Great opportunity lost with Marin City plan

Often in life it’s not so much what you do but how you do it that makes the difference. By choosing a conventional path for rehabilitating the Golden Gate Village public housing units in Marin City, our local Housing Authority lost an opportunity to correct long-standing inequity and exclusion. There’s a better way.

Before I came to California, I was hired as director of development and maintenance for the East St. Louis Housing Authority. I soon learned how government dollars were used, and I was appalled that most federal money intended to help the poor went instead to banks, construction companies, social workers, government agency employees (like me) and a raft of all-too-willing consultants. I also saw how government regulations and conventions often maintained the very discrimination and inequity they were intended to correct.

To change that, we hired and trained local residents. Many had never held an office job. They adapted quickly.

On the construction front, we pulled locals into well-paying union jobs. That wasn’t easy. Helping a neighborhood handyman step up to installing full kitchen plumbing, or completely rehabilitating a house to code, was way more difficult than I had imagined.

We struggled through a terrible thicket of resistance as we forcibly integrated the previously all-White unions. But we hung in because the goal was clear — don’t just build housing, use housing to correct inequities.

We involved the people most affected, kept the housing money in town, strengthened the local economy and community and trained locals for successful futures. Paying attention to how we built the housing made all the difference.

— Barry Phegan, Greenbrae