Housing authority makes plans to redevelop Cleveland Avenue neighborhoods

For years, the neighborhoods around Cleveland Avenue have been blighted by abandoned buildings, vacant lots and crime. The street is dotted with public housing, including two large projects, Cleveland Avenue Homes and Sunrise Towers, at the southern end of the street, near Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.

The proliferation of public housing there could be part of the problem, said Larry Woods, chief executive officer of the Housing Authority of Winston-Salem.

Concentrating low-income people in one area is an outdated model for public housing that can cause a neighborhood to decline, he said.

"We believe that the need for income-based communities is over with, that we really need to figure out a way to integrate individuals of different income means within a wider community," Woods said. "What we're looking for is for (the Cleveland Avenue neighborhood) to become a distinct community of its own with its own personality that will attract a wide range of families and individuals who will become stakeholders."

To achieve that, the housing authority is working on a master plan for those neighborhoods to spread public-housing residents out and to draw businesses to the area.

"What we're looking to do is not just to rebuild our public housing site, but actually begin to stimulate private investment and rebuild an entire community," Woods said.

The plan, called the Cleveland Area Master Plan, is ambitious, officials say.

It covers about 130 acres, and includes the neighborhoods between Highland and Cleveland avenues from Martin Luther King Jr. Drive to 14th Street and the school system's new campus by Kennedy Learning Center.

It calls for traffic circles and landscaping, new parks and public art, an expanded library and retail shops. It also calls for garden apartment complexes, which would be home to people who receive public-housing assistance, and to those who would pay fair-market prices, Woods said.

The housing authority paid about $250,000 to Washington, D.C.-based architects Wiencek and Associates to create a plan for the neighborhoods.

Katrina Redmon, chief financial officer for the housing authority, said the project would likely take 15 to 20 years to finish. The Housing Authority's board approved the plan last summer; the Winston-Salem City Council endorsed the plan last month.

Redmon said the Cleveland Area Master Plan represents a shift in how the housing authority has operated.

"We must have private investment and we must make a return on our investment so we can fund the next project," she said. "Everything cannot be done with a government dollar."

The first part of the project, likely to start this June, will start construction on new apartments at Johnson Square at the corner of Cleveland Avenue and 10th Street. The authority has demolished the complex and plans to replace it with new garden-style apartments.

It is the second overhaul that the housing authority has planned for the complex. In 2009, the housing authority held a groundbreaking there for what was to be a 13-month project to rebuild the apartments from the inside out.

That rebuilding, though, never happened.

Woods said construction crews discovered "major structural problems" with the Johnson Square complex.

"For us to try and repair them would have been just as expensive as building brand new, and we wouldn't have gotten the big bang out of it," Woods said. "So we opted to demolish the entire property, hire an architect, and start from scratch."

Woods said the housing authority hopes to work with private investors or other public institutions to overhaul the neighborhood. And, to some extent, that is already happening.

The Winston-Salem/Forsyth County school district has built a Career Center at East 11th Street and Highland Court, near Kennedy Learning Center. Businesses and community development corporations have opened shops along Martin Luther King Jr. Drive — a CVS, and a business incubator.

Marva Reid, a community activist in the neighborhood, said she thinks the plan is a good one, though she said most residents in the neighborhood do not know about it.

Reid said she worried that public-housing residents could end up homeless as the housing authority moves them from their apartments near Cleveland Avenue.

"We do have to change," Reid said. "It's nothing but drug-infested over there."