Thu 12/10 @ 12:15PM
Tue 12/15 @ 9AM
Many people who live outside cities have fixed ideas about what it’s like to live in public housing aka “the projects” — that they’re filled with criminals, drug dealers, the uneducated, unemployed and unemployable.
The ideastream broadcast/podcast Inside The Bricks: Woodhill Homes, which culminates this week with a final live episode featuring residents from Woodhill and members of Cleveland Metropolitan housing Authority (CMHA) administration. It’s the day before CMHA submits its second application for $35 million in federal money to redevelop Woodhill, a project that triggered the series, hosted by ideastream’s Justine Glanville and Woodhill resident Jeanette Marbley. (Previous episodes are available for listening on ideastream’s site as podcasts).
“The real instigating factor here is that CMHA wants to complete rebuild Woodhill in the next few years; they’ve have been aggressively pursuing a grant to do,” says Glanville. “So me and ideastream thought, what if we did some narrative stories from neighborhood now so we could document what life is like there right now. We thought if we documented it, it could hold CMHA a little more accountable to what people in the neighborhood want.
So Glanville started to visit and hang out at Woodhill, talking to residents and getting to know them. That’s how he got to know Marbley.
“I met her very early on when I was going over to Woodhill at one of the local advisory council meetings,” he says. “She’s president of that. I’d just show up from time to time and she was involved because of her role. She and I developed a friendly rapport with each other. We got real comfortable with each other. When it came time to do this podcast, she was the first person who came to mind [to co-host] not just because she was a leader but because we have a nice dialogue with each other.
“Unfortunately we had to record narrative remotely,” he adds. “But the good thing is we got to know each other before the pandemic. Because I started recording last year, I’m so grateful for that because I got to know people face to face, and when I call people now asking them what’s going on, they already know me. People are surprised you go into Woodhill homes as a white guy and they talk to you. I don’t find that surprising. They want to be heard. If you’re friendly to people and you’re interested, sure, they’ll talk to you.”
He says the goal of the series is to share with people who might have entirely negative ideas about public housing — people in areas such as Brecksville, where he grew up without exposure to different kinds of people — the richness and diversity of life in public housing.
“I think we’ve heard the narrative about how bad public housing is for a long time,” he says. “I didn’t want to shy away from difficulties, but I also wanted to make sure we were showing people’s lives in all their dimensions. I wanted to show how people did have agency in their lives, that they were striving after the same meaning in their lives and the same goals that all of us do. Certainly there are limitations from living there but you can have just as rich and fulfilling a life growing up in public housing as in growing up in the suburbs. I think for the residents of Woodhill they’re happy they’re not being just portrayed as victims of the system, but as full human beings. I hope we can open up people’s eyes to that it’s not just gloom and doom.”
In addition to airing the final episode on Tesday December 15, Glanville will moderate a City Club forum on Thursday December 10 about Woodhill, the proposed redevelopment project and its impact on residents. Panelists include Marbley, Jeffrey K. Patterson of CMHA, Joy D. Johnson, executive director of Burten, Bell, Car Development Inc., and Edward Goetz, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Minnesota. Tune in here.
1317 Euclid Ave suite 100, Cleveland, OH 44115
Cleveland, OH 44115