In less than 18 months, the Chattanooga Community Housing Development Organization has renovated or built and sold four homes on the once-dilapidated Carr Street, and the corporation has another house under construction.

“We’re making an impact,” Executive Director Rayburn Traughber said. “The overall goal is to stabilize the area with homeownership and to address property that is deteriorating.”

The nonprofit corporation has spent about $600,000 in the 2600 block of Carr Street for home renovation and new construction since December 2006, Mr. Traughber said. The corporation owns another two lots on the street where it plans to build two new houses by next spring, he said.

It has been less than a year since Carr Street was the site of police drug raids and crack houses, Mr. Traughber said.

Carr Street is one of several streets bounded by 25th and 29th streets and Market and Broad streets, making up the South Chattanooga community called Southside Gardens, known as Hootersville to longtime residents.

Ezra Harris said he remembers when the community was “shotgun, shanty houses” instead of the stylish and efficient designs now being built.

“You had an eyesore, dilapidated homes, absentee landlords,” Mr. Harris said. “Now you have beautification, something attractive to the eye.”

Mr. Harris once was president of the Southside Gardens Neighborhood Association and lived there for more than 40 years before relocating to Brainerd. The Johnson-Harris Park on Carr Street is named after him.

Many of the area’s drug problems could be traced to the city-owned apartment complex on Carr Street, which was sold to a private owner in 2006, Mr. Traughber said.

“Drugs were prevalent in 2004, 2005 and some of 2006,” he said. “It didn’t calm down until the city sold the Carr Street apartment complex.”

Debra Willis, the mother of three children, has lived in the apartment complex for about 11 months.

“It’s gotten a whole lot better, quieter,” she said.

One of the newest homes built by the Chattanooga Community Housing Development Organization sits just across the street from the apartment complex. The three-bedroom, two-bath house at 2617 Carr St. is selling for $120,000.

Roya Evans, the corporation’s assistant director who holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the University of California-Berkeley, designed the home to have style but still be within budget.

“It has a bit of design element, but it doesn’t cost more,” she said.

Chattanooga Neighborhood Enterprise, a government-supported, nonprofit group that has helped nearly 10,000 Chattanoogans rehabilitate or buy homes since it was created in 1986, offers financing help for the homes to low- to moderate-income homebuyers. The organization also offers financing from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The Chattanooga Community Housing Development Organization was under CNE’s umbrella for 15 years, but officials announced in September that it would focus solely on providing low- to moderate-income housing and operate separately from CNE.

Despite its success in helping many homeowners and home buyers, CNE came under fire in recent years for losing money on several apartment projects it tried to manage or rehabilitate. CNE also drew fire from various builders who said the agency, which receives public funds, was competing with them.

“CNE was managing the construction side of the CCHDO, but CNE was going through so much transition that there was not much continuity, particularly in the construction department,” Mr. Traughber said. “We had tremendous turnover, and somewhere we lost some of the control and continuity.”

Comments