By Janine L. Weisman/Daily News staff

November 6, 2003 - Angela Jersky treats the lip of her son Randy, 3, who cut it recently while playing outside the family's Newport apartment. The Jerskys live in a crowded three-bedroom apartment on Mahan Street and are hoping to rent a five-bedroom apartment in Newport Heights. (Jacqueline Marque/Daily News photo)

Angela Jersky could live with having to pick up the occasional nasty diaper tossed on the ground outside her front door or the suspicious handoffs among people she has seen in her Newport neighborhood.

That was before the night of Oct. 6 when she heard something at her back door as she sat in her darkened living room watching a baseball game on television. Her husband, Randy, 29, was at work and their four children were asleep. She called out for the cat to stop making noise, then saw the dark figure run past her window.

"It freaked me out. I'm constantly awake at night now. I've lost sleep over it," said Jersky, 32.

Police said they believe someone mistook her family's Mahan Street apartment for a vacant unit two doors down that had been broken into by vandals. But the incident crystallized Jersky's fears and frustrations of living in the Tonomy Hill public housing complex and intensified her hopes of moving to a new home where she and her family can feel safe.

That might be right across the street. Jersky would like to live on the north side of Mahan Street in one of the new buildings with brightly painted clapboard exteriors that glow in the afternoon sun. The buildings, which front Maple Avenue, are part of the $15.5 million first phase of Newport Heights, a privately owned and managed housing development that will gradually replace Tonomy Hill. Developer Trinity Financial of Boston will own Newport Heights, although the Housing Authority of Newport will continue to own the land and subsidize some units. Maloney Properties Inc. of Wellesley, Mass., is the property manager for the new development.

The first 42 new units will be ready for occupancy by the third week in December, said Trinity Financial Executive Vice President Patrick Lee.

Originally built to house wartime workers, Tonomy Hill was taken over by the housing authority in 1950. Over the years, Tonomy Hill has consolidated Newport's poorest residents at the northern edge of the city, cut off from Newport's center by a poorly planned network of on-and-off ramps to the Pell Bridge.

Eighty-six percent of Tonomy Hill residents have household incomes below 30 percent of the area's median income. Can this isolated, distressed neighborhood be transformed into an attractive area where residents of higher incomes would want to live? Can it be reconnected to the city physically, as well as economically and socially?

By 2007, the 498 original Tonomy Hill units will be replaced with 425 new housing units for residents of mixed incomes. A portion of the redevelopment effort is funded through a $20 million HOPE VI grant the Housing Authority of Newport received from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. It is the first HOPE VI-funded revitalization project in Rhode Island. An integral part of the HOPE VI funding is what's called a community and supportive services program. New Visions for Newport County has been selected as the program's case management provider to track residents and get those in need of life skills and job readiness training into appropriate programs.

Nowhere is the contrast between what's wrong with the city's north end and what's possible more clearly defined than on Mahan Street, where a chain-link fence divides the new buildings from a row of identical barracks-style buildings. If the colorful schemes on the north side of the street - in teal, blue, yellow, beige and red with white trim - can be seen as symbols of the promise of the future, the gray Tonomy Hill buildings represent isolation and blighted land use.

Newport Heights is a key piece of the ongoing effort to revitalize the city's north end, which includes the construction just started on a Community College of Rhode Island campus and the already completed Head Start early childhood education center, both located off Maple Avenue.

Future plans include the reconfiguration of the Pell Bridge access ramps to reconnect the north end to downtown Newport and release 15 acres of land for commercial and housing development.

In its HOPE VI application, the housing authority cited Tonomy Hill's "myriad of physical and social ailments," chiefly its poorly planned site infrastructure "including cul-de-sacs that encourage crime" along with "unattractive buildings with cracked foundations, structurally unsound porches and roofs, and undersized units with obsolete building systems." In addition, the housing authority cited the high turnover of tenants and the fact that 22 percent of Tonomy Hill's units were vacant, which keeps the housing authority's maintenance staff constantly busy preparing units to be re-rented.

"Turnover at a development can be an expensive thing," Lee said. "Communities are not stable places if there's big, big turnover."

The developer points to the firm's success transforming Orchard Park, formerly a distressed public housing site in Boston's Roxbury section with closed-off streets separating it from the surrounding neighborhood, into the thriving Orchard Gardens. In 1995, when the Boston Housing Authority was awarded a HOPE VI grant, 42 percent of Orchard Park's 775 housing units were vacant and rent collection was around 70 percent. Now the new 331-unit brightly colored development with another 76-units off-site, has a waiting list of 12,000 names, said Sandra B. Henriquez, administrator for the Boston Housing Authority.

Orchard Gardens' new townhouses and Victorian-style homes, each with a front porch and private back yard, spurred surrounding private commercial property owners to redesign and improve the appearance of their sites, she said.

"Orchard was a place where homeless families, families living in cars, would reject an offer of housing," said Henriquez, a former partner with Maloney Properties. "From our perspective, Orchard is what I call sort of the textbook HOPE VI development. It accomplished everything that program was established to do."

Rent collection increased significantly when the newly developed Orchard Gardens, climbing from 88 percent the month before to 97 percent, she said.

"The culture changed," Henriquez said. "People knew private management was coming. They knew it had to be better. People flocked in to pay their rent on time."

About 30 percent of Tonomy Hill residents routinely fall a month behind in paying their rent. For the first six months of this year, the housing authority averaged a monthly collection rate of 69 percent in Tonomy Hill, according to Timothy S. Barrow, director of finance. But at the end of the year, the housing authority writes off very little in uncollected rent from Tonomy Hill tenants, usually about 3 percent.

"We're getting the money," Barrow said. "It's just not on time."

But late rents will be unacceptable to the Newport Heights property manager, said Maloney Properties Vice President Diana J. Kelly. The proposed lease for Newport Heights states clearly that repeated late payments of rent are cause for termination of tenancy.

Maloney Properties has required tenants at other affordable housing developments in Massachusetts it manages to sign contracts committing to such things as counseling programs and prohibiting problem family members from visiting, Kelly said.

"What we try to do is to work with people to get them to do what needs to be done," she said.

"We don't try to make people more responsible. What we do is try to help them be more responsible and to help them see that this is an opportunity," Lee said.

The most obvious difference between the housing authority and the private developer as landlords can be found by comparing their leases. The housing authority uses a six-page lease, while the proposed lease to rent a Newport Heights unit will be 35 pages long.

The housing authority pays the full cost of utilities, according to its lease, while the Newport Heights lease states that tenants will be responsible for paying bills for heat, electricity and gas directly to the appropriate utility company.

The housing authority lease prohibits tenants from having guests remain for "an unreasonable length of time without prior consent from the management," but it has long had a problem with tenants allowing others who are not listed on their lease to live with them.

The Newport Heights lease is much more explicit. Tenants must notify Maloney Properties in writing of all overnight guests staying on the premises for more than two weeks. That notification must indicate how long the guest is staying.

If such visits last for more than a month, the tenant must notify the property manager in writing stating the reasons for the extended visit and receive written authorization from the landlord.

Also, the Newport Heights lease outlines security deposits in detail, explaining the procedures for refunding deposits. The housing authority's includes one paragraph indicating that the tenant shall pay a security deposit equal to one month's rent, but officials say that security deposits are often waived.

Tenants not worried about losing security deposits when they move out have sometimes created extra work for the housing authority's maintenance staff. Maintenance Director Terry Gallagher said his staff has to fix broken tiles, windows and toilets purposely damaged by some former tenants and clean up the debris they leave behind.

"They never thought of it as their home," Gallagher said.

Tenants who recently moved out of 60 Mahan St., took their furniture but left dirty clothing and trash strewn all over the unit. A closet door was pulled off its hinges and thrown across the kitchen floor. The refrigerator contains leftover food growing moldy in bowls.

Vandals entered the unit after the tenants left and scrawled obscenities on the wall in crayon along with anti-police messages. The rear windows of the first floor are now boarded up but the front remains open so staff driving by can check on the unit, Gallagher said.

Since that apartment is among those due to be demolished as part of the second phase of construction, the housing authority won't clean it up and prepare it for new tenants.

Elsewhere in Tonomy Hill, units that are vacated are being kept empty to house phase two residents when they are relocated. The housing authority has not begun moving the phase two residents because a demolition agreement with HUD was not approved until last week and a relocation agreement with Maloney Properties is still being negotiated, said Executive Director Daniel W. Marvelle Jr.

The number of vacant units in Tonomy Hill Wednesday stood at 89, of which 75 have been vacant for more than 60 days. They are becoming a problem, said Patrolman Anthony Piermont, the community oriented police officer assigned to the Tonomy Hill and Park Holm public housing sites. Drugs and weapons have been found in some units, he said.

"It gives some people more places to hide," Piermont said. "Sometimes they're popping the windows and breaking in. Sometimes there's some extra keys out there."

Police and maintenance staffers are checking the vacant units several times a week, Gallagher and Piermont said.

The housing authority lease prohibits the storage of junk vehicles, yet throughout Tonomy Hill one can find unregistered cars kept for spare parts. It is common to find vehicles with flat tires stored in driveways for long periods of time.

Piermont said that housing authority streets are not city streets so police have no authority to ticket and tow the vehicles. Moreover, the housing authority is required to give notice to the owners of junk cars to order them removed, he said.

Around Tonomy Hill, residents have mixed views on whether they would want to live in Newport Heights. Some expressed concerns about what they feared would become aggressive property management or they worried about shouldering the financial burden of utility bills.

In a survey of 205 Tonomy Hill households completed over the summer by New Visions for Newport County, only 24 percent of residents said they would prefer to live in Newport Heights.

Jersky wants to live in Newport Heights in one of its five-bedroom units, which would provide much needed space and a second bathroom for her, her husband and their four children, now squeezed in a three-bedroom unit.

More than modern amenities, however, Jersky said she wants to feel safe. Newport Heights buildings will have a security system on the screens of first floor windows. The development would be designed so that each unit has a private, fenced back yard accessible only from the unit itself, eliminating the grassy void now existing between rows of Tonomy Hill buildings.

The developer has a budget for security service on weeknights and weekends but will wait to evaluate the need for it as the project evolves, Lee said. He believes police patrols and security guards may convey the wrong impression.

Some of Jersky's neighbors are skeptical.

"If it's going to be just like Tonomy Hill with new buildings, I don't want to move in," said Mahan Street resident Kerrie Fobert, 28.

"People out here are constantly fighting over stupid things, whose boyfriend looked at whose girlfriend. Another big problem is drugs," she said. "There is a lot of drama out here."

Fobert would prefer to find an apartment elsewhere with a Section 8 voucher, though she knows there is very limited availability for such rental housing in the area. She said she might also prefer another public housing unit in the Park Holm or Chapel Terrace developments.

For now, she is growing impatient waiting for word on relocation. "They told us to start packing in June," she said. "I packed almost all my winter stuff."

In small ways, though, some on Mahan Street already see life changing for the better. Justin DiCarlo, 10, out riding his bike one recent afternoon on Mahan Street said Newport Heights has already made his life brighter.