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5.14 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 1 0 7 OUR PLACE Continued from page 63 White flled out an application to move back. He thinks he'll return. Perhaps not, though, if it feels like a generic apartment complex. "I want people to feel like it's a community and not just any other place (where) they just go to live in their house," he says. White pauses on that thought for a few moments and engages the fip side. "Maybe that's what we need to get to, though. Just people living, going to work, minding their own business." J anae Tompson's new neighborhood barely exists. She and about 40 other families live in Sheppard Square's frst new block. Te rest of it is coming together in pieces. On a recent warm afternoon, hammers pound a balcony's frame into place. Forklifts scurry about. A construction worker walks by wearing metal piping on his arm like giant bangle bracelets. Te whole scene makes black street-lamp posts in front of Tompson's building look like props. Her brick townhome, with its bronze-and-black address plate, stands identical to those that stretch down a few doors, an architectural equivalent to those paper dolls that hold hands. "It's peaceful," Tompson says over the throaty purr of heavy machinery. It's much better than her old place, an apartment near Beecher Terrace, a public-housing project just west of downtown. "Tere was so much going on (there) with murders and shoot- ings," she says. Nearly every day, a herd of police and paramedics screeched by. Liv- ing so close to the hospitals now, she hasn't escaped sirens. But there's comfort in living near the healing side of an emergency. A 22-year-old single mother of two girls, she sits on her stoop, eyes squinting from the sun, with an explosion of freckles stretching from cheekbone to cheekbone. Her young daughters, ages two and three, ride their purple and pink princess tricycles in tight loops, careful cubs playing in a work zone. Today they watch as men carry thick rolls of grass to each townhome's front yard, unroll- ing them like carpeting. Tis past fall, Tompson, who works part- time cleaning commercial buildings, would ride the No. 23 bus down Broadway to check on the progress of the new Sheppard Square. "Just to take a peak," she says with a smile. And so on the frst day applications were being accepted at the rent ofce, she and her sister waited in line for an hour. It was a 34-degree November morning. Tey were about 10th in line. Te woman at the front of the line, a bony 28-year-old, shook in the chilly air, cursing her thin jacket. She'd woken at 7:30 and walked about a mile and a half to make sure she'd secure a spot in the front of the line. It paid of. Te wait list for the new Sheppard Square has swelled to more than 1,200 people. Before Tompson moved in March, photographers from every local TV station followed her as she toured her apartment for the frst time — into the bright living room with crisp white walls, up the carpeted stairs, as she opened the door to the bath- room in her master suite. "It's beautiful," she proclaimed on WDRB. "It's like I'm living in paradise." She says the atmosphere alone has her dreaming bigger. She wants to fnish her GED, maybe go to college. But on this day, as she looks out at the empty lot across the street, one concern remains. "I'm kind of worried what it's going to be like when other people move in," she says. She had friends at the old Sheppard Square. A lot of trouble didn't come from tenants, but others, like couch-crashers. "I just don't want it to turn into what it used to be. I think it can turn into that real quick," she says. Teresa Fowler lives just down the block from Tompson. She's a spunky 64 with a puf of red hair — cherry popsicle red, not orange-red. "Do I not have my tubes in?" she asks herself out loud one morning while sitting on the edge of her bed. She swivels her head in search of plastic nasal tubes that attach her to a hissing oxygen machine. She spends a lot of her time in bed, a pufy pal- ette of creams and brown. It's located right near a window where she's watched a dirt lot go from coughing dust to holding the frame of what she assumes are apartments. "It sorta looks like a church," she says with a laugh, revealing two childlike dimples. For 33 years she lived at the old Sheppard Square. She's one of about 130 former residents who've applied to return. Nine have been approved. Fourteen more await avail- able units. In the Louisville Metro Housing Authority's other HOPE VI projects, few former residents have returned. Of the 443 units at Liberty Green (formerly Clarksdale), just more than 40 have former Clarksdale tenants. Part of that may be because people don't want to move again. Fowler never wanted to leave the old Sheppard Square in the frst place. It felt so disruptive, forced. She cried the day her children packed up her unit and hauled it away. Strict rules at the new place may also pre- vent a lot of old residents from coming back. First of, no smoking inside. It's strongly suggested residents recycle and compost, part of a larger efort to make the new Sheppard Square a "green" neighborhood. Unlike the old place, you pay your own utilities and you must have a job or other source of steady income. "Tey're cutting out a whole lot of nonsense," Fowler says. "Shootings and stuf? Tey're not having it. . . . You're not bringing this to our area now. Tis is our new place." Like Tompson, when Fowler frst walked into her new apartment she fell in love. It had a dishwasher! A kitchen island! "Tere's more room," she says. In the old Sheppard Square it was hard to maneuver her walker around. Tis place has a bright, open feel. She shares it with her seven-year-old grand- son, Telvon. His frst time through the door he sprinted to a second bathroom. "My own bathroom!" he declared. "I'm glad to be back," Fowler says, gazing out her bedroom window. A pack of yellow hard-hats crawl on the roof of that church- looking building just down the street. It felt lonely, isolating, at her temporary home in west Louisville. Te smooth transition home has softened her initial emotions toward HOPE VI. Back in 2011, she was certain this project was nothing more than a push to get all black people living in west Louisville, out of the downtown area. "I got a change of heart," she says, smiling. Being that Fowler's health keeps her in bed, that window of to her right has turned her into a bit of a neighborhood sociologist, with a splash of spy. She's tallied more young tenants than old. Without a playground as of yet, kids confne play to a strip of sidewalk. And unlike the old place, there's been "a whole lot of somebody else" — white people. While the two other HOPE VI projects have remained largely African-American, LMHA thinks Sheppard Square, with its proximity to the Highlands and downtown, will evolve into a diverse blend of races. "I got no prob- lem with mixture," Fowler says. Out of this new place, most just want a nice community, maybe a few shops and restaurants, a friendly neighborhood, the kind where people watch out for each other. At this point, Fowler has no plans on moving ever again. "I'm back," she says. "I am back." So her grandson, Telvon, may wind up part of the last generation of kids who intimately know two Sheppard Squares, before and after. 80-112 BACK.indd 107 4/21/14 11:38 AM