Greg Rosalski

On both sides of the street were these three-story tall brick apartment buildings.

Wysina told me that back in the day, none of those buildings had doors onto the street.

Like it was just one long brick wall with a few windows for the length of the whole block.

You didn't have a door.

Your door was in the inside.

So it was kind of, it was like closed off to the street.

The old buildings, they were really isolated from the outside world.

To get inside, you had to enter in through this courtyard that basically only someone from Richard Allen would even go into.

Like, I call it the pit.

Like, you were just in the middle of the pit.

It was almost like the old version of the Richard Allen homes was designed to keep people from the projects from interacting with anyone who wasn't also from the projects.

From there, Wysina walked me over a couple blocks to the new buildings that came in with Hope Six.

Two-story brick houses facing onto the street, each with their own front yard.

I mean, these houses have like a lot of space between them, right?

Like it's almost like we're in the suburbs a little bit.

Instead of being disconnected on its own island, the public housing in the new Richard Allen Homes is open to the surrounding neighborhood.

It's connected to it.

And on blocks where there used to be just public housing for low-income people, now there's housing for people with different incomes.

It literally transformed the neighborhood economically.

Raj and his colleagues looked at the kids who grew up in the revitalized Hope Six developments and saw what they were earning as adults at age 30.