Boarded site to get housing by 2007

By Timothy Pratt (contact)

Tuesday, March 29, 2005 | 10:57 a.m.

Fifty-four Las Vegas Housing Authority apartments that have been boarded up for nearly three years will be demolished to make way for new apartments that could be ready by 2007.

If the new apartments go ahead as planned, it would be the first public housing for low-income families built by the housing authority since 1985, said Richard Martinez, the agency's deputy executive director.

The 60 apartments that the authority hopes to build at 3901 E. Charleston Blvd. would cost about $13 million and would be available to people on the authority's waiting lists, Martinez said. Those lists currently include 2,680 people, he said.

The new apartments would feature water and energy conservation measures in their designs, a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development press release noted. The housing would also be built in consultation with Metro Police in order to help reduce crime and would be accessible to the handicapped.

While the news was greeted as positive, experts pointed to it as an example of why public housing projects may be a small piece of the solution for what many see as one of the Las Vegas Valley's most pressing problems: the lack of affordable housing.

"There aren't the resources or turnaround times we need to deal with the problem (with the housing authority)," said Sue Allen, president of the South West Action Network and a member of the Clark County Growth Task Force. The task force, which has been meeting for a year, recently named affordable housing as the most important growth issue facing the valley.

The apartments in the Ernie Cragin development were closed down in July 2002 due to problems inside the apartments that included asbestos, lead paint and mold, and others outside the apartments such as a lack of entrances for the handicapped, according to Amparo Gamazo, project manager for the modernization and development department of the housing authority.

Prior to that, the housing authority had spent several years trying to determine the seriousness of the various problems plaguing the development, which was built in 1971. Records obtained by the Sun show that 18 Ernie Cragin apartments were tested for mold beginning in September of 2000. Ten had mold. It is unclear how much the tests cost.

When the authority decided that tenants should be relocated, most were given federal-funding Section 8 vouchers for new housing, Gamazo said.

After the authority determined that problems at Ernie Cragin were serious enough to close down the apartments, it took at least two more years to decide that fixing the problems would cost more than tearing the apartments down.

Martinez said the housing authority applied to HUD in October 2004 for permission to demolish the apartments.

The application was approved in February. Demolition is scheduled to begin in May and could take until September, at a price of $566,000, a HUD spokesman said. Construction on the new apartments is expected to start in February 2006, to be completed in February 2007.

Michael Liu, a HUD assistant secretary who was scheduled to announce the plans regarding Ernie Cragin this morning, said, "This step will directly help Las Vegas as it meets the challenge of affordable housing."

Paula Haynes-Green, the valley's regional homeless services coordinator, said that because "homelessness and the lack of affordable housing are intricately linked," having new affordable housing in the pipeline was good news.

But like Allen, Haynes-Green said the time that the whole process took -- and the number of apartments versus the need -- are worth examining.

"I wish this had been able to move more quickly, and we're still grossly lacking in affordable housing," Haynes-Green said.

Haynes-Green noted that the federal government decided decades ago to stop developing such housing, and locally "the private sector didn't pick up the slack."

"I think this highlights the need for the government to go back and analyze and redefine what its goal is in providing affordable housing."

Allen, the growth task force member, said her group's consensus, likewise, is that "we have to initiate and handle this issue locally instead of waiting for the federal government to come in and save the day."