participants from the previous three days. Based on these scenarios, the city of Madison will begin to develop goals and a more specific plan that will eventually turn into a request for proposals that will be released in early 2007 to redevelop the site. As is the case with all large scale governmental projects, there will be winners and losers created by this governmental  action. Most of those winners and losers will be residents and landlords from the Allied Drive area. And one of the most important factors that will determine who those winners and losers are will be the impact of the plans on the affordability of future Allied Drive housing units. In this two-part series, The Capital City Hues will examine the issues surrounding affordability and redevelopment through the eyes of six people involved in the process or who have influence over the final outcome. Those individuals are Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz, Alderperson Ken Golden, Planning Director Mark Olinger, Community Activist Alice Howard, Madison Police Chief Noble Wray, and landlord Nick Dorneanu. In the first part of this series, we'll look at the history of Allied Drive, the people who live there, and some of the present day factors driving the redevelopment. In the second part, we'll examine the factors that will influence affordability during the redevelopment process.
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      Alderperson Ken Golden's 10th district sprawls all the way from Camp Randall in the east to Allied Drive on the west. Golden also grew up in the area and remembers when Allied Drive was first built.  "These were built for graduate housing," Golden said. "I delivered newspapers here in 1969 for the Milwaukee Journal in my last summer job before I was supposed to leave Madison. And it was all  graduate students there. It's a very different neighborhood now."
      And like so many neighborhoods -- Sommerset, now Parker Place; Broadway-Simpson, now Lake Point-Broadway -- it was at its birth that Allied Drive was almost destined to become a problem neighborhood 30-40 years later. "What has always struck me about  those buildings is this was a neighborhood that was built, but never conceived of as a neighborhood," said Mark Olinger, the director of Madison's planning department. "It was conceived of as a series of apartment buildings. You hear stories that it was originally built for graduate students from the UW who wanted to move here to get away from the undergrad, downtown party atmosphere. And then they would transfer from there to a job or a house. So if you look at how those buildings are placed and how that neighborhood is built or if you look at the green space  --the green space is all over somewhere else -- it wasn't conceived as a neighborhood. It was conceived as a place where people would come, live a year or two, get themselves in order, and move out. It was transitional housing for the upwardly mobile."
      "But as that market changed, where newer stuff got built — look at the number of multi-family housing units that have been permitted in the city of Madison since 2000, several thousand units -- the choice has gotten bigger and the housing units as they  have aged, they have trickled down the housing demand ladder to where they are now," Olinger continued. "The inherent weaknesses of the site, which is not very good open space and buildings with front doors on the side and bedroom windows on the street, is it isn't engaging Allied."
      As Allied Drive aged and became less desirable, it became the private market's solution to affordable housing. With its low rents, driven down by the housing market, it became susceptible to the  conditions that would allow a concentrated area of poverty and despair to      develop. And then, the law of unintended consequences came into play as the city grappled with
A primer on affordability for Allied Drive residents
Affordability and Development (1)
by Jonathan Gramling
     On September 7-10, over 100 Allied Drive residents,  landlords, service providers, government officials, and other stakeholders met at the Boys & Girls Club to engage in a community visioning
Allied Drive leader Alice Howard
process to develop a common vision on how redevelopment might occur on the Hawks      properties that the city of Madison purchased.earlier this year. The Hawks property are a significant portion of housing available on Allied Drive. On the last day of the process, volunteers from the  American Institute of Architects, who had led the process, presented three scenarios for the redevelopment of the Hawks property that incorporated the ideas of the
Madison Police Chief Noble Wray
Mayor Dave Cieslewicz
Alderperson Ken Golden
Mark Olinger
Nick Dorneanu
other areas like Allied Drive and implemented efforts to clean up other neighborhoods like Vera Court and Darbo Worthington with massive renovations of the properties and the displacement of people who may have been deemed as part of the problem in those neighborhoods. The residents who were displaced from those efforts had to live somewhere. Alice Howard, a long-time Allied Drive community activist who moved to Allied around five years, has witnessed and experienced the dynamics first hand. She lived in Sommerset when it was      renovated and transformed into Parker Place.  "You have to look at what has happened over the years," Howard said. "Each time they      created new housing such as at Sommerset, they moved people out. When they left Sommerset and went on the east side to Vera Court, what happened there? They got moved out too. A lot of them ended up on Allied Drive. Then when they went to Broadway Simpson, they said it was a success. Why were people moved out then? I would like to know the percentage that stayed. But people still got moved out and moved around. Some of those people are now out on Allied Drive. How did they all get to Allied Drive? If they were living in all of these different areas at one time, how did they get to Allied Drive? Did they move because they wanted to? I would say 5 percent moved here because they wanted to help. I would say the other 95 percent moved here because they had no where else to go."
      Madison Police Chief Noble Wray is a veteran at community policing. During the 1980s to the early 1990s, Wray worked in some of Madison's troubled neighborhoods like Broadway-Simpson. Wray has also had a good vantage point to see how things have developed on     Allied Drive. And according to Wray, the former tenants of the other low-income housing areas weren't the only things that were dispersed. "One of the reasons why Allied is a more difficult neighborhood to move things in a certain direction is when Madison was dealing with      this in the early 1990s -- this city is no way near where it was in the early 1990s -- we had roughly 8-9 open air drug markets," Wray said. "They were Simpson Broadway, Allied, Vera Court, Darbo, Northport, Magnolia Cypress, Sommerset, and Fiedler Lane. We had all of      those. What would happen is that when the police would apply pressure in one, they would just go to the other. But then two things have happened. One is that we have really had some success in a number of these neighborhoods, so the open-air markets in them no longer really exist. And some of the displacement has gone to Allied."
      The increased drug activity in Allied Drive has exacerbated its decline to the point where Allied Drive apartments are now      experiencing a 30-50 percent vacancy rate. "We've seen an increase in the level of drug activity taking place, in disturbances, and more importantly in terms of solving crime; we've seen an increase in fear," Wray said. "And fear manifests itself in residents feeling uncomfortable in reporting crime. They fear retribution. That is part of the delicate balance. What has happened is that we have been      tracking what is referred to as crimes against society. These are the crimes that have taken place out on Allied Drive and they're the ones      that have increased in the last 2-3 years. Crimes against society are those crimes that have a broad impact than just on the individual victim. They are disturbances because people can see that. Street disturbances, fights, and short-term drug trafficking are these kinds of crime."
      The quasi open air drug market that developed on Allied Drive wasn't an intra-neighborhood drug market. It became a regional drug market. Nick Dorneanu, the president of the Allied Drive-Dunn's Marsh Landlord Association, owns the Fairwood Arms Apartments at the south end of Allied Drive. He has had personal run-ins with drug dealers who try to use his parking lots for drug deals. He's been threatened and has had guns drawn on him. And since he spends long hours on Allied Drive everyday, he can attest that the dealers do not live in the neighborhood. And while Dorneanu admits that some of his tenants have drug habits, he also knows they are not alone in making purchases from the dealers.  "It's not tenants; it's the people who come in and want to sell or they are looking for places where they can smoke their    crack," Dorneanu said.  "A lot of people who come here do not live on Allied Drive." Since the local colleges started up their fall terms, Dorneanu has noticed an increase in college-aged people cruising through the neighborhood looking for drugs. The intensified drug dealing and the almost daily shootings, along with the uncertainty of what Allied Drive's future is, have driven down the occupancy rates in the Allied Drive area. And the lack of tenants is speeding up the spiral downwards of badly maintained properties.  "If you look at the pro formas for some of these landlords -- and we have -- almost everyone is going broke," Olinger said. "There are five properties on Carling      that are getting foreclosed on. I know a good chunk of the other parcels in the Allied-Rosenberry area have been actively marketed. You don't see for sale signs on them, but I know because they call the city to see if we want to buy it. There's a lot of uncertainty and with the vacancies and the small property owners, they're not being able to keep up. You can't rent those buildings and get any kind of cash flow. In an eight-unit, if you have three vacancies, it's a killer. That's exactly what's happening."
      Sometimes, it is difficult to get a handle on who exactly who is left and still lives in the Allied Drive neighborhood. While outsiders are causing many of the more visible problems that afflict Allied Drive and have hastened its decline, some of the tenants are also a part of      the problem. The two poles of people who live in Allied Drive may be a gang member selling drugs on the one hand and the working family that has lived in Allied Drive since the 1980s. In between lies most of the people on Allied, very poor people trying to survive on incomes most Madisonians couldn't conceive of living on and then making bad decisions as they try to make their lives work. "About 60 percent of my tenants live on $683 per month, state and federal money," Dorneanu said. "And you can imagine when you pay $550 in rent and some electrical bills, it doesn' give you anything left. It's hard for them. Most of them get caught into doing drugs and then they have to pay their habits or they get hurt. That has happened many times. I've seen places where the drug dealers came into the apartment and trashed up the whole place completely. They destroyed doors, windows, walls, everything to make the community know that if they don't pay, that's exactly what is going to happen."
      Wray also sees the residents of Allied Drive with some compassion since he has worked long term in neighborhoods like Allied      Drive. "The vast majority of people out in Allied -- I'm  not the neighborhood officer, but I've been in a number of neighborhoods like this -- are good, hard working people," Wray observed. "Make no mistake about it. But there are vulnerable populations of people living out there. There are hard working single mothers, in many instances, who have rented apartments and they are at times manipulated by boyfriends or have friends who are coming along that may be even dealing drugs. Where this gets complex is that we may identify that particular apartment as one that has the associated drug dealing taking place. But here you have a good person who rented the apartment, but they have these other folks there. From a policing standpoint, you say "Well, if you want to solve the problem, you have to deal with this      apartment." The landlord says that the tenant is a good person. But the officer talks about the other people in the apartment. It's a very complex issue. And the response, in many instances, on both sides is too simplistic. Either it's 'Kick them out' or  'Keep them in.'"
      The transience of the Allied Drive community has made making improvements difficult to implement. While most communities have a    strong social fabric reinforced by the institutional memories of those who have lived in the community for 25-30 years, that fabric is missing at Allied Drive.  "I think 20 percent of the people have lived in the neighborhood five years or more," Olinger said. "So when      you're trying to build and you think about the plan we did in 1990 and we've been much more engaged in the last 3-4 years with the Boys     & Girls Club, Avalon, the Verona Road West Beltline Physical Improvement Plan spin-off and now this process, I've had people come      up and say they didn't know anything about the physical improvement plan and it was adopted in February 2005. So it is only one year old and there are people in the neighborhood who don't have any clue about  that plan's existence."
      It is the high vacancy rates and the transience of the population that have served as a focus for who should the city policy focus on in remaining in Allied Drive.  "What I'm hearing from the folks in Allied Drive who have lived there 7-10 years who don't have criminal backgrounds and don't have a lot of money and aren't making a lot of money and are afraid they are going to be priced out of the      neighborhood, those are the folks I want to make sure we keep a place for them in the neighborhood," Golden said. "They've committed themselves to the neighborhood. They've been part of the planning process. Let's keep these folks in the neighborhood. Those folks aren't going to have difficulty with the screening process. What I do know is that if you use my own formula and say that 50 percent of the residents might be stable, long-term residents, if that were the case,I certainly would want to make sure that the 50 percent stayed. So we would look at their income range and then see how that fits into the overall demographic."
      Howard sees the transience as a much more complex  process.  "Only 20 percent of the residents having lived here five years or more is a possibility," Howard admitted.   "But you have to think about is that the majority of the people who transition out, also transition back in. They aren't looking at that. They may have left  and went to Minnesota or went to Chicago, but the majority of them transitioned right back in here. It might have taken them a few years, but they still came back. So do they still count them? They have to look at that. I know many of the people who have left here -- I saw a young lady the other day back in the community who hadn't been here for four years -- and I see them come back all the time."
      When past low-income neighborhoods have been redeveloped, the thrust for the improvements have come from the neighborhood residents who then caused other actors to come into play. Wray sees the same nucleus of neighborhood coming together at Allied. "One      positive is that make no mistake about it, Allied was one of the neighborhoods that for many years, it was very difficult to get a sustained     grassroots approach or movement or empowerment going on out there," Wray observed.  "If you think of every neighborhood where we have had success, there is a name that usually pops up with it. Mothers of Simpson Street, Darlene Horner, and the list goes on and on and on. Now with people like Alice Howard and Freddie Clark who are sustaining the effort out there, that is a major positive. When you talk to the West District command staff, since Fall 2005, their neighborhood association has really begun to pick up. That's a very positive sign."
      Yet even though Wray has a high regard for the people who manage to make a life at Allied  -- Wray grew up poor in a poor      neighborhood -- he still feels that not everyone will remain at Allied once the renovation efforts kick in. "In my view, I'm not saying that no one on paper needs to be out of there. But I am saying that a neighborhood can only sustain so much of that, where people are on      parole. But if you're saying everyone who is living here needs to stay, that is incorrect. But if you say we need to get rid of a whole lot      of people, that's also incorrect. We really do need to have a discussion, a community dialogue, on how do we handle and deal with people    who live in neighborhoods like this. Sometimes that theme comes through. I think, in many cases that we have taken a very simplistic view and not realize the nuances and the complexities of this and not approach it head on."
      One thing is for certain, there will be changes made out at Allied Drive during the next 2-3 years. How the redevelopment happens -- and how affordable it is -- will go a long way in determining who stays and who goes at Allied Drive.