The picture below is of Joy Horak-Brown, on the left, and Tamara Foster of New Hope Housing in Houston, Texas, flanked by Larry James, Chairman of the Board of Central Dallas CDC, on the far left, and myself on the far right at CityWalk last Thursday. Joy and Tamara came up to Dallas to take a look at what we are doing.New Hope Housing is the pre-eminent developer and operator of permanent supportive housing in Houston where it operates 319 units of permanent supportive housing and has two more projects, the 149-unit Brays Crossing and the 166-unit Sakowitz Apartments, under construction.
Joy Horak-Brown leads New Hope Housing and Tamara Foster is in charge of operating its properties—and both of them have been inspirations to us in our work in trying to develop permanent supportive housing. One of the first projects we visited when we started this work was New Hope’s Hamilton Street Residence, which is only a deep fly ball away from Minute Maid Park.
New Hope showed us—and other visitors, including councilwoman Angela Hunt—that permanent supportive housing could co-exist with a diverse mix of housing, retail and office development in a downtown area. In fact, if you talked to people in the neighborhood surrounding the Hamilton Street Residence, many of them had no idea that the building housed people that had formerly been homeless, and nobody had ever had a problem with its residents.
New Hope’s new projects look like they will be every bit as high a quality as their previous projects—I wouldn’t have expected anything less. Check them out on their website here: http://www.newhopehousing.com/newhopehousing.html.
After all the encouragement they’ve given us, I was extremely pleased to be able to show Joy and Tamara that we hadn’t been wasting their time. We may still be behind New Hope in our efforts to eliminate homelessness, but we’re going to work hard to try to catch up—at least a little.
John, I'm wondering if you discussed the importance of relationships between residents and the community with New Hope. The carfreeinbigd blog recently had what I thought was a really insightful post "The Naughty Building Catablog" (I can't seem to link here) that really hits this. I know they weren't excited about the re:vision designs, but I wonder if cohousing would be a viable option there.
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