© 2024 254 North Front Street, Suite 300, Wilmington, NC 28401 | 910.343.1640
News Classical 91.3 Wilmington 92.7 Wilmington 96.7 Southport
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
CAPE FEAR MEMORIAL BRIDGE CLOSURE: UPDATES, RESOURCES, AND CONTEXT

WHA Executive Director: Residents will be back home "more than likely by the end of Spring"

Tyrone Garrett, executive director of the District of Columbia Housing Authority, says some residents are living in homes that are "decaying around them."
Amr Alfiky
/
NPR
Tyrone Garrett, currently executive director of the Wilmington Housing Authority, shown here in an NPR file photo.

The head of Wilmington Housing Authority sees the end of the mold crisis on the horizon, and hopes for growth and development for the authority in the future.

Kelly Kenoyer: So Ben, we asked to interview WHA’s executive director, Tyrone Garrett, a few weeks ago. And we finally got to see him this week.

Ben Schachtman: It was definitely an interesting conversation, and I came away understanding quite a bit more about the status of the mold crisis.

KK: So where are we with the crisis at this point?

BS: They’re making steady progress — they’re down to 57 displaced families, and they’re hoping to have more than 40 apartments in working order by the end of next month.

KK: We also got an update that 18 of the displaced families are in corporate apartments, which are a lot more comfortable — they have kitchens and they’re designed for extended stays. That means 38 families are in hotels, with another family staying with relatives.

BS: WHA says the hope is that everyone will be back in a home or an apartment by the end of spring. But, it’s complicated. Here’s Tyrone Garrett:

Tyrone Garrett: “For full transparency, there may be individuals [who are in] for two moves. And the two moves are because we have residents that are supposed to go back to Woodbridge. And we haven't started the Woodbridge units yet because the NCORR money hasn't been released.”

Note: Garrett is referring to the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency (NCORR), which was created in wake of Hurricane Florence to lead the state's recovery efforts. NCORR is overseeing a rehabilitation project at Woodbridge, where earlier this month 18 units were still offline due to mold.

KK: But he missed his goal of getting all the residents back in their homes by the end of the year. I know a lot of residents were devastated to not get into a permanent home before the holidays, especially since that was promised to them.

BS:  We made that point to Garrett, but he stood by his ambitious goal. Here's what he told county commissioners in early January, seeming to dismiss negative news coverage of missing that goal.

Tyrone Garrett: "Now there's one thing that I do want to say, and it saw it in one of the tabloids, I believe it was that we had an unattainable goal, well, what leader would stand before you and not reach for the stars, right? So if you were to ask me again, 'could we obtain the goal of having all the units and all the families returned before the end of the year?' I still would say yes, because that's what we were trying to do."

KK: We’ll talk about some of the other goals he set a bit later, and we’ll keep track of whether WHA meets them in the coming years. But I also want to talk about how this happened, and how to prevent this kind of mold crisis in the future.

BS: Part of the reason for the crisis was that staffing issues and Covid disrupted WHA’s inspections for mold. We asked how that would be handled going forward, he didn’t have a great answer for existing buildings. They have limited resources.

Tyrone Garrett: “That's a hard one. The reason being is because we're not doing that major capital improvement, right, we don't have the money to do the major capital improvement, the major improvement would be redevelopment.”

KK: Redevelopment, huh? Like the plans for Hillcrest?

BS: Yep, and they’re looking at doing other major projects for Solomon Towers and Houston Moore. Solomon Tower will get more of a rehabilitation, but Houston Moore will probably be redeveloped. Those ones are probably several years out, but he said Hillcrest is coming up on the horizon now.

KK: He said they’d have shovels in the ground in 18 months.

BS: And they’re looking at a range of options for it, now that they have a development partner. They might do a public-private partnership, or use low-income housing tax credits. He has a lot of plans on how to leverage those new units to keep the building financially solvent.

KK: And big for our housing crisis- the new construction would be 500 to 700 units. That’s more than double the current number at Hillcrest, and would probably take a big chunk out of WHA’s 1,000-person waiting list.

BS: What about the people living there now?

KK: That’s the hardest thing. They have a right to return, but finding housing for them in the meantime during construction is a major challenge in a town with a housing shortage. They might have to rely on housing choice vouchers, but it is hard to find rentals for those kinds of residents. Garrett says they’re considering alternatives.

Tyrone Garrett: “Is there a possibility on the housing authority side, to provide a build-first location, or create a build-first scenario that gets units built first, without having to require residents to move? That does a lot for the psyche.”

BS: So off-site, or maybe going more vertical on one portion of the Hillcrest property?

KK: I think they’re in early days and aren’t sure yet. But hopefully we’ll learn more in the coming months. Including the exact shape of the project, which might be mixed-income, or mixed-use with a business like a bank on the ground floor.

BS: It’ll be interesting to see how it shakes out. Garrett told us the mold crisis really took up all of WHA’s efforts for a while, but now they’re turning to other important issues. Those buildings are around 80 years old, so rebuilding them in a newer and better form really seems like a must. And it sounds like the rest of their aging portfolio could see similar redevelopment under Garrett’s leadership.

KK: That’s right, and we’ll keep an eye on Hillcrest to get a sense of how those other projects will go. Thanks for coming in, Ben.

BS: Thanks Kelly.

Kelly Kenoyer is an Oregonian transplant on the East Coast. She attended University of Oregon’s School of Journalism as an undergraduate, and later received a Master’s in Journalism from University of Missouri- Columbia. Contact her on Twitter @Kelly_Kenoyer or by email: KKenoyer@whqr.org.
Ben Schachtman is a journalist and editor with a focus on local government accountability. He began reporting for Port City Daily in the Wilmington area in 2016 and took over as managing editor there in 2018. He’s a graduate of Rutgers College and later received his MA from NYU and his PhD from SUNY-Stony Brook, both in English Literature.