Rehabilitation efforts are proceeding swiftly at public-housing complexes dotting this seaside city. At Sunnyland Homes, Juaneka McQueen is on a ladder installing ceiling fans in Louella McMillan’s apartment. Across town at Lakeview Gardens, James “Deacon” Jones and Billy Spells are landscaping the community green with high-powered mowers.
And, nearby, at Alan Apartments, Barbara Wyche is feeling relief at a crisis averted. She just pressed a repairman to plug a leaky roof before it rained.
John Roache, who lives in a first-floor apartment near Wyche’s office, says simply, “She’s more concerned about the tenants than the old managers were.”
The reason?
Wyche, like the woman on the ladder and the guys with the mowers, is a public-housing resident. There are now about 50 “resident staffers” in the Ft. Lauderdale projects who are earning solid wages, bettering their environs and learning about the connection between hard work and an improved life.
That is why the rehabilitation here goes well beyond dry wall and spackle to matters of spirit and character.
No fan of welfare
Engineering it all is a very angry, very clever man named William Lindsey, 49, executive director of the city’s public-housing authority. He used to carry a pistol to ward off drug dealers, still salts his speech with colorful truisms and still sparks controversy.
But these days, he gets cited by congressmen, business leaders and welfare recipients as an exemplar of what can be very right about government.
Not that Lindsey is a fan of the federal government or its welfare system.
“The system has a vested interest in keeping people dependent. Otherwise, how is it going to justify its existence?” he says. “The problem is with the government. The solution is with the people. They’re ready to learn, they’re ready to work, they’re ready to step up.”
Three years ago, the government offered Lindsey an avenue to exploit. Four agencies, led by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, quietly gave support to an obscure 1968 legislative provision that allows housing authorities to train and hire residents to work in housing projects.
The federal program that emerged, called Step-Up, provided Lindsey with a framework for his long-held notions about employing residents. Under the provision, he could hire residents to help with construction and maintenance work.
Participants in his program, designed to deal mostly with at-risk young males, also receive education and job training.
Residents united
Broadly interpreting the program’s spirit, Lindsey has unfurled an economic enterprise zone of sorts, with residents handling scores of jobs and launching small businesses with the housing authority’s help.
Some residents, like Wyche, help manage public housing sites, and others inspect apartments to make sure everything is in working order. Two residents have a landscaping business with a contract to groom the authority’s lawns. Some operate a transportation company with new vans.
A resident-elected group called the United Residents Council helps screen applicants for public housing and is setting up rules to govern residents’ activities.
Residents are close to setting up for-profit child-care centers. And many companies with contracts to work at the projects are now obligated to hire some residents of those sites. A roofer recently hired 11 residents for a temporary job.
One of Lindsey’s stars is the 37-year-old Wyche, who cares for 10 children, four of whom she took custody of two years ago when her sister died.
Since May, she has also managed the Alan Apartments, a 72-unit development of mainly elderly and disabled residents that is privately owned but managed by the housing authority, which subsidizes tenants’ rents.
Still a depressed place
Today, she supervises maintenance, signs leases, certifies tenants’ eligibility for subsidies and earns $600 a month–$100 more than the most she ever collected on welfare.
It “shows you have more going for you than sitting at home on welfare and having children,” she says.
This is still a depressed place. There are 6,000 or so people living in the authority’s 243 buildings, where average income for a family of four is $6,500.
When Lindsey testified last year at a U.S. House subcommittee hearing on welfare reform, he noted that a study of school-age residents of public housing found a 50 percent dropout rate in middle school; 70 percent don’t graduate from high school.
To be sure, no one is getting rich. The Step-Up program’s 25 apprentices are paid roughly minimum wage. The other 25 or so in Lindsey-launched jobs can make more. Some resident maintenance workers make $8 an hour. Apartment inspectors are paid $12 for each unit they examine.
The point, says Joseph Newman, Step-Up’s on-site director and the authority’s maintenance and management supervisor, is that “they can make a career from what they’re learning here.”
Melissa Rawls, 22, and three other women on welfare may lose their cash assistance because they are Step-Up apprentices and have begun to earn money.
Rawls, who has four children and has been on welfare for six years, says the risk is worth it: “I know how to drill, caulk, put in windows and use a power saw. I hope to get my own business started some day.”
With Lindsey in charge, that is possible. He recently hired instructors from a nearby university to teach business courses to residents, and put aside $75,000 in seed money to start microbusinesses based on what he calls “the Jones-Spells model.”
Gardeners grow
That refers to Jones and Spells, who started as free-lance gardeners and now own the J&S Landscaping Co. The $41,000-a-year contract J&S has with the housing authority “got me off food stamps,” says Jones, 55, whose diabetes made it difficult for him to work regular hours.
J&S soon hopes to have clients outside public housing.
“They wanted a business,” Lindsey says. “They did not want to be our employees.”
Same goes for a home-grown jitney service. Lindsey attracted contributions from two local banks and a foundation to buy two vans, which now are owned by the resident council.
The housing authority is increasingly taking on the look of a conglomerate. There is the separate Housing Finance Corp. of Ft. Lauderdale through which Lindsey issues tax-exempt bonds, some of which provide housing subsidies for needy people.
There also is the not-for-profit development company, Housing Enterprises of Ft. Lauderdale, a conduit for banks to provide money to buy dilapidated and abandoned homes.
Housing Enterprises also will receive $693,000 in block grants from Ft. Lauderdale over the next three years to buy other decrepit houses.
Step-Up crews will rehab the dilapidated homes. Rent from the restored properties will be funneled back into additional purchases.
Last May, the city added $1 million to a $3.2 million federal grant Lindsey received to build 50 affordable, single-family homes. The money puts the authority in the role of a developer that hires another company to build to its specifications.
Revenue from the sale of the homes will, again, go to Housing Enterprises so it can buy more dilapidated housing for rehab.
“It’s a win, win, win,” says Lindsey. “Now isn’t this what taxpayers want us to be doing with their money?”
That’s why several congressmen have recently cited Lindsey’s accomplishments and called him to Washington for testimony. Yet, the struggles Lindsey faced in launching his enterprises illustrate why there are so few such programs nationwide.
The secret ingredients
The secret ingredients–nearly everyone agrees–seem to be Lindsey’s vision, his respect for those in his charge, and his ability to fight or finesse the bureaucracy. His background is far different from that of the people he serves.
Lindsey is white, and 95 percent of the authority’s families are black. That isn’t an issue.
“He has a good heart and we’ve learned we can trust him,” says Cassandra Gordon, president of the residents’ council.
Both his parents were in the Army, and he grew up on military bases in Japan, Germany and the U.S. After graduating from college, Lindsey came to Ft. Lauderdale to help tenants in a dilapidated apartment complex.
He quickly got attention with such tactics as bringing a load of trash to City Hall when garbage pickup was slow. He became housing director in 1972.
“I saw him as a visionary,” said Robert P. Kelly, former housing authority board chairman.
Lindsey lived among the poor his first five years on the job and worked periodically with maintenance crews “so the people would see that I wasn’t above anybody else.”
Those antics and innovations with what he calls the “Oasis Technique”–identifying resident-leaders, with strong values, and then helping them create islands of stability within their neighborhoods. The effort brought him notice in Time, Esquire and Readers’ Digest magazines.
But that was before crack and gangs hit hard, before unemployment went through the roof and before the deep cuts in safety-net programs. Through the 1980s, he pressed on with his Oasis programs, but increasingly found that strong values could only take residents so far.
Then, a few summers ago, Gordon “came to us and said there were kids in high school who wanted to work,” recalls Newman, Step-Up’s director. The authority hired 15 to paint their own homes, and Newman says, “they’re free of graffiti today.”
By the time Washington approved Step-Up in late 1992, Lindsey was waiting to use it. He swiftly began negotiating with almost a dozen entities to put it in place.
Rude receptions
He sometimes got a rude reception. At a meeting with local representatives of organized labor, he recalls telling the group, “I want you guys to share economic opportunity with poor black people.”
It didn’t go over well. But he found ways to sell the deal. Labor got jobs for its journeymen-training the so-called apprentices, while at the same time cultivating potential new members.
The clincher was Lindsey’s promise that apprentices would do only rehab work, not new construction that would compete with the trades.
Another problem: The Ft. Lauderdale Step-Up, like 19 other such programs around the country, gets no federal money to train apprentices.
So Lindsey went to the heads of local businesses.
Building self-esteem
“He is training people to be active members of society; he’s building self-esteem,” says Anthony Nolan, president and chief executive officer of Williams, Hatfield & Stoner, an engineering firm, and until recently president of the Broward Workshop, an organization of chief executives who have become Lindsey allies.
The housing authority, with assets of $50 million and an $8.5 million operating budget, started receiving business donations two years ago for Step-Up. Home Depot extended a $10,000 line of credit for building materials. A foundation that remains anonymous gave $150,000.
Meanwhile, Step-Up crews, supervised by Anthony Moten and Michael Hall, no-nonsense men who double as father figures, began hanging new doors and windows, installing ceiling fans, planting shrubbery and pressure-cleaning roofs.
And they hung screens. Hall and other staffers developed a unique, thick-mesh window screen that solves a problem known to many public-housing residents: how to let in airflow and not intruders. The housing authority has a patent application ready to file.
The newly installed fans and security screens mean that 33-year-old Louella McMillan and her five children can breathe easier in the Florida heat.
“We can run the fans and open the windows at night,” she says.
Plans for the future
Meanwhile, Lindsey continues to scheme about ways to expand his nascent operation. Despite his successes, he can be moody and thin-skinned–and has feuded with developers, politicians, even the local Legal Aid Society.
“We used to have a really bad relationship,” says Sharon Diaz, who has fought Lindsey over evictions. “Now, we’re at a point where we respect each other. We’ll talk about it instead of racing to the courthouse.”
People are quick to forgive him because they say he has taken them so far and he may not have much time left.
In 1991, Lindsey underwent a kidney transplant and almost died. Doctors put him on life support for 35 days. Two months ago, complications sent him to the hospital.
Rep. E. Clay Shaw, a conservative Republican from Ft. Lauderdale, worries about him. Lindsey’s immune system is weakened, and Rep. Shaw fears, “Something’s going to get him.”
Of late, Lindsey has been lauded at meetings of public-housing directors, as he was a few months ago in Las Vegas. When he returned home, he went straight to the hospital but was back at the office a few days later.
“Where there’s a will there’s a way,” he says, in a rare moment of quiet. “People say that’s naive, but you can take that a long way. You can take that a long way.”
