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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Her daughter has lived in Atherton East apartments, a community that Johnson compares to a war-torn Beirut and Chicago's notorious Cabrini-Green public housing, for more than a year now. It's a place where residents say they are scared to talk; a place that some say is plagued with violence, drugs and prostitution, a place that some still call the Terrace.
FLINT
Crime has a grip on Flint's Atherton East public housing complex
Updated Sep 3, 2015; Posted Sep 3, 2015
By Jiquanda Johnson | jjohns16@mlive.com
Editor's Note: This is the first of three posts about Flint's crime-ridden Atherton East public housing community.
FLINT, MI - The woman peered out of an upstairs window of her daughter's Atherton East townhouse while her grandson pressed his face against the mesh screen. She looks down.
"Can I help you?" Jonsene Johnson asked.
After introductions, she seemed relieved, as if she wanted to talk. Her conversation started with drugs and truancy. She ended with a 2014 slaying at the Flint public housing community.
"We heard the gunshots. I grabbed the kids, threw them in the basement and called 911. I watched the boy fall," she said as she pointed to an empty courtyard near the townhouse. "They did it right in front of us. My husband and I want my daughter to move."
Her daughter has lived in Atherton East apartments, a community that Johnson compares to a war-torn Beirut and Chicago's notorious Cabrini-Green public housing, for more than a year now. It's a place where residents say they are scared to talk; a place that some say is plagued with violence, drugs and prostitution, a place that some still call the Terrace.
Community officials and law enforcement leaders have been grappling with the issues at Atherton East and the surrounding community for years. They are trying to decide whether it is feasible to rebuild the development where it is, move it or if anything can be done at all.
It is five months since Johnson's first interview with The Flint Journal and she is pointing at something again. This time she points at a makeshift memorial shaped like a cross and decorated with what look like red silk flower petals.
"That wasn't there the last time you were here," she says to me. "This time it was different. They shot him in broad day light. He was just a baby. He was only 17."
She recalls details of a shooting that happened in May.
"I helped drag his body over here. I knew when they put in him in the car that it was over. I knew he was dead. I just knew he was going to die."
-- Jiquanda Johnson is a reporter at MLive Media Group/The Flint Journal. Contact her at jjohns16@mlive.com or 810-252-5575. Follow her on Twitter. |
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Sat Mar 30, 2019 3:34 pm |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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| The rivalry between the Terrace Boys and the Howard Boys over drug turf played out in the Rico case of the Howard Boys. There was threatening graffice in several south side places. |
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Sat Mar 30, 2019 3:41 pm |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Michigan Radio l
Flint's notorious Atherton East public housing will be torn down and replaced
By TRACY SAMILTON • JUL 6, 2018
Concept drawing for new housing development in Flint to replace Atherton East
CREDIT CITY OF FLINT
Flint has been awarded $30 million in federal money to tear down the aging, crumbling public housing complex known as Atherton East, and build a new, mixed-income development, in a different location.
Congressman Dan Kildee says Atherton East was part of a bad approach to public housing during the 1960s.
"Concentrating poverty in housing projects that are in the least desirable parts of a community, the cheapest land," he says. "Well, there's a reason the land (for Atherton East) was so cheap. It was isolated from the rest of the community and in this case was in a floodplain."
Residents had to deal with chronic flooding from the very beginning, and they were cut off from city services and shopping by I-475.
Current residents will be relocated to a number of different types of housing in South Flint closer to amenities. The relocations will be supported with $13 million in funding from the Michigan State Housing Development Authority.
The $30 million federal grant will also support job, literacy, and health care supports for current and future residents of Atherton East |
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Sat Mar 30, 2019 3:49 pm |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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In order to obtain tax credits for housing projects the developer must have at least 20% low income. For the Smith Village project that means about 12 apartment units. with the credits lasting ten years,what happens then?
Family members of homeowners in Smith Village allege that some homeowners do not want Atherton East tenants in Smith Village. |
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Sat Mar 30, 2019 4:00 pm |
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