Before CO evacuations, Durham planned to redevelop McDougald Terrace. What happened?
In a city meeting with a Durham nonprofit that fights poverty and social injustice in February, 2015, McDougald Terrace came up in conversation.
“McDougald Terrace is also awaiting demolition,” reads the city’s notes for the meeting with Reinvestment Partners.
Later that month, the Durham Housing Authority and the Durham City Council held a joint meeting. The authority’s then executive director, Dallas Parks, said in a presentation: “Much of DHA’s housing stock is well past its expected useful life. McDougald Terrace is now 61 years old.”
Five years later the property is still standing, with its original gas appliances emitting dangerous carbon monoxide and its residents evacuated.
About 270 McDougald Terrace families are staying at hotels because of the gas leaks. They don’t know when they’ll get to go home.
Plan Called for Demolition
In 2012, the Durham Housing Authority received a Choice Neighborhoods Initiative planning grant from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. The $300,000 grant was awarded to help plan the redevelopment of McDougald Terrace and the surrounding Southeast Central area.
The grant is listed in Durham’s 2015-2019 Five Year Consolidated Plan.
Once finished with the planning initiative, Durham submitted a Transformation Plan to HUD in October 2014. The estimated cost for redevelopment of Southeast Central Durham, including all 360 units at McDougald Terrace, was over $163 million. Most of this money was expected to come from equity and debt financing, but over $5 million was expected to come from subsidies and grants.
In the proposed transformation plan timeline, McDougald Terrace was scheduled as the first redevelopment in the area from 2020-2025.
A HUD document from 2015 said DHA would be applying for federal, state and local funding to start the revitalization project, which involved demolition of the property.
On Tuesday, Peter Skillern, the executive director of Reinvestment Partners, said he knew Durham applied for multiple federal grants from HUD to redevelop properties but the federal department “only give(s) out a handful every year.”The maintenance needs for McDougald Terrace listed in the Durham 2015-2019 Five Year Plan were already much higher than all other DHA properties.
The 360-unit complex was built in 1953, the same year that President Dwight Eisenhower took the oath of office. Many other DHA properties like Oldham Towers and Cornwallis road would not be constructed for another decade.
Some of the needs listed for McDougald Terrace in 2015 were water heater replacement; heating, ventilation and air conditioning renovations; dryer outlets and vents. The cost was estimated at almost $6 million. The second most costly property, Oxford Manor, needed $3.6 million in repairs.
But the revitalization project hasn’t happened and according to HUD physical inspection scores, the state of the property has gotten worse since.
A 2016 inspection gave the public housing complex a score of 63 — a passing score.
In 2019, its score had dropped to a 31.
On the day the latter inspection finished in March 2019, current housing authority CEO Anthony Scott was testifying to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations, asking for more funding for HUD projects.
When asked last week if he could explain why the plans fell through, Scott said: “I simply can’t, I don’t have a response for you at all. I wasn’t here in 2015 but I’ll have to look and see.”
Jillian Johnson, mayor pro tempore on the Durham City Council, said she wasn’t aware of plans under the previous DHA administration but that Scott was brought in to bring change to the agency.
Johnson, the city’s liaison to the DHA board since 2018, said that change included finishing renovation projects that were “languishing away” and converting all of DHA’s properties to the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) program so DHA could begin to redevelop them.
Rental Assistance Demonstration
In DHA’s 2020 annual plan, the agency says McDougald Terrace will be developed under RAD, a HUD program authorized in 2012 to help meet the funding needs of public housing across the country with severe maintenance backlogs. The program allows housing authorities to convert properties into mixed-income communities and to finance redevelopment through private investors.
The plan says DHA “plans to partner with a developer to redevelop” McDougald Terrace. Demolition was approved by HUD in May 2019, but the process will take much longer, Scott said Tuesday.
The plan also says DHA may apply for another Choice Neighborhoods Initiative planning grant for McDougald Terrace, Cornwallis Road and Oxford Manor, five years after the city finished the original planning grant.
Under RAD, some units at a modernized McDougald Terrace would be market rate and others would be converted to the Housing Choice Voucher program, formally known as Section 8. The voucher program helps low-income people pay rent on the private market.
DHA says the conversion to RAD would require moving tenants to comparable units either onsite or at other public housing units during renovations. It also says all residents would be eligible to return after redevelopment, most likely at the same or similar rent.
DHA plans to redevelop all of its sites under RAD. In 2015, Parks said this could take up to 10 years.
Scott brought up these plans Saturday, saying housing like McDougald Terrace “just isn’t working.”
“This obviously is our oldest site and clearly it is outdated in terms of what is considered a modern standard of living today,” he said. “So we want to look to upgrade all of our properties to mixed-income apartments.”
Johnson said there’s no current timeline for a redevelopment of McDougald Terrace.
This story was originally published January 14, 2020 at 4:06 PM with the headline "Before CO evacuations, Durham planned to redevelop McDougald Terrace. What happened?."
