Photo by Jay Paul
With change on the horizon for Gilpin Court, Richmond’s largest public housing community, City Council is seeking to assert its authority on the matter.
Steven Nesmith, chief of the city’s housing authority, says it must transfer the 781-unit community to its own nonprofit entity to finance the $466 million project. It’s led to concerns that public housing could be privatized.
Nesmith says the project will have a mix of income-based public housing, market-rate housing and low-cost “workforce” housing. Other details remain murky with no definitive rebuilding plans in place yet. But the Richmond Redevelopment & Housing Authority earlier this year entered a “master development agreement” with New Orleans-based developer HRI Communities.
That’s where critics say the housing authority allegedly runs afoul of state law.
Ahead of its summer recess, City Council unanimously passed an expedited resolution that casts the agreement as illegal without the council’s consent.
Third District Councilwoman Kenya Gibson, the patron of the resolution, said her constituents who live in Gilpin are worried that the housing authority is neglecting their concerns about being displaced by the redevelopment project.
“The law is very clear that before the RRHA has the authority to be able to go into an agreement … our body needed to vote in support of that, and that did not happen,” Gibson said at the council meeting. “I’m looking to see us move forward with enforcing the laws that exist and providing policy and a framework to ensure that we’re doing right by these residents moving forward.”
Nesmith told Richmond magazine in August that he disagrees with the notion that state law requires council approval for the development agreement, adding that lawyers and representatives from the housing authority and city would be meeting to discuss the matter.
“We believe that there’s a fundamental misreading of the [state] code, and we’re going to meet to get clarity on it,” he says. “When we do come with a plan, we’ll be working in partnership with the City Council.”
Several council members say they understand the need to fix up Gilpin Court, as the more-than-80-year-old neighborhood has become synonymous with concentrated poverty and blight. Still, the council’s involvement creates a potential obstacle for Nesmith after the RRHA Board of Commissioners in April narrowly rejected his plan to transfer Gilpin Court to the nonprofit Richmond Development Corporation.
City officials earlier this summer also raised concerns about media reports that RRHA paid Gilpin residents to support the land transfer at a council meeting in June. When asked about it, Nesmith says the housing authority should have taken a different course to build support for the project.
With another RRHA vote on the land transfer pushed to this fall, Nesmith says the housing authority will start a “listening and learning campaign” with Gilpin residents and the broader community to form consensus around a redevelopment plan.
To push the project through, Nesmith will need to win the trust of public housing residents, activists and city leaders who say it’s been broken for several years.
In September, Mayor Danny Avula refused to endorse RRHA plans until several conditions were met, many of which would bring the project under closer City Council and public scrutiny. He also called for RRHA to withdraw the RDC transfer plans “until major concerns about RDC’s governance structure are addressed.”
“Unfortunately, for too many Richmonders, and especially Gilpin residents,” Avula said in a statement, “there is not clarity about the goals of redevelopment, nor is there understanding about the specific action steps required to achieve success. Our city’s families deserve better.”
