Fairmount Avenue Apartments will be the first public housing site in which all the residents will be enrolled in the Chattanooga Housing Authority's family self-sufficiency program.
"We want to encourage people not always to depend on public housing," CHA board Chairman Eddie Holmes said.
Housing officials still are finalizing guidelines for the new Fairmount, an 18-unit site in North Chattanooga, but so far officials agree that all residents will have a job except the elderly or disabled. And instead of remaining in public housing for decades, all residents will participate in a plan to make themselves more financially stable within five years.
Families also may work toward obtaining a car or accumulating money to continue their educations.
"People will have to come up with family goals over a five-year plan ... with the hope that at the end of the five years they will be fully self sufficient and able to move to homeownership or a market-rate rental unit," said CHA Executive Director Betsy McCright.
The plan works by providing escrow accounts for residents to save toward their goals. Instead of raising the rent each time a resident's income increases, residents can lock in a rental rate and put extra income into the account. After five years, residents get their money back and can use it toward their goals.
The new complex will replace an older, 28-unit complex that will be torn down.
The last family moved out this week. Lee Adcock Construction Co. is scheduled to start demolition in September.
The new site, a $3.9 million townhome development, is expected to be complete in 2012.
Nineteen-year-old Kashayla Anderson has lived in the Emma Wheeler Homes all of her life but said she'd like to live at a public housing site where residents focused on homeownership.
"It's just better having your own," she said. "You don't have to worry about your company visiting and you do what you want."
She said she doesn't oppose the stipulation of a job requirement to live at Fairmount and that she wants to work, but she dropped out of school in the 11th grade and now has trouble getting a job that pays a living wage.
CHA has used the self-sufficiency program before. Of nearly 3,000 participants in its housing choice voucher program - formerly known as Section 8 - about 175 are enrolled in the family self-sufficiency plan, officials said. Out of 3,000 public housing tenants, about 40 are enrolled.
Several people in CHA's housing choice voucher program have proven that the family self-sufficiency plan works, with some saving as much as $11,000 toward their goal, McCright said.
About 10 former voucher holders became homeowners within the past year, CHA officials said.
CHA officials plans to hire a family self-sufficiency coordinator by the end of October.
The housing authority received $107,709 earlier this year from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to establish a full-time homeownership coordinator and a family self-sufficiency coordinator for its housing choice voucher program.
Housing officials say they want to do better at helping residents move up and out of public housing.
"We could say (to residents) stay here for the rest of your life," Holmes said. "But a part of our task is helping individuals to move on."
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