Subsidized Housing

The Hollywood Community Housing Corp. wasn't giving away housing vouchers Thursday -- just the slim chance of securing a subsidized apartment in a new, 58-unit building. Even so, by 11 a.m. more than 700 people were waiting in a line that snaked down Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles -- and housing advocates were worried enough about potential unrest that they called police to help manage the crowd.

About 40 tenants at the Jordan Downs public housing project gathered Saturday to hear about city plans that could dramatically change their lives -- a proposal to tear down the tarnished Watts complex and replace it with a modern "urban village" with apartments, stores and restaurants. Residents met at the Jordan Downs recreation center to hear about the ambitious, $1-billion proposal that could include as many as 2,100 units, with both low-income and market-rate housing.

Social service volunteers identified a 65-year-old homeless veteran as one of the people most likely to die on skid row in downtown Los Angeles. The man, who suffers from kidney and liver disease and has lived for decades on the streets, belonged at the top of a new list of 50 skid row residents deemed in urgent need of permanent housing, county officials said.

For more than a decade, a steady stream of housing officials and city planners from across the country have visited Atlanta to view the future of mixed-income housing. They tour sites such as Centennial Place -- where vast public housing blocks were torn down in 1994 to make way for a pioneering $150-million mixed-income community of garden apartments and town homes -- and then they go on to carry out similar projects in cities such as New Orleans and New York.

Damu Barnes, 32, bounced his 1-year-old daughter on his knee Saturday while keeping one eye on his son playing in the courtyard of Nickerson Gardens. Nearby, hundreds of hot dogs grilled on oversized barbecues, a gospel choir prepared to sing and about 200 of Barnes' neighbors gathered amid colorful balloons for the first Nickerson Gardens Community Family Block Party at the largest public housing project west of the Mississippi.

The affordable-housing project known as Buckingham Place has stood vacant for nearly a year, surrounded by a dirt lot, a chain-link fence and some very unhappy neighbors. Community leaders in South Los Angeles call the 71-unit apartment building an eyesore. Electricians, plumbers and others who worked on it are owed millions of dollars. And at least a few elderly low-income residents who turned in rental deposits have not gotten their money back.

A coalition of public interest law firms and civil rights groups Tuesday filed a class-action lawsuit against the Los Angeles Housing Authority, charging that the city agency broke the law when it effectively raised the rent for more than 20,000 poor residents.

To some, the four sprawling three-story brick complexes may not look like real estate worth fighting over. But with inhabitable housing of any kind at a premium here, the fate of New Orleans' four largest public housing complexes -- St. Bernard, C.J. Peete, B.W. Cooper and Lafitte -- is at the center of another battle in the city's turbulent efforts to reshape its future. The U.S.

In the 17 months since Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Sharon Jasper has shuffled from place to place, including a cot at the Superdome and temporary housing in Houston. On Tuesday, she and nine other displaced residents of New Orleans' public housing projects came to Capitol Hill to tell their stories, as the House Committee on Financial Services examined the loss of affordable housing because of the storm.

A security guard was shot to death at a trailer park set up by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, New Orleans police said. The shooting was in Gentilly, a section of the city that flooded during Hurricane Katrina. A few hours earlier, another man was shot and killed near the Guste public housing complex. The deaths brought the city's homicide total to 34 this year, compared to last year's 161.