Fairview complex celebrates summer
Trending
Two years ago, Andrea Marshall was living in North Philadelphia, where she feared to let her three children play outside because of shootings and robberies in her neighborhood.
On Thursday, Marshall was at a picnic table under a big tent in the yard of the Altoona Housing Authority’s Fairview Hills housing development, where she lives with those kids now – and things are much better.
“I love it,” Marshall said at the authority’s annual summer picnic at Fairview, with a bounce house, stuffed animal races, ski ball, hot dogs and soda – an event that doubles as a recruiting tool for the Gloria Gates Memorial Foundation’s afterschool program at Fairview. “The kids can play outside. And there’s no violence – that’s the main thing.”
Marshall’s two 15-year-old daughters attend Commonwealth Charter Academy virtually from her apartment, and her 7-year-old son goes to Juniata Elementary School, she said.
Marshall works for Arcadia Home Care, assisting an older individual who lives in an apartment at the development.
“It’s cool,” Marshall’s daughter, Maziyah Johnson, said about living in Altoona.
Maziyah likes that “nature” is more evident here than in her Philadelphia neighborhood, where there were no nearby parks and where the city’s two rivers weren’t close.
Maziyah wants to be a veterinarian, although it’s too early to have made concrete schooling plans for that.
The family has two cats, Kash and Kiley.
Marshall likes the willingness of people to help – help that, as a single mother, she welcomes.
The only thing she doesn’t like about living in Altoona is that there is “a little racism.”
She experiences that as “people being nasty,” she said. “You can just tell.”
Fairview Hills, the authority’s family development, has 150 units with 450 total tenants, according to property manager Randy Wilson.
The staff does its best to maintain a “good, clean and safe” complex and prides itself on treating everyone with respect, Wilson said.
Brad Kanuch, Wilson’s predecessor as property manager, and now the authority’s deputy director, used to urge Wilson to be “firm, fair and friendly,” Wilson said.
“(But) we still have rules and a lease,” Wilson said.
His least favorite part of the job is evicting families.
“I work with people until I’ve done as much as I can” – until the standards of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which funds the authority, make eviction mandatory, he said.
Issues that can lead to eviction include disruptive behavior, poor housekeeping and failure to pay the rent.
He doesn’t like that with eviction, he can make a family homeless, he said.
It makes him feel a little better that even at eviction hearings, most tenants will tell the judge that Wilson has tried to help, he said.
Yet the rewarding parts of the job predominate for him.
Perhaps the high point of his six years at the complex was handing a $17,000 check to a family that had paid that money as rent into an escrow account, so they could make a down payment on a home.
But it also feels good when he sees tenant families grow – when he learns someone is pregnant or a baby has been born.
It feels good to see people graduate from subsidized housing to home ownership, or to an unsubsidized apartment, Wilson said.
And it feels good to bring a new tenant into an apartment with shiny floors and newly painted walls – because they always look and smell good, he said.
It feels good also to know that introducing someone to such a new apartment may be keeping them from a housing situation they can’t afford, or in some cases, from actual homelessness.
The development he supervises is “comfortable and secure,” he said.
Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 814-949-7038.