Good Neighbor

Milwaukee agency revitalizes neighborhood

Townhomes at Carver Park Milwaukee

By Sean Ryan

For the Townhomes at Carver Park, Milwaukee's Housing Authority tore down a bleak concrete super block and replaced it with a real neighborhood, complete with sidewalks, trees and a sense of community.

"We had to demolish the existing public housing development that was built in 1964," said Rocky Marcoux, manager of housing modernization and development for the Milwaukee Housing Authority. "The government did not allow a lot of design leeway when these things were built. They were warehouses, essentially."

Using a federal HOPE VI grant, the agency tore down the old 200-dwelling high rise and surrounding single-family buildings and ripped up the pavement, which covered 90 percent of the block. The Housing Authority polled the area's residents, bounced design concepts off them and incorporated their comments into the redesigned neighborhood.

"It's really a program that has reinvented public housing by rebuilding the old developments and remaking them into mixed-income communities," Marcoux said. "The townhomes development has a series of new streets that connect it to the urban street pattern. It's weaved back into the tapestry of the neighborhood."

The rebuilt neighborhood's streetscapes and houses were modeled after Milwaukee communities built 60 years ago. The authority laid roads and sidewalks that connected to the city streets, planted trees to make 60 percent of the block green space and built 122 townhouses in 35 buildings available to a wide range of incomes.

New neighborhood

When the 18-month project was complete, 51 families who lived in the deteriorating super block moved into a greener, more diversified public-housing development. The neighborhood, which was already within walking distance of public schools, parks and transportation, was reconnected to the surrounding area.

Project Name: Townhomes at Carver Park Location: Milwaukee Submitting Company: Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee General Contractor/Construction Manager: Stevens Construction Corp., Madison, and Burkhart Construction Corp., Butler Architect: AG Architecture Inc., Wauwatosa Engineer: Larsen Engineers SC, Milwaukee Owner: Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee Project Cost: $22 million Start Date: August 2000 Completion Date: January 2002

"We essentially built a traditional neighborhood," Marcoux said. "Traditional neighborhoods have a mixture of incomes, and that's why they're successful. You have a much better neighborhood because you have a mixture of people with different experiences."

Although the neighborhood is adjacent to Carver Park, the authority built a smaller park within the development to contribute to street and pedestrian activity. The authority lit the sidewalks, but not the streets, to increase the focus on walking rather than driving in the neighborhood, Marcoux said.

To make the development accessible to people with disabilities, he said the authority built 101 of the 122 townhouses, with at least one ground-level entrance and an accessible first-floor bathroom, to be easy for people visiting; another 14 are fully handicap accessible.

"We really strove to make this as accessible and as visitable a development as we could," Marcoux said.

The Townhomes at Carver Park was the Housing Authority's third HOPE VI project. Construction for its fourth, at the Highland Park housing development, begins this summer after the authority won a $19 million federal grant for the redevelopment.

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