Children play on the basketball court during an after-school program at Bayview. The low-income housing complex Downtown is nearing completion of a $60 million overhaul that saw 102 deteriorating housing units replaced with 130 colorful new ones.
AMBER ARNOLD, STATE JOURNAL
Jacob Washington's brand-new townhouse at Bayview is unlike anywhere else he has lived.
Washington, his wife and their three young children shared a single room at a family shelter before the townhouse became available at the Downtown low-income housing complex this fall. Now they have three bedrooms, two bathrooms and far more space to themselves.
"Coming from a shelter, locked up in that room, my kids are joyous," Washington said. "The poverty forced my kids to age," he said. At Bayview, they’re free to be kids again.
But what stands out most to Washington isn't Bayview's facilities. What really feels different, he said, is the community.
"People want to be involved here," Washington said. "It's not some type of place where people are trying to get rent from you and don't care about you. They build and work every day for the kids’ sake. They really do. And that’s amazing to me because, literally, I never had this in my life."
Washington's family is one of about 50 that will join the community by early next year as the Bayview Foundation finishes replacing the flat, brick-and-beige townhouses that had long sat at the corner of West Washington Avenue and Regent Street with one of the most vibrant developments Madison has ever seen.
Seven years since the foundation began planning its overhaul of the eastern end of the "Triangle" and three years since it broke ground on the first of 11 colorful buildings, the nonprofit that has housed low-income families there since the early 1970s is nearing completion of its 130 apartments and townhouses.
Construction is set to end in December. Most of the remaining move-ins will take place in January.
The completion of the $60 million redevelopment project — one that, unconventionally, was shaped in almost every way by the people who already lived there — is a big moment for Bayview. It is also "a time of transition," said Alexis London, Bayview’s executive director.
"It feels like we're just at the beginning of a new chapter in terms of community cohesion and family stabilization," London said. "And that will take as much work and thought and creativity as this took."
The version of Bayview that exists today is the product of years of discussion — in English, Spanish and Hmong — with the community. Residents, many of them refugees who have been at Bayview for decades, told staff that they were afraid of being displaced, again. But they recognized that their housing was falling into disrepair, and they wanted cleaner, more accessible places to live and a more welcoming space to gather.
The new Bayview, rebuilt in stages without displacing any of its residents, has all of that and then some.
Bayview also has space for another 28 families on top of the 102 that could live there before. It ended up with almost as many additional openings due to residents moving out over the course of the redevelopment. For a community with a turnover rate of less than 10% per year, incorporating so many new people in such a short period has been a process of its own.
"We all know that moving to a new community, no matter what your circumstance … is stressful. It is difficult," London said.
Some of the people who are moving into housing at Bayview "are coming out of really hard situations," London said. Families that are leaving unstable and sometimes unsafe environments, such as living with relatives, in shelters or on the street, may need a while to find their footing again, she said.
Bayview anticipated facing more challenges, from noise complaints to police calls, during that adjustment period.
"Bayview is doing everything we know to do to provide support," London said. "And yet it takes time."
'It's about growing here'
Bayview’s efforts to support its newest residents begin the moment they walk in the door.
Veronica Vega, the family support coordinator Bayview hired to oversee its expanded services, meets with families right away to determine their most pressing needs. Do they have dishes? Furniture? A doctor? Health insurance? Have their kids started school, or do they need to be enrolled?
Staff members give families that need groceries access to the food pantry and supply essentials that have been donated, such as kitchen tools, towels and bedding, to those that don’t have them yet. They familiarize parents with the after-school programming and try to get kids involved early on.
Adjusting tends to happen in stages, Nate Schorr, Bayview's program director, said. First, people have to settle in. Once their basic needs are met, they can begin to catch up on the rest, such as going to the doctor for the first time in years or making sure their kids are attending school regularly.
"You need to land here. You need to stabilize here. And then it's about growing here," Schorr said. "How do you take on leadership in the community? How do you start planning for the future?"
Washington said he grew up "in a place of poverty" and spent time in prison before moving to Madison in April for an opportunity that didn’t pan out, then found a job as a machine operator while staying at the family shelter. Now, as a Bayview resident, he's experiencing that forward momentum firsthand.
"I’m ready to establish a foundation," Washington said. He’s motivated partly by the opportunities available to his kids at Bayview, such as after-school activities and field trips, and partly by the bonds among the people working and living there. His passion is writing music, he said, and he plans to set up a studio in his townhouse.
"This community is a place that'll build you up," he said.
More than an apartment
At the heart of Bayview is its $9 million community center, which is part of Madison’s network of city-supported neighborhood centers. The community center — like the rest of Bayview's buildings — is designed to save energy. It's set to be outfitted with solar panels and an emergency battery so that critical systems, like heating and cooling, can stay operational during power outages.
In addition to providing year-round youth programming, the center regularly puts on recreational and educational activities for adults and seniors, ranging from art and yoga classes to English as a second language and financial literacy courses. Bayview’s resident chef serves hot lunches every weekday and makes dinner for the kids three times a week, all for free.
Vega wants families arriving at Bayview to know from the start that they are not just moving into a housing unit but are instead "moving [in] with all of us as a community," she said. "It’s all of us working together."
K.S., who moved in earlier this month with four of her grandchildren, ages 1 to 17, and asked to be identified by her initials to protect her grandchildren's privacy, said she had been looking for a safe place to raise them.
"I didn’t know it was a community," she said. "I just thought you get an apartment."
She's beyond satisfied with her new housing so far. The family had three bedrooms where they lived before, she said, but the space was smaller and more cramped than the three-bedroom, three-bathroom townhouse that they’re settling into at Bayview.
"I was just shocked when I saw this place," she said of the townhouse, which has a large kitchen and living room on the ground floor and bedrooms upstairs. All of the units at Bayview come with high ceilings, lots of windows, a washer and dryer and free Wi-Fi. Most, including hers, also have a porch or balcony.
Staff members' offers to help with anything her family needed came as another surprise.
She hasn’t had time yet to think about much besides unpacking, but she’s looking forward to going back to work at a nonprofit that supports homeless and poor people for the first time since she got custody of her 1-year-old grandson.
"I’m used to giving," she said. "I’m not used to people doing a lot for me."
High demand for a limited resource
Bayview opened its waiting list for three weeks this spring. In that time, it received over 500 applications.
"I knew it would be a lot," London said. "I didn't know it would be that much."
Almost all of the units at Bayview are reserved for low-income households. Most residents pay 30% of their income for rent, no matter how much — or how little — they make.
Some of the more than 500 applicants seeking housing they could afford were referred to Bayview by partner organizations, such as the Salvation Army or the Community Action Coalition for South Central Wisconsin, London said. But she was surprised, she said, by the number of families that were not connected with those sorts of support services.
London suspects that "a lot of families fell through the cracks," she said, "and they somehow found Bayview, and they're desperate for housing, and they're so hopeful that they get the call that they got a place here."
London said. "To see these new families come, it's bringing a whole new energy, a whole new life, a whole new positivity."
E.B., a young mother who also asked to be identified by her initials, was pregnant and living at home with her mother and younger sisters when she applied for a place at Bayview. About a week after giving birth to her daughter, she got the call she’d been waiting for. The two moved in a couple months later.
The first night in her new one-bedroom unit was "calming," she said. "I was happy to be here."
When E.B. first toured Bayview and after she moved in, she was struck by how much there was to do. She has since returned part time to her job, where she works with survivors of domestic violence. But she takes her daughter to the play and learn sessions put on at Bayview by the Madison School District, and people dote on the baby wherever they go.
“Everybody’s just so welcoming,” she said.
-Nicole Pollack