The Housing Authority

Topping Brown's list of criticisms is the Housing Authority's expensive receivership.

The Housing Authority pays the Boston-based Jeff Lines and TAG Associates $275,000 annually to oversee the board (though Lines says he has never overruled any of the local commissioners' decisions). Brown says it's absurd to pay Lines a three-figure salary to oversee a housing authority halfway across the country.

"This man is eating up our budget with that kind of money," she says. "He ought to be ashamed of his self, pimping off us. I've never seen somebody make as much as he makes, and he doesn't even have an office here."

Whipple should be ashamed, too, she says. The federal judge (who declined to speak with the Pitch) is the one who will decide when the nation's longest-running housing receivership will end. Brown says it's a sin that Whipple is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars that could be spent improving conditions for tenants.

What she lacks in respect for the Housing Authority itself, she makes up for in pride for her home turf. She knows that plenty of people say they'd rather live anywhere but Chouteau.

"If they tell me that, I will tell them something," she says hotly. "Don't talk about where I live."

That's why she says what she feels.

"If I'm wrong, I don't care," she says. "Prove that I'm wrong."

Last summer proved Brown right. On May 11, 2006, Brown took the bus to the federal courthouse for a hearing about the receivership. She showed up early to give Whipple's clerk a handwritten statement. It was evident, she wrote, that the Housing Authority's staff "can't handle Chouteau."

She sat in the hearing with a few other tenants. For months, residents had complained about roaches and spiders and rodent holes. A federal inspection backed up their claims. Inspectors reviewed 23 units and found that more than half of the doors wouldn't lock. Close to a third of the inspected apartments had busted sinks, clogged toilets or broken refrigerators. Three were infested with insects.

After appealing to Whipple, Brown took her concerns to Commissioner Ellen King. "I listen because I've learned she's real. She keeps it real," King says. "She makes people mad, but we all have to be able to accept the truth where it lies."

King brought Levin and several other board members to Chouteau.

Levin, the Legal Aid attorney who had originally filed the class-action lawsuit, was appalled. On May 18, she wrote an angry letter to Lines. "How could this have passed HAKC's inspection?" she asked.

Ed Lowndes, the Housing Authority's director, quickly hired a new property manager, but conditions didn't change. In July, Brown took the commissioners on another tour. Levin sent an outraged letter to Lowndes, noting the stench of urine, the moldy windowsills and the filthy floors in Chouteau's community center. "We could not believe that children would be having dinner at that center in a few hours," she wrote.

Levin also called the crime situation "horrific."

She threatened that Chouteau's decline was making her rethink her recommendation to end the receivership. In response, the Housing Authority increased security at Chouteau. Managers started issuing photo ID cards and parking stickers to residents. They instituted a strict towing policy for unregistered vehicles and mandatory security meetings for tenants. Residents said crime spiked as soon as the manager's car left the lot in the evenings, so managers kept the office open until midnight.

Finally, administrators agreed that crime at Chouteau was "severe." But progress on the ground was slow. In August, Brown again wrote to Whipple, who wouldn't give her a meeting. "Would you want to live here yourself?" she asked. "Would you want your children to stay here?"

She ended the letter with a dramatic prediction: "Our lives are at stake."

King agreed with Brown. "I just remember thinking, I know something's going to happen," she says.

On October 1, it did. Damarco Harris claimed that he wasn't at Chouteau Courts the day someone killed Clyde Holden. In a statement to police and in a handwritten letter to Jackson County Circuit Judge Kathleen Forsythe, the 20-year-old said he hadn't been at the housing complex for months. But witnesses told a different story, and, in July, Harris will go to trial on second-degree murder charges.

According to court documents, Chouteau residents knew Harris as "Fuzz." In his letter to Forsythe, Harris admitted to selling drugs in the complex. Witnesses to the October 1 shooting claimed that Harris was one of the men gambling and drinking outside the building at 573 Tracy on the Sunday morning Holden was shot. A guy called Easy bought the beer.

Shortly before noon, witnesses heard Harris and Holden get into it over a $5 wager. Harris started yelling and allegedly pulled out a black handgun, then shook it at Holden. He ordered a 10-year-old kid who was hanging around the scene to go home. Before the kid reached his front door, shots rang out. Several witnesses reported seeing Holden's body crumple to the ground and Harris flee with gun in hand.

Later that night, e-mails began flying between Housing Authority officials. In several short messages exchanged with staff and board members, Lowndes stressed that Holden was not an HAKC resident.