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Building a Balanced Community: Jubilee Housing
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18336 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1990 |
3,861 Words |
| Author
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Robert O. Boulter
Robert O. Boulter has been active in the housing field for
twenty years, and has served as the vice president of Jubilee
Housing since 1979. In1989 Mr. Boulter served as a member of
the Housing Task Force of the Greater Washington Board of
Trade, and as a member of the Regional Public-Private Housing
Task Force of the Metropolitan Copuncil of Governments in
1990. He is a well-known speaker on low-income housing. And
related issues and is the author of Reflections on Urban
Violence (1982) and Rehabing with Residents in Place (1984). |
Seldom in recent history have events so changed communities in the United States as the riots of the late 1960s. The Adams Morgan district of Washington, D.C., was one community ravaged by those riots and their aftermath. Formerly among the most affluent neighborhoods in Washington, it was only two blocks west of one of the major riot corridors of April 1968. By the early seventies, once elegant apartment buildings had become deplorable slums and many of their occupants were among the poorest in the city. Weakened by the physical destruction, community bonds within this neighborhood were shattered by the mistrust and hopelessness that pervaded the squalor. Many residents who could afford to move and saw no hope for the area did, in fact, leave.
Exceptions to this exodus were members of a socially active ecumenical congregation, the Church of the Saviour, who had operated a small coffeehouse called the Potter's House on a major thoroughfare in the midst of these dwellings since 1960. Refusing to move away, they instead chose to rally around a vision of service and investment to reinvigorate the decaying environment. Through the one-to-one contact of their outreach programs, these volunteers achieved a firsthand awareness of the squalid living conditions of their neighbors.
A small group of church members began to explore the possibility of directly influencing the housing that was available. In 1973 they negotiated the purchase of two occupied apartment buildings totaling ninety apartments within a block of the Potter's House and formed a nonprofit housing corporation called Jubilee Housing, Inc. The purchase of these buildings was but the beginning of a herculean effort to physically revitalize these structures, an undertaking that would require tens of thousands of volunteer-hours. The challenge was not only to eliminate 947 housing code violations but also to win over the hearts of the residents - virtually all black and lower-income - who viewed the volunteers with mistrust and suspicion and assumed that they, being white and middle-income, were there only to make a profit and would eventually evict the poor.
Trust was built very slowly. Perhaps the greatest avenues for communication between the two groups were children's programs that the volunteers offered to the community. Time and again, a parent who appreciated the efforts the volunteers made with the children agreed to help with the renovation project. Gradually, this resident involvement in the cleanup, fix-up activity evolved into the formation of resident councils to address the concerns of the building occupants. Eventually, a resident was
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