Done

TACOMA, WASHINGTON - "Done." It's one of those four-letter words most people like to hear. That's certainly true for residents of the Salishan neighborhood on the east side of Tacoma.

70 years ago the Salishan site was 188 acres of vacant land. With a World War raging, in 1942 the Federal government began to construct housing for workers in Tacoma's shipyards, working 24 hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week building the fleet that would prove critical to defeating the Axis powers. The project was completed and families started moving in less than a year later.

The housing was designed to be temporary. Once the war ended, the Tacoma Housing Authority took possession of the project to provide low-income public housing. Since then, it's been a source of affordable housing to thousands of families.

"We moved into Salishan and it was, like, all of a sudden we had three bedrooms and our own kitchen and the children could have their own dog. So, it was wonderful," resident Virginia Verrett explained in a documentary produced by 5th graders from Lister Elementary in Tacoma. In Salishan "my neighbor was my family," added former resident Darlene Hilyard.

"Salishan is special because it has given a lot of people the opportunity to get through difficult times in their lives," said Washington's Lieutenant Governor Brad Owen, a resident of Salishan in the early 1960's "Like my mother, who had four kids and was working her way up without a college education, It allowed her to support her family at the same time she was working her way up in her job. If it wasn't for that, I'm not sure what we have done as far as a place to live."

But housing built to be temporary can get pretty rough around the edges after 60 or 70 years. And that was true at Salishan. Leaky pipes. Bad wiring. No insulation. And walls so thin, recalled Lieutenant Governor Owens, that he put his fist through the wall "not because I was strong, but because the wall was weak."

Out-of-date housing might have been bearable. But the crime was not. By 1990 there was almost one violent crime a day in Salishan. "I remember it being a place where homicides, stabbings and assaults were of regular occurrence," police officer Lee Ramirez recently told Kathleen Merryman of The Tacoma News Tribune. "It was a scary place to live for those trying to live and raise their children. For me, it was a place to take caution when on patrol."

Aggressive action by the police, the Authority and residents finally was able to stem the tide and, by mid-decade, crime had been reduced. But the housing authority decided that something more fundamental needed to be done at Salishan - tear it down and start all over again.

The idea began to become reality when, in July of 2001, the Authority was one of just 18 in the country to win a HUD HOPE VI public housing revitalization grant. The $35 million effectively served as the "down payment" on the more than $225 million the Authority would raise to give birth to the New Salishan.

How "new"? Well, the Authority's plans called for tearing down not just a few but all 855 World War II units to be replaced, in seven phases, by some 1,250 state-of-the-art units. Of even greater significance, the new units would be a mix of rental and homeownership properties. And the rental units wouldn't just be public housing, but also units for the elderly as well as market-rate renters.

Already one of the most ethnically-diverse neighbors in the Northwest, Salsihan now also will be among the most economically-diverse, with renters and homeowners, with families receiving rental assistance and families receiving no subsidies at all. "It gives us a range of incomes, which we like," Authority executive director Michael Mirra told The News Tribune. "It gives a stability to a neighborhood that we like."

On December 13th, 2010 -10 years after winning the HUD grant and 67 years, seven months and 12 days after the first 10 families moved into the "old" Salishan, - the Authority completed the seventh of the seven phases in building the "new" Salishan. The affordable portion of the project was done, wrote Merryman in The News Tribune, "ahead of time, under budget and more environmentally friendly than anyone dared hope."

And that's the kind of "done" people really like to hear. "It was a great day in the history of Tacoma," said HUD Northwest Regional Administrator Mary McBride, "a great day for HUD and, most of all, a great day for those who have the privilege to call Salishan home. Not so long ago, people talked about boarding up Salishan. Now people are talking about moving there. What a great story."

Read Kathleen Merryman's full account in The Tacoma News Tribune (www.tacomahousing.org/Salishan/salishan.html).

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