For years, tenants of the Prospect Terrace Apartments, Waltham's largest public housing complex, were united only in their complaints of mold, asbestos, and bed bugs. Now, with the help of some college students, the tenants are becoming organized like never before.
In October, the residents partnered with Brandeis University to spruce up the complex's landscaping. Last month, tenants successfully lobbied the Waltham Housing Authority for a long-desired community center. And Monday, elections for officers of the revived tenants' association were held, with the promise of keeping residents organized in the future.
"There's strength in numbers," said Leo Flores, 18, the association's new president.
"A lot of people are intimidated. They're immigrants. They don't want to speak up. They don't know the laws. I'll voice my opinion."
Flores and others said they started organizing after Brandeis professor Ellen Schattschneider visited the neighborhood with students from her "Anthropology of Gender" course. In order to more fully understand the female activists that were the subject of the course, Schattschneider felt her students needed to become involved in activism themselves. Housing in Waltham, the university's hometown, was a good place to start, as Schattschneider knew some of the women working on city housing issues.
"Unlike the volunteer work students have been doing for decades, this community-engaged learning is a way to link up academic classes with outreach," said the professor.
Brandeis students hosted a barbecue, painted a mural with children, and persuaded local merchants to donate worker time and equipment to help clear brush and plant gardens in Prospect Terrace's courtyards. That was when Schattschneider and her students realized a day-care center in the complex had gone out of business, leaving vacant a space that could be used for the community hall many tenants said they wanted for years.
Schattschneider and her students helped tenants collect almost 50 signatures for a petition calling for the former day-care center to be converted into a community center. They presented the petition to the Housing Authority's board of trustees, which last month approved the idea.
John Gollinger, assistant director of the authority, said it would take a year to raise money to renovate the space. Until then, a vacant apartment will be used as a gathering place.
Brandeis has agreed to donate computers, as well as time from students to teach computer literacy courses for residents. Language classes for non-English speakers - many tenants are Creole-speaking Haitians or Spanish-speaking Latinos - are also being planned. The nonprofit Waltham Alliance to Create Housing expects to write grant proposals for money to help cover renovation costs.
Gollinger said the petition gave the Housing Authority board members a feeling for the broad sentiment among Prospect Terrace residents. In recent years, he said, tenant associations have been inactive or nonexistent. The Housing Authority planned to convert the former day-care space into offices for management staff and a tenants' meeting room, he said, but officials were happy to adjust their plans. "We've always encouraged our tenants to organize as a group, so they can act as a group and we can deal with them as a group," he said.
Darline Raymond, WATCH's director of community organizing, said the success with the community center was an example of how tenants' voices can be heard if they organized properly. In the past, she said, the tenants have been less coordinated when it comes to presenting demands to the authority. As a result, officials were less likely to take them seriously, and the association's leaders often failed to achieve their goals. That led them to lose both confidence in themselves and legitimacy in the eyes of their fellow residents, she said.
"The tenant associations were falling apart, because when they have needs, they make requests and nothing gets done," Raymond said. "They hadn't really been informed of their rights and the value of public housing tenants associations."
Crime, drugs, and other stereotypical public housing ills are not major problems at Prospect Terrace, Raymond said. But for years, tenants' complaints about such conditions as dilapidated interiors and out-of-date fixtures went unanswered, she said.
Gollinger said there's another reason tenants' demands are often not satisfied: The Housing Authority is perennially under-funded. "We need to spend the money we're given," he said. "We can't raise money like a city or state."
Now, said Gollinger, the state Department of Housing and Community Development is spending $11 million on renovating approximately 60 of Prospect Terrace's 140 apartments, with the work on track to completed next year. It's the first overhaul of the complex's two and three-bedroom apartments since they were built in 1949 for veterans returning from World War II, he said.
As many as 600 people lived in Prospect Terrace when all the apartments were at capacity, Gollinger said. Its tenants are members of low-income families who pay 30 percent of their income as rent, with the average rent being around $400 a month, he said.
The lack of cohesion among tenants is not unusual in large public housing complexes, Schattschneider said. The day-to-day demands of low-income families often preclude them from banding together and working for change, especially when such efforts often don't yield results, she said.
"There are such limited funds and a sense of you can only go so far, and you can't have expectations that go too far," said Schattschneider.
The professor hoped that while her students contribute to a new point of view in the Prospect Terrace community, they are also learning about folks who live a stone's throw from their dormitories but they otherwise would probably never meet.
"It's clearly a two-way street," she said. "I see students gaining just as much as whatever we are lucky enough to offer to the residents."
Now that the tenants association has been reinvigorated, Flores said, he wants to discuss the apartments' heating system with the Housing Authority. Tenants can't control the temperature of their units, he said. "The boilers are old," he said. "You'll hear the pipes rattling through the walls. It's ridiculous."
A clerk at a video store in Waltham who has lived in Prospect Terrace for three years, Flores said he learned how to make his voice heard from his mother, one of those activists who inspired Schattschneider to bring her students to the neighborhood.
Tenants need to be persistent when dealing with a bureaucratic public agency, he said.
"When I first moved in here, the tenants association was horrible," he said. "When they asked Waltham housing to do something and housing said 'no,' they backed off. I'll speak loud and clear."
