There’s a shortage of affordable housing. This transformed project helps fill that gap

Emma Jackson moved this spring from the Pendleton Homes housing projects into a brand new apartment that’s the first finished piece of a major neighborhood redevelopment.

It’s been a world of difference, said the 64-year-old, who is now living in Tindall Seniors Towers where she commiserates with her fellow seniors on a daily basis.

“I enjoy the spaciousness and going out and meeting the neighbors,” Jackson said about the complex located near Mercer University. “You feel safe because anybody can’t just walk in. A lot of the seniors we meet downstairs and meet outside in the gazebo, so you don’t feel isolated.”

Jackson is one of the tenants staying in new affordable housing for fixed-income residents. The lack of affordable housing has reached crisis levels, and Tindall’s transformation is much-needed, housing officials said Friday.

Nationwide, there’s a shortage of 7.2 million affordable rental housing units for extremely low-income households, which is defined by people at or below the poverty level or 30 percent of their area’s median income, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

“The lack of affordable housing doesn’t just hurt low and moderate income households, but it creates a lag on the larger economy,” U.S. Rep. Sanford Bishop, D-Ga., said. “To fully address this problem, we need commitment from all levels of our government — local, state and federal.”

There’s a gap between the people who make too much to qualify for low-income housing but don’t make enough to fully pay rent in a decent place on their own, Macon-Bibb County Housing Authority Executive Director Mike Austin said.

“As the economy grows, we are starting to see a new challenge in affordable housing,” Austin said. “That is for families who make too much to live in conventional public housing, Section 8 or other public housing but not enough to pay $1,200 in rent.”

Transforming neighborhoods

Friday was a celebration of a milestone for the first phase of a new Tindall. The former Tindall Heights development opened in 1940 as a public housing complex for black people.

“It has been a top priority of the housing authority to redo Tindall,” said Johnny Walker III, chairman of the housing authority board. “It was a mammoth undertaking, and things just never quite fell into place.”

Until now.

All 76 units in the $14.7 million new Tindall Seniors Towers are occupied. It’s the first of the four-phase redevelopment of the former housing complex, which by the time it was demolished in 2016 was considered obsolete.

Construction is underway on the second phase of the renamed Tindall Fields, which will have multifamily housing once finished, while construction could start by the end of the year on the third phase.

The leaders of the housing authority and its nonprofit development arm In-Fill Housing, Inc. are waiting to find out if tax credits will be awarded to the final phase.

The goal is to have the project finished by either late 2020 or some time in 2021, Walker said.

Once it is done, the overall number of units at the Tindall complex would have dropped from 412 to 270.

Housing officials said the Tindall redevelopment is an example of how affordable housing developments are more about transforming neighborhoods.

For many years, the old complex produced important community leaders, said Alex Habersham, founder of Macon-Middle Georgia Black Pages, who also grew up in the neighborhood.

“What made it hallowed was not just the building, but the atmosphere,” he said. “You had love, you had devotion.”

This story was originally published August 24, 2018 at 5:19 PM.