

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