Roy Johnson figures that 3,000 people have lived at Skyline Crest, the Vancouver Housing Authority’s public housing neighborhood in central Vancouver, since it opened in 1963.
The place has been almost miraculously well-maintained since then, according to Johnson, the VHA’s executive director. But at age 51, it’s more than ready for some major renovations and upgrades.
“It’s very functional. It’s also very institutional,” Johnson said while leading a recent tour of a four-bedroom unit, pointing out tile flooring that looks like it belongs in a cafeteria.
VHA is inching closer to a long-envisioned $28 million renewal project for Skyline Crest, a 20-acre development that includes 150 units in 58 standalone duplexes and fourplexes as well as a central community building, the Rise & Stars Community Center, that’s grown over many years and additions into a confusing maze of hallways and offices.
According to the plan, that building will be replaced with a new three-story, 36,500-square-foot residential block. After the entire renewal project is done, Skyline Crest will include 163 units housing 471 residents, Johnson said.
VHA has been hosting tours for elected officials who could help with the bottom line, as well as sister nonprofit agency leaders who are interested in checking out plans to house additional social, educational and employment services here.
For one thing, a new Boys & Girls Club is headed for the property. The 13,900-square-foot facility will be aimed at kids who live at Skyline Crest and attend Marshall, Harney and King elementary schools, but will be open to others too. It’ll be a place where children can get homework help as well as play games and sports, enjoy snacks and generally stay positive and supervised after school. And, it’ll be open until 7 p.m., giving parents greater flexibility when it comes to their own work and schooling.
“Students in these schools have some of the highest rates of poverty and diversity” in the area, according to executive director Elisa Menashe of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Southwest Washington. “Forty percent of the households in this locale are headed by a single parent. The per capita income is about $21,000.”
The Boys & Girls Club will share a wall with the new, 8,500-square-foot Bridgeview Employment and Education Resource Center, which will help Skyline Crest residents build futures beyond subsidized housing. Bridgeview’s classes and offices will offer case management and peer support groups, child care, healthy cooking and healthy living classes — and, crucially, job training and other services offered by community partners who come in to use the space.
These new facilities will be located near the Andresen Road entrance to the neighborhood in order to cut down on traffic driving through, said Jan Wichert, the executive director of Bridgeview Housing. The agency is a VHA subsidiary that works to empower residents with early education, job training, health and fitness and other forward momentum in life.
‘Let’s get going’
“We are providing stable housing, but that shouldn’t be the end,” Wichert said. “We’re looking to change the culture in housing. The culture we’re looking for is, your instability is gone, so hooray. Now let’s get going.”
Going where? The best-case scenario is accelerated education and earning leading to a happy exit from subsidized housing. But it could also mean a part-time, minimum-wage job to be proud of. For someone who’s been poor and struggling for years, Wichert said, a steady part-time job at a fast-food joint “is a great goal” — but it probably won’t be a lift out of VHA housing. “We want them to be working, but we know that will never be a livable wage,” Johnson said.
Still, these partner agencies are determined to make sure the children are receiving all the educational advantages they can get — to spring them from a cycle of poverty that generally keeps poor children in exactly the same situation their parents were in, Wichert said.
“If stable housing means your kids can go to school and look forward to something better, we’re breaking the cycle,” Wichert said. “We really want to focus on the kids.”
Anna Mayclin, the property manager at Skyline Crest, said she knows one tenant who has been there 34 years. It’s not unusual for some families to stay for “generations,” she said.
The Bridgeview Center and the Boys & Girls Club both fit with VHA’s official designation of Skyline Crest as a “Campus of Learners,” Wichert said, where parents are contractually bound — as part of their annual lease — to be involved in and supportive of their children’s education, and to set specific goals for it each year.
“I appreciate the comprehensive approach,” said Vancouver Mayor Tim Leavitt, who took a recent tour. “It’s not just, ‘Here’s some housing, now go do what you can.’ Seems to me that’s a program that could be applied other places, too.”
People who don’t live at Skyline Crest will also be welcome at Bridgeview and the Boys & Girls Club, Wichert said. It’s important that Skyline not be an isolated community, she said.
Skyline Crest residents make 30 percent or below the area median income, and pay 30 percent of their income in rent. The typical wait time for a unit is years long, Mayclin said, and the official wait list is often closed. “You have to wait to get put onto the wait list,” she said.
Ambitious
New exterior siding with rain screens and diverse colors, new exterior and interior doors, new interior wood trim for doors and windows, new vinyl floors with a residential wood look, new plywood pantry shelving and new bathroom countertops with built-in sinks are all planned for Skyline Crest’s residential units.
And then there’s the new triple-decker Caples Terrace, a new residential building with 25 units. It will stand where the Rise & Stars Community Center sits now and it will offer highly sought single-bedroom and studio apartments for individuals as well as some two-bedroom units.
That’s in keeping with demand, Johnson said; there aren’t enough solo options for a burgeoning population of young adults who are homeless or aging out of foster care with no place to go. Caples Terrace also will include a small maintenance warehouse for the community.
Phased renovations are planned so that nobody is displaced beyond having to shift temporarily from one on-site unit to another, Johnson said. Given recent news about upgrades displacing families at the low-income Courtyard Village Apartments in Rose Village, Vancouver Councilwoman Anne McEnerny-Ogle said she was particularly pleased to hear that “nobody will be kicked out without a net.”
It’s an ambitious and expensive plan overall, noted Mike Wilson, a senior associate with the consulting firm Wesby Associates, and there’s more asking for money to be done. Here’s where everything stands now:
• Residential renovations will cost $16 million; funding includes $8.3 million in sales of state-authorized low-income housing tax credits, $5.7 million in bond sales, $1.5 million from VHA, and a deferred developer fee of $500,000.
• Boys & Girls Club will cost $4.5 million; VHA has pledged $1.5 million and the BGC organization has raised most of the rest, according to Menashe.
• Bridgeview Education and Employment Resource Center is estimated at $3.5 million; funding includes $1 million from VHA, a $1.6 million capital campaign and a 2015 legislative request of $875,000.
• Caples Terrace, the new residential building, is estimated at $6 million; $4.9 million will be sales of low-income housing tax credits and $1.1 million comes from VHA.
Wilson said the upcoming legislative session is sure to be difficult — but some sort of capital budget will emerge from it, he said, and “we need to make sure this project is on it.”
