ROME CITY – The outer doors to Sylvan Manor are heavy and old.

They’ll be gone soon, replaced by fully automatic, handicap-accessible doors paid for with federal stimulus funds.

Rome City Housing Authority, which operates the low-income home for elderly residents and people with disabilities by Sylvan Lake and a family apartment complex nearby, received about $85,000 in stimulus grants.

“We were able to do some things that needed to be done that we would have had to wait longer to do,” said Cara Sisson, housing authority director. “I was very pleased.”

The Rome City grants are a small part of the stimulus funds for modernizing and renovating America’s public housing. While the money has helped projects that otherwise would have been pushed down the line, local housing directors say it came with so many strings and deadlines – including one last week – that using it has been a challenge.

The distribution list also delivered some disappointment. The Fort Wayne Housing Authority received only a fraction of the money it was after.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 gave housing authorities around the country $4 billion to make capital improvements to their public housing units, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The majority, $3 billion, was divided based on a complex formula and then distributed to 3,200 housing authorities around the nation that could also compete for the remaining $1 billion.

The Fort Wayne Housing Authority received more than $1.6 million in formula grants. But it was denied the two competitive grants it applied for under the “green communities” category to do moderate rehab because the applications did not score high enough to be awarded funds, a HUD spokeswoman said.

HUD oversees massive, nationwide programs for affordable housing and homelessness prevention, as well as housing opportunities for low-income families, the elderly and people with disabilities. Many Americans associate public housing with “projects” in urban centers, characterized by poverty and crime, but low-income housing with rent based on income exists in cities and towns large and small and are operated by housing authorities.

The Fort Wayne Housing Authority operates eight public-housing sites with multiple units, as well as about 50 single-family homes scattered throughout the city.

In Indiana, housing authorities in Gary and Indianapolis were the big winners for stimulus funds, receiving more than $5.8 million and $5 million, respectively.

That breaks down to about $6 per city resident in Fort Wayne and Indianapolis, compared with more than $60 per resident in Gary and East Chicago.

The formula used to determine the grant amounts is not simple. Maynard Scales, Fort Wayne Housing Authority director, said the formula factored in the number of public-housing units a housing authority has, how old they are, demographics, a needs assessment – and that’s just a bare-bones, simplified explanation.

It boils down to need, he said.

“If we were in good shape, then we deserve less money,” Scales said. “We’ve invested a lot in our properties over the years.”

Small towns benefit

Some large sums were given to housing authorities in much smaller communities. The Housing Authority of the City of New Albany, with about 37,000 residents, received the third-highest formula grant in Indiana, more than $2.1 million.

Demand for low-income housing is strong in small communities, including Rome City, a town of less than 2,000 people northwest of Kendallville.

The wait for the 34 family apartments at Warrener Court is nearly a year and a half, according to the Rome City Housing Authority. Sylvan Manor’s senior apartments are full and also difficult to obtain.

With half the apartments overlooking Sylvan Lake, and a community sunroom giving a panoramic view of the peaceful waters, it’s easy to understand why. The lakefront location elevates it above a typical public-housing project.

“It’s so quiet and peaceful here,” Sylvan Manor resident Betty Mackenzie said.

“And it means you don’t have to live with your kids,” Sharon Oliver added.

Oliver laughed as she said it, but she grows more serious when she says she thinks an elderly parent living with children can be a burden. Without a low-income housing option, she wouldn’t be able to afford a place to live on her own, she said.

It’s a concern echoed by several other women gathered in Sylvan Manor’s community room on a recent morning.

With demand what it is, the announcement of the stimulus funds was welcome, said Sisson, the housing director.

Sylvan Manor and Warrener Court both date to the early 1980s. The family apartments are mostly original, so the stimulus funds will go to repainting and repairing the playground and installing new back doors in all 34 apartments.

Some of the money paid to modify the bathtubs in Sylvan Manor to make them easier for residents to step in and out.

So far, Sisson said she’s managed to keep administrative costs far below the 10 percent allowed for stimulus funds, which means more projects can be done. That’s good news for a Noble County economy that saw its unemployment top 14 percent in January, although Sisson said since most of the work hasn’t begun, she can’t say how many jobs the stimulus projects created there.

‘Very confusing’

Of course, when your job is helping low-income people and families have a home, any extra money is welcome.

But the influx of stimulus funds did present challenges, said Jerry Foster, director of the Fremont Housing Authority, which received more than $62,000.

Fremont Housing Authority in Steuben County runs a 40-unit low-income apartment complex for the elderly that is at 95 percent capacity, Foster said.

The stimulus money Fremont received represented about 10 percent more than the housing authority normally gets.

“Really, I hadn’t been looking for money,” he said. “It made us have to do some extra thinking as to where to apply it.”

The money ended up going toward a heating and air-conditioning unit for the community room, lighting and other energy-efficiency changes. But Foster, the only full-time staff in his office, found it difficult to meet all the deadlines and reporting requirements attached to the funds, and he ended up outsourcing some of the administrative tasks.

He’s been spending about $1,000 a quarter for help with those tasks. It seemed new regulations were being created daily, he said, with specific requirements to buy local or buy American that were sometimes difficult to meet.

“It made it very confusing and hard,” he said.

The requirements even presented challenges to larger offices. The Fort Wayne Housing Authority will use its funds for Whispering Oaks, a senior-living complex near its Tall Oaks family apartments on Old Decatur Road.

The money isn’t going toward anything not already in the Fort Wayne Housing Authority’s five-year plan, Scales said. But meeting the added challenge of bureaucratic requirements pushed the plans up against deadlines, he said.

A plan to replace aged properties would have used competitive grant money, but the Fort Wayne Housing Authority’s competitive grant applications were denied.

Scales said he was told the sheer volume of applications made the grants highly competitive, and he wonders whether political factors played into the decisions.

“We were somewhat disappointed,” he said.

But the money it did receive will help jumpstart a project that was already in the works and move others farther up the line, he said.

aturner@jg.net