On a sunny day in October, Kimi Gray was handed a gold key in a celebration marking the first time in U.S. history that public-housing residents could become the owners of their homes. To her, it was an occasion rich with meaning. "Poor people," she says, "are allowed the same dreams as everyone else." The event was a significant step in a revolution that has been moving through more than a dozen public-housing projects across America for 15 years. In these complexes, tenants have balked at the notion that poverty means helplessness, and are taking over the management of their housing.
Getting the poor and mostly undereducated residents of public housing to assume responsibility for their dwellings has been hard, but not nearly so difficult as convincing politicians that it can be done. Gray, chairwoman of the Kenilworth-Parkside Resident Management Corp. in Washington, has been leading this fight since 1972. The decision to take control of the project was forced on Gray and her neighbors, she says. Plumbing was broken and heating was, at best, intermittent. So in 1981, deciding "things couldn't get much worse and we had to do something," Gray petitioned the District government to let residents take control. The mayor eventually agreed, and in January 1982 Gray's tenant management corporation began collecting rents, making repairs and running things for itself. What the corporation got was a run-down facility with bursting pipes, flooding basements and no one trained in physical-plant management. "It was crisis that brought us together," Gray says. Welfare mothers learned plumbing skills, children were pressed into clean-up patrols. The residents thrived, and Gray became a national spokeswoman for the movement.
This success led Gray to lobby Congress for changes in housing laws giving tenants the right to buy their homes from the government. The law went into effect in 1987. Prominent Republicans, including Ronald Reagan, flocked to her cause, but Kimi Gray is no conservative ideologue. Her success depends on Great Society programs such as job training to drive home traditional conservative values. "We want to bring families back together, restore our pride and respect," she says. Congressman Jack Kemp, another fan of Gray's who co-sponsored the 1987 legislation, calls tenant management a "synthesis of New Deal programs and conservative thinking." Selling public-housing tenants their homes, he says, "gives the poor dignity and a stake in the American dream." The management association paid $1 for the title to Kenilworth-Parkside. In 1990 residents will be able to buy shares in their units.
Kenilworth-Parkside is a hub of activity. The grounds are clean and graffiti-free, and more than 100 residents work in businesses created by Gray's management corporation. These include the day-care center, a barber and beauty shop, a moving company and a construction-managemen t firm. Gray's plans are boundless: she has started negotiations with the Department of Transportation to establish a "reverse commute" system for driving residents in vans to unfilled jobs in nearby suburbs.