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DAYTONA BEACH -- Sweat beaded on David Ellis' forehead as he struggled under the late-afternoon sun, lugging heavy boxes into his brand-new home on International Speedway Boulevard.
The 57-year-old, who used to work on car lots, was the first person to move into the bright-colored brick- and stucco-adorned apartments late Friday afternoon.
"They used to call it the hood," Ellis said of The Villages at Halifax, where Halifax Park once stood.
The complex is the first of three communities to be completed by the city's public Housing Authority after old projects were demolished.
"Now that they're rebuilt, I don't know if they'll call it the hood anymore," he said. "I'm home. I'm not going to move again."
Halifax Park, Bethune Village and Martin Luther King Jr. Apartments were beacons of hope when they were built more than 50 years ago. For many of the early residents in those projects, it was their first home with running water.
Over the years, the projects became islands of despair where the city warehoused poor residents in increasingly deteriorating buildings. It was a fate common to public housing in many cities around the country. When the bulldozers started knocking down Daytona Beach's old projects in 2005, a resident's average income hovered around $10,000 a year, about half the metropolitan average and just above the poverty level.
Ellis, who never lived in public housing, remembered Halifax Park as looking "like a graveyard." He was stunned recently when he rode his bicycle past the new Villages at Halifax.
"It looked like a dream come true," he said.
The Villages at Halifax is the prototype for the future of public housing. Seed money for construction came from a federal program called HOPE VI. More HERE
