City spending millions to wipe out high crime apartments

LOUISVILLE, KY (WAVE) - Louisville is taking aim at high crime public housing projects. Taxpayers are spending more than a hundred million dollars turning around the city's most run down, violent neighborhoods. Sheppard Square is the latest problem housing complex to get a high-priced makeover. A model that city leaders say is paying dividends for the entire city.

Jerry Walker had a front row seat to the violence at Sheppard Square Apartment Complex. He lives in the shadows of the old public housing buildings with his two year old grandson Cameron.

"The guy run right across there with a sawed off shot gun," Walker said, pointing to an area 50 years from his front lawn. "He shot him and missed him," Walker said.

His family's view is a whole lot better than it used to be.

"You don't see that now," Walker said.

What Walker does see is the construction of an all new Sheppard Square.

Tim Barry, executive director of the Louisville Metro Housing Authority, said anyone who was familiar with the old complex wouldn't recognize it today.

Barry has watched over similar transformations in Park DuValle and Liberty Green, which replaced the old crime ridden Clarksdale neighborhood downtown. In each case, taxpayers invested tens of millions of dollars to tear down the barracks style public housing projects built in the 50s and replace them with new mixed-income apartments and town homes. In the case of Sheppard Square, all energy efficient, non-smoking units.

Barry says Sheppard Square, like Liberty Green and Park DuValle before it, has been a huge success. The first phase, to be complete at the end of April 2015, is already fully occupied with hundreds on a waiting list to get in. Barry says the impact reaches far beyond these families front door.

"What happens down here affects everybody," Barry said. "What happens in the urban core affects the entire community."

There is still work to be done. The area surrounding Sheppard Square remains run down so the city is buying up as much property as it can to clean things up.

The plan has worked in Liberty Green, which is now seeing privately funded apartments buildings popping up across the street, including the new 310 Nulu Apartments.

All this, as the city spends a million more taxpayer dollars studying whether the same model can be used to turn around Beecher Terrace which remains plagued with violence.

"I don't believe, never have believed, that there's a strong criminal element in the public housing sites," Barry said. "The criminal element comes from the outside."

Barry says the bad guys move on as the city moves forward.

For Jerry Walker, a torn down brick from Sheppard Square he keeps on his front porch is a reminder a once blighted neighborhood is now building for the future.

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