IT TAKES A VILLAGE
Residents of run-down Roosevelt Village have
come together to rebuild, and finance, the community
By John C. Drake
Staff Writer
COLUMBIA—Sitting on the porch of her cramped, two bedroom apartment on the crest of a hill at the Roosevelt Village apartment complex, Valerie Sease envisions a more hopeful future for her five children.
She wants a new home at that very spot, a short walk from the Broad River. She hopes for youth programs for her kids and for a chance to have a small packing business of her own in the village.
Her children share the vision.
Her 5-year-old son, Jeremy, likes to draw pictures of houses. When, he asks his mother, will they have a house of their own?
This is no pipe dream. If all goes according to plan, the answer to her son’s question is “soon.”
Plans are taking shape to transform 24.5 acres off River Drive in North Columbia that have been home to the Roosevelt Village apartment complex since 1950.
Residents recently received new county funding for the effort, are looking to hire permanent staff and have detailed plans for the structures that will take the place of their run-down apartments.
A home of last resort, Roosevelt Village, with its $285-a-month rent, has been the place many people go when their options are limited.
But fed up with the crime and deteriorating conditions at their community, tenants joined forces to rebuild in 2003.
“We didn’t know what we were doing,” tenant Pearl Jacobs said of the initial group of residents who took charge. “We signed our names and said we are the board.”
The residents formed a community development corporation and received a $1 million bank loan to purchase the property in December 2003. It now is run by a board that includes residents.
Clemson University’s Office of Community and Economic Development is helping build the master plan and guiding residents through the community-development process.
Their fledgling effort also has been helped along by influential Columbia officials who have take a personal interest in transforming the community, including Richland County’s sheriff, Columbia’s city manager and Richland 1’s school board chairman.
Plans call for a 72-unit apartment complex, two apartment complexes for the elderly, a village center with commercial and community spaces and a complex of 48 duplexes. A sixth component would be 30 single-family homes or town homes.
A total of 238 units would be built in the community, to be called Village at River’s Edge. All would be available for low- and moderate-income tenants and homeowners.
None of the current residents, who occupy about 50 apartments, would have to be displaced.
“We’re trying to develop housing on that site to accommodate a variety of different individuals, families, and needs,” said Roger Jones, president of Companion Associates, a Charleston developer that has turned residents’ desires into viable plans.
The effort will require money to become a reality.
In addition to the $1 million loan from Regions Bank to purchase the property, the development corporation has received $130,000 in federal funding, allocated by Richland County’s office of community development, to help pay down the mortgage on the property.
Since it received the loan, the community development corporation has been using rental income to make monthly payments.
Jones has placed applications on the corporation’s behalf with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the State Housing Authority for the initial apartment buildings.
If that funding is approved, the community immediately would begin construction of the first two apartment complexes, without demolishing any of the current structures, Jones said.
Those current residents who are willing and able—they’ll have to meet credit requirements and not exceed certain income ceilings—will be able to move into the new apartments, paving the way for demolition of the 55-year-old Roosevelt Village apartments.
When residents bought the property from McQueen Smith in 2003, they began a new chapter for a neighborhood with a tumultuous past.
Built in 1950, the complex of 100, 650-square foot apartments was a step up from a community of sheds called Block Bottom, said Roosevelt Washington, 50, whose family moved to the area when he was 2.
Raw sewage flowed in the river around the sheds of Block Bottom, and residents lacked running water. “That was the worst place in the world,” Smith said.
Roosevelt Village was built to house the people displaced by the demolition of Block Bottom.
“It was a beautiful place,” Washington said of Roosevelt Village. “People took pride in it.”
Smith, 77, bought it out of foreclosure in 1956. He got SCE&G to run gas utilities to the complex in the 1960’s.
Accounts differ on when drugs overcame the community. But by the mid-1980’s, Roosevelt Village was a dangerous place with drug activity and all the crime, including robberies and shootings, that accompany it.
Columbia city manager Charles Austin, then police chief, worked with the Wesley United Methodist church, where he is an associate minister, to open a family center and church across the street from the neighborhood.
“That church was like a ray of light,” said Washington, now a leader at the Village of Hope church.
Helped by zealous neighborhood leaders like Jacobs, who stood toe-to-toe with drug dealers, and an increased law-enforcement presence, the level of crime has subsided and residents feel safer.
Since the transfer of the property, the development corporation has begun evicting tenants who trash the community and who consistently fail to pay rent on time.
They intentionally are leaving about half of the apartments vacant, to allow residents to switch units if their apartments have structural problems that would be too costly to repair.
Surrounding neighborhoods, including the Riverview Terrace neighborhood, where Richland 1 school board chairman Jasper Salmond lives, have begun to work more closely with Roosevelt Village.
Mary Rawls, a social worker at Midlands Technical College who has never lived at Roosevelt Village, is volunteer president of the community development corporation. The memory of a former student is driving her involvement.
Greg Corley, a Roosevelt Village resident, graduated from Midlands Tech with a social work degree in 1998, but died of cancer in 1999. “He said, ‘I want to use this as a way to improve my community,’” Rawls said. “He never had the chance.”
The food bank at the community is named for him, and Rawls said his spirit lives on in the efforts to improve his neighborhood. “If he couldn’t do it, we were going to do it for him.”