Trouble by the tracks
One 911 call changed 16-year-old Jared Todd’s life
Azzie Todd’s lingering affection for Hawkins Village, in Rankin, coexists uneasily with her ambition to leave.
“I walk around this neighborhood. You see kids outside playing. You see people barbecuing,” says Ms. Todd, 49, of Hawkins Village, where she and her husband raised three daughters, now grown, and a son, who is in high school. She gets “a warm feeling, to see the camaraderie of the community. … Usually, I don’t see any crime.”
Sometimes, though, you hear it. Her son Jared, 16, says he was playing the video game Fortnite just a week prior, in late November, when he heard a real gunshot. Through his headset, he told his gaming buddies, “’Another shooting happened.’” In the week that followed, he said, “It was lingering in my head. Did someone get shot? I hope no one got shot.”
“I used to go outside every day,” Jared says.
A few years ago, though, they were transferred from the front of the complex to the back, near the wooded railroad right of way. “Then, like, all the chaos started breaking loose and my friends stopped coming outside,” Jared says.
On July 4, 2016, the Todd family came back to Hawkins Village following a day trip to Presque Isle. “We went in the back door, saw flashing lights and heard people on our porch,” Ms. Todd recounts.
A 14-year-old boy, Kennir Parr, of Swissvale, had been shot in the head just a few yards from their door. He had come there to join aunts, uncles and cousins in setting off fireworks.
In the days that followed, the Todds attended a vigil and balloon launch. “We had a talk with our kids about safety,” Ms. Todd says. “And then life goes on.”
There’s a pile of stuffed animals, deflated footballs and burned-out candles marking the spot where he fell.
On Oct. 17, 2016, Richard McClinton Jr., 26, was shot fatally in Hawkins Village. On Oct. 15, 2017, a 12-year-old boy was injured in a drive-by shooting. And on June 19, Antwon Rose II, of Hawkins Village, was killed by three shots fired by an East Pittsburgh police officer, in an incident that happened two neighborhoods away but spurred protests here.
Ms. Todd describes the effect on Jared: “So it was like a resignation. ‘I’m not going out there any more.’”
He takes the bus to and from Propel Braddock Hills High School, where he is a junior, then comes straight home and plays video games, draws — cartoon characters, hands, flowers, things he sees on YouTube — or writes poems.
“The shootings is kind of how I come up with some of my art,” Jared says. “I wanted to write a poem about the shooting that happened a few days ago.”
“We’ve had an increase in [criminal] activity out there,” says Allegheny County Housing Authority police Chief Michael Vogel. “I attribute it to the age of the young girls moving in there.”
Mothers as young as their late teens can get their own public housing units, he notes. “They’re so vulnerable, and they bring these young guys in, and that’s where the trouble begins.”
Rankin police Chief Ryan Wooten estimates that 80 percent of the 911 calls in Rankin come from Hawkins Village. “When something critical happens in Hawkins Village, everybody knows about it,” the chief says. “But you know that ‘no snitching’ thing?” Major crimes, including Kennir’s death, go unsolved.
Packing impoverished families into dense “projects” has been officially out of vogue since 1993, when the federal government started financing the replacement of old public housing with mixed-income communities. Locally, a 1994 consent decree mandated improvements to communities, including Hawkins Village, and efforts to desegregate and disperse subsidized housing.
Still, today Hawkins Village is entirely subsidized housing, in long, low, six-unit buildings, last upgraded in 1994.
Kymarii Howard, 26, is raising four kids — all under the age of 9 — in a Hawkins Village apartment with roaches, loose floor tiles, water-stained plaster and broken cabinets. “I’ve been asking for three years to be transferred to another house,” Ms. Howard says.
Housing authority executive director Frank Aggazio would love to do “a complete modernization” of Hawkins Village, but funding for big rehabs is hard to get. Instead, he plans $2.8 million in repair work on the roofs, windows, chimney, parking lots and sidewalks next year.
Meanwhile, conditions have slowly eroded.
The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development inspected Hawkins Village in December 2017, finding clogged plumbing, damaged door and window locks, inoperable ranges or stoves, and missing or broken hand railings, and estimating that there were 476 health and safety deficiencies in the complex. On a scale in which 60 is a passing grade, HUD gave Hawkins Village a 55.
Mr. Aggazio says that when residents move in, they get a fully intact, safe, clean unit. In a June response to HUD concerns about Hawkins Village, he wrote: “The residents at Hawkins are generally rough on their units.”
“Sometimes I come here in the morning, and there’s all kinds of trash, and I think, ‘How are you living like this?’” says Ava Johnson, who was raised in Hawkins Village, brought up five children there, and led the resident council in the 1980s. She now lives elsewhere in Rankin but works in Hawkins Village as a housing authority service coordinator.
Decades ago, the resident council planned parties and cleanup days and brought in programs for the kids, including Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. Around 2005, though, participation petered out.
Ms. Johnson scheduled an August meeting for residents interested in reviving the council. No one showed.
The housing authority has posted surveillance cameras in Hawkins Village. But most of the trouble happens where the complex meets the tracks.
“Anything can come from the train tracks,” Ms. Todd says. “And people can run to the train tracks, to get away from something they’ve done.”
She works full time handling phones at a community living center and hopes her communications degree from Carlow University, completed in 2013, will help her to move up. She and her husband, who is disabled, assist their three grown daughters, all in college, and try to save enough money to leave Hawkins Village.
After Jared finishes high school, she said, “Who knows? Maybe we move across the country, to Arizona.”