The HOPE VI Project in Utica, which provided $11.5 million in federal funds to restructure public housing for low-income residents, will end this September. Stephanie Wong '10 (Amherst, Mass.) is working this summer as an assistant with Hamilton's program evaluation of the project, which is supervised by Judith Owens-Manley, associate director for community research at the Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center. Wong received a Community-Based Research Fellowship from the Levitt Center to work with Owens-Manley in the final stage of evaluating the program, assembling, organizing and presenting the materials Hamilton has collected over HOPE VI's five-year tenure in the area.
The HOPE VI Project was created by Congress in 1992 as a competitive grant program, under which local public housing authorities apply to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for funding to redevelop or demolish distressed public housing areas. In Utica, the federal grant, supplemented by municipal funds, was used to tear down the Washington Courts housing complex, and rebuild and renovate scattered site housing in a mixed-income neighborhood in the Cornhill area.
As this is the last year of the HOPE VI project in Utica, Wong will create a Web site detailing the federal program in general and the Utica's experience in particular. She is also collecting and editing five years' worth of interviews with residents and the Utica Municipal Housing Authority and compiling them into DVDs. Finally, she will pursue her own supplemental research on the origins of public housing, nationally and in Utica. For this, she says, she will use the Utica Public Library as well as Hamilton's Burke Library and the Oneida County Historical Society.
Wong finds the interviews to be particularly interesting, showing the very different views that the Housing Authority and the residents have on the ultimate success of the program. The Housing Authority, she says, feels optimistic that the HOPE VI project has succeeded, allowing residents to leave an apartment-style housing project and move to the new Cornhill redevelopment, which renovated and rebuilt individual homes in an already established community. "It was intended to give residents a chance at home ownership, which is part of the American dream," she says. However, she has found that most of the people who moved into the renovated homes did not move from Washington Courts, whose residents mainly chose to stay in apartment-style housing. The Washington Courts residents, she says, feel that they were merely displaced and scattered from their old, strong community. "Most chose not to go to the HOPE VI development," Wong says. "They chose to remain in apartments, but they miss the Washington Courts community."
In addition to documenting the progress of the Hope VI program in Utica, Wong hopes that her project will provide a more accessible format for the information, as well as providing a way for the former Washington Courts residents to interact. She says that for her, this emphasizes how the College can play an important role to benefit the community.
A psychology major at Hamilton, Wong helps on the staff of the satire paper "The Duel Observer," and also works on layout for "The Green Apple," the newly-reestablished alternative student newspaper. After college, she hopes to work for a non-profit concerned with social and corporate responsibility.
-- by Laura Bramley
The HOPE VI Project was created by Congress in 1992 as a competitive grant program, under which local public housing authorities apply to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for funding to redevelop or demolish distressed public housing areas. In Utica, the federal grant, supplemented by municipal funds, was used to tear down the Washington Courts housing complex, and rebuild and renovate scattered site housing in a mixed-income neighborhood in the Cornhill area.
As this is the last year of the HOPE VI project in Utica, Wong will create a Web site detailing the federal program in general and the Utica's experience in particular. She is also collecting and editing five years' worth of interviews with residents and the Utica Municipal Housing Authority and compiling them into DVDs. Finally, she will pursue her own supplemental research on the origins of public housing, nationally and in Utica. For this, she says, she will use the Utica Public Library as well as Hamilton's Burke Library and the Oneida County Historical Society.
Wong finds the interviews to be particularly interesting, showing the very different views that the Housing Authority and the residents have on the ultimate success of the program. The Housing Authority, she says, feels optimistic that the HOPE VI project has succeeded, allowing residents to leave an apartment-style housing project and move to the new Cornhill redevelopment, which renovated and rebuilt individual homes in an already established community. "It was intended to give residents a chance at home ownership, which is part of the American dream," she says. However, she has found that most of the people who moved into the renovated homes did not move from Washington Courts, whose residents mainly chose to stay in apartment-style housing. The Washington Courts residents, she says, feel that they were merely displaced and scattered from their old, strong community. "Most chose not to go to the HOPE VI development," Wong says. "They chose to remain in apartments, but they miss the Washington Courts community."
In addition to documenting the progress of the Hope VI program in Utica, Wong hopes that her project will provide a more accessible format for the information, as well as providing a way for the former Washington Courts residents to interact. She says that for her, this emphasizes how the College can play an important role to benefit the community.
A psychology major at Hamilton, Wong helps on the staff of the satire paper "The Duel Observer," and also works on layout for "The Green Apple," the newly-reestablished alternative student newspaper. After college, she hopes to work for a non-profit concerned with social and corporate responsibility.
-- by Laura Bramley
