The Galveston County Daily News

Critics of Galveston Housing Authority should look at the agency’s plans to rebuild Magnolia Homes. The plan offers some exciting possibilities. It would be a shame if a community that badly needs help in rebuilding after Hurricane Ike overlooked them.

Community leaders occasionally argue that the city’s future depends on the release of the East End Flats. That land, now in the hands of the federal government, is badly needed as space for housing, they say.

But, if you look down Strand Street from downtown to the University of Texas Medical Branch, you can see land that could be redeveloped.

The housing authority owns a small part of that corridor — three blocks. That tract was the site of Magnolia Homes, a housing project destroyed by the hurricane.

If the housing authority develops that land wisely, the improvements could encourage development in the surrounding neighborhood. The flip side of that coin is that a bad plan would strangle that opportunity in the crib. Before the storm, Galveston leaders frequently lamented that the public-housing project was on the doorstep of the medical branch.

What’s changed to allow planners to think in terms of opportunities instead of blight?

About 10 years ago, people in other parts of the country accepted the idea that people with different income levels could live together in public housing.

The first public-housing projects were inhabited by people with a broad range of incomes. To this day, you can find people who tell of teachers, dockworkers and police officers living in the island’s first projects in the 1940s.

But, during the ’60s, housing units were reserved for the poorest of the poor. While the ideal of directing all available resources to those who most needed it was admirable, the reality was something else. The projects became pockets of poverty, with all the accompanying social ills.

Nationally, that trend turned years ago. Communities such as Atlanta began to develop housing with a mix of household incomes. Galveston is behind on that trend. Before the storm hit, the overwhelming majority of public-housing residents on the island made less than $20,000 a year.

The proposal for redeveloping Magnolia Homes assumes a mix of incomes. Some residents would make up to $19,150 a year. Others would earn $19,150 to $31,900. Still others would earn $31,300 to $38,300, and some would make up to $51,050.

Where would those people come from and where would they work?

One obvious answer is next door, at the medical branch. Groundskeepers and cooks work there, as well as doctors and researchers.

The housing authority plans to spend $88.35 million in rebuilding public housing. Can the agency funnel some of those millions into the corridor between downtown and the medical branch in a way that prompts a redevelopment boom?

Could that public investment be part of a broader effort to create neighborhoods that would be attractive to people of all incomes who simply want to live close to Galveston County’s largest employer?

Isn’t that a question worth investigating?