Filling Up Fast

Early indicators suggest Park Place is easily exceeding rather low expectations of a skeptical, mostly suburban, populace who couldn't fathom that anyone would want to live there, in "dangerous" Downtown Birmingham.

Every one of the 23 townhouses and flats available for rent in Park Place 's first phase of development has been spoken for. The apartment managers have a waiting list of people lined up to move into the units as they're finished.

"I'm very proud to be able to say to those naysayers, 'I told you so,'" says Ralph Ruggs, the Housing Authority's executive director, in a mocking voice. " Park Place has turned into a very strong market."

According to a prescribed ratio, 40 percent of the units are set aside for public housing residents, primarily for those who lived in the former Metropolitan Gardens . Twenty percent are for working, low-income families, with rents based on income.

The remaining 40 percent are for people who can afford to pay market rate, up to about $980 a month for large three-bedroom units.

Criticism about urban removal - displacing the poor to favor the rich - and about the authority's overall handling of the public housing residents gave Ruggs many sleepless nights. But he says those worries are behind him now.

With pride, he proclaims that all of the subsidized units are filled with public housing residents; all of the market-rate units have been pre-leased by future Park Place tenants.

Ruggs says some of the 86 Metropolitan Gardens families who wanted to return to the revitalized community have been moved in, after undergoing a screening process by the new managers, Integral Properties. (Its parent company, The Integral Group LLC of Atlanta, is Park Place 's principle developer.)

Now that they see the new neighborhood, Ruggs said, some former Metropolitan Gardens residents who chose other housing preferences want in too, but they'll have a longer wait behind other public housing residents who may qualify to move in ahead of them.

But the majority of ( Metropolitan Gardens ) residents . . . have received Section 8 assistance and that has been their preference for housing. And many of those individuals have indicated they don't have a desire to return to the revitalized community," preferring to stay instead in nicer houses with their federal subsidies, Ruggs says.

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