STARKVILLE — The idea of relocating the tenants of the Starkville Housing Authority’s Pecan Acres development sparked debate in 2018 but has gotten barely a mention in recent years. Despite the lack of progress, the land surrounding Pecan Acres has continued to develop, and the buildings the housing authority wanted to replace aren’t getting any younger.
Is the housing authority still looking to relocate Pecan Acres? Why was relocation proposed in the first place? And what does the future hold for the proposal?
What was the plan?
Pecan Acres is a public housing development managed by the Starkville Housing Authority, which in turn is owned by U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. In 2018 the housing authority announced it was considering a partnership with Tuscaloosa-based real estate developer Chris Dobbs to have him recreate the housing complex somewhere else and exchange the new neighborhood for the land currently occupied by Pecan Acres.
The late Johnny Moore, representing the developer, said during discussions of the proposal that he’d fielded interest in the land on Highway 12 from a hotel, restaurants and a bowling alley.
HUD limits where new developments can be built, ensuring that they don’t displace areas where the majority of residents belong to minority demographics.
The most likely spot was a property along Highway 182 west of Reed Road with up to 346 acres available. The housing authority held several meetings with tenants to discuss the measure and by July said the deal was halfway done, with planners ready to start looking at potential property layouts.
March 2019 was set as the initial construction start, with the housing authority eyeing a 2020 move-in date. With Pecan Acres still sitting next to Highway 12, clearly that never came to pass.
Is relocating Pecan Acres still on the table?
Loren Bell, the chairman of the Starkville Housing Authority’s board of commissioners, told The Dispatch the developer seems to have backed off the proposal since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bell said that while he’d discussed it a couple times after COVID-19’s onset, talks slowed down during the pandemic economy, and it’s been years since relocating Pecan Acres has been seriously discussed.
“Things may come back around, but as of right now we’ve decided to move forward as if it isn’t happening,” he said.
He said the primary driver was the pandemic’s massive spike in construction material costs. Solid brick-and-mortar public housing like Pecan Acres isn’t common today due to its expense, and pandemic changes seem to have shifted the math so the deal no longer made sense.
Moore’s death in 2018 complicated matters even before COVID-19, depriving the developer’s team of its local contact.
Bell also cited difficulties finding a new site for the development, saying the housing authority considered five or six properties with its bosses at HUD but couldn’t settle on one before the pandemic.
Mayor Lynn Spruill noted the proposal had many more moving parts than those typical of real estate investors.
“The proposal was incredibly complex and problematic,” she said. “You had to build an entire project before you could move people and then raze the area on Highway 12. It had so many moving parts and it would take so much money to do that, I think it was doomed from the get-go. It was an extremely complex maneuver to put all those pieces in place.”
All told, while Bell still looked positively on the idea of swapping the land for new buildings, it’s not a prospect the housing authority is actively pursuing in the absence of a private partner.
Dobbs could not be reached for comment by press time.
What are the potential problems with Pecan Acres staying where it is?
Pecan Acres dates back to the 1950s. While Bell said the housing authority has kept up with most maintenance, fully refurbishing the brick and mortar buildings was prohibitively expensive. When Dobbs contacted the housing authority, offering to fully replicate the buildings somewhere else in exchange for the land, Bell leapt at the opportunity.
“If we could find the right place and provide our tenants with a new neighborhood that we wouldn’t have to spend so much money on repairs for several years, we could take that money and use it for other improvements,” Bell said.
While replicating an entire housing development in a style not usually feasible today would’ve been a financial hit, Dobbs would’ve gotten a much more valuable plot of land in exchange.
That central location, however, was a double-edged sword for the proposal. While residents might appreciate having brand-new houses, relocating would mean giving up a central spot with access to surrounding retail and traffic arteries.
What now? Will Pecan Acres move in the future?
Bell said that if someone brought a similar deal to him today, he’d certainly investigate it. The underlying conditions that prompted the proposal are still in place and only getting stronger as the development ages and Highway 12 grows, he said.
Most concerns voiced by residents during 2018’s discussions were around questions of transportation and access but in the intervening years the adjacent Vowell’s Marketplace grocery and accompanying SMART bus stop have been replaced by Miskelly Furniture.
In Bell’s eyes, the offer was an innovative idea that could have served and still could serve as a model for similar arrangements to come.
“It was exciting,” he said. “We thought we were really on the cusp of something new and different. And it might materialize again, you never know. It’d have to be someone with pretty deep pockets. … But it’s important for us to provide safe and affordable housing for our tenants. If we get an opportunity to get them brand new housing at some point, we’ll certainly explore it.”
Spruill, however, was skeptical that the setup would prove workable.
“I did not see the path forward for it,” she said. “… It seemed to be an on-again, off-again, problematic project because of all the dominoes that had to line up and fall correctly for it to happen.”
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