The former Harriet Tubman Homes site in East Chattanooga is seen from Missionary Ridge.The Nashville contractor hired for $4.3 million in taxpayer dollars to demolish the former Harriet Tubman public housing site has hired 14 East Chattanooga residents so far for the project.
Those 14 residents were among 479 people who expressed interest with the city to get hired. They were also among the more than 100 people who registered for the city's training program to become eligible for the jobs, said James McKissic, director of Multicultural Affairs who headed the jobs fair.
On Thursday, city officials called this the start of Mayor Andy Berke's plan when he bought the Tubman site to bring jobs to Chattanooga. The site will eventually be marketed for a business to purchase and build what officials hope will be a small industrial park.
"That number of people working in the community is like a seed, it can have a positive impact," McKissic said.
But Elanora Woods, who chairs the NAACP housing committee, criticized how few residents have received jobs in the same community that lost its public housing site.
"[People] were only excited about them removing all of the Harriet Tubman homes because there was hope that this was going to bring jobs to the African-American community," she said.
In April, Berke purchased Tubman from the Chattanooga Housing Authority for $2.6 million, beating out multiple other bidders who wanted to reconstruct public housing on the site. This summer the City Council approved a bid for $4.3 million with Environmental Abatement to tear down the 440 apartments and the city began to advertise job opportunities for the public.
The residents who were hired will have the potential to make up to $20,000 over the course of the demolition job, McKissic said.
And since the jobs fair in September, he said the city has given out the list of residents interested in jobs to other organizations that are willing to hire people with a felony record. The city also plans to use the job training program again.
"We probably went into [the job training] thinking it was one time, but based on the need we're trying to figure out how to use this same model for other organizations," McKissic told a group of officials Thursday.