How Allied Drive descended into chaos
8:03 PM 4/19/04
Andy Hall and Dean Mosiman Wisconsin State Journal

Allied Drive is isolated. <

Decayed. <

Poor. <

Menacing. <

Full of children. <

It's the neighborhood that got left behind. <

A decade of neglect and half-steps by local officials and property owners drove the area deeper into danger and despair, creating the worst place to live in Dane County, a Wisconsin State Journal investigation shows. <

Fights, domestic abuse, gunfire, drug dealing and decrepit housing infested the neighborhood of 5,000 people on Madison's southwest border with Fitchburg during the 1990s, even as local officials achieved national acclaim for rehabilitating other places. <

A dramatic example of the despair and the absence of effective response is a burned-out shell at 2306 Allied Drive. <

Four apartments remain charred and vacant after a tenant committed suicide by igniting cans of gasoline 3years ago. <

The law-abiding people who comprise a majority of the neighborhood pay heavily. They put up with battered apartments. They hear gunfire. They fear for their safety at night. <

Sandra Watkins, a special education assistant raising four grandchildren in Allied Drive, says it's as if government leaders "closed one eye on this neighborhood. <

"I'm sorry to say it, but this is their fault. When you clean out other neighborhoods, where do you think you push that trash to? They're coming here." <

A resident of Allied Drive for two decades, she remembers "when the lawns were all beautiful and green and the flowers were growing." <

Now, Watkins' grandchildren play on bare dirt between buildings, sidestep glass on walkways, and find butts of marijuana "blunts" lying in bushes and hallways. <

Allied Drive is home to a higher concentration of children than any other urban neighborhood in Dane County. <

The 1,100 schoolchildren, many of whom walk past drug-hustling gang members on their way to school buses, scatter to more than 30 schools in two school districts in Madison, Fitchburg and Verona. <

Many children aren't ready to begin school, and once there they struggle - a generation that may later drain social service and police resources. <

Allied Drive also bears the stain of having a higher concentration of police action than any other neighborhood in the county. <

In other Madison neighborhoods in the 1990s, a core of residents organized and became a foundation for renewal. But in Allied Drive, those residents are skeptical, afraid, overwhelmed by daily struggles or simply looking to move. <

It's not that people don't care. <

Watkins, in fact, helped prepare a 1990 Madison plan for reviving Allied Drive. <

That blueprint, much like ones issued this spring by Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz and County Executive Kathleen Falk, offered a vision for reversing Allied's decline, which began in the mid-1970s when the buildings were just a decade old. <

Since the early 1990s, local officials, non-profit agencies and landlords have acted, improving some housing, establishing a small neighborhood center, bringing police and social services, and creating the Madison School District's Allied Learning Center. <

But officials and residents achieved far bigger gains in other rough neighborhoods in the 1990s as intensive, federally funded "Blue Blanket" police patrols routed drug dealers and prostitutes. <

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Once-notorious places such as Sommerset and Eric circles on the South Side, Vera Court on the North Side, Worthington Park on the East Side and Broadway-Simpson (later renamed Broadway-Lake Point) on the South Side became safer and more pleasant. <

That's part of Allied Drive's problem. Demolitions and renovations of drug houses and decrepit apartments forced hundreds of residents, many with addictions, criminal records or poor credit histories, to find housing elsewhere. <

By 1995, violence reports in Allied Drive soared 41 percent over the previous year to the highest rate in the urban area, a State Journal analysis found. <

It showed that declines in police calls elsewhere didn't mean a clear-cut victory over violence. <

Allied Drive was ripe, offering Madison's largest supply of cheap, vacant apartments and a disparate group of about three dozen landlords. Some landlords - out of altruism, desperation or greed - offered housing to residents who couldn't pass background checks in other neighborhoods. <

"What started the neighborhood going bad was when they cleaned up Broadway-Simpson," said Allied Drive resident Troy Barlow, who as a countywide bus driver for Head Start early education program saw more than 50 people displaced by renewal in Broadway-Simpson and elsewhere turn up on his bus route in Allied Drive. <

"They started busting all of them and kicking them out, and they ended up over here." <

The other neighborhoods got help earlier than Allied Drive because they were easier to fix, said Paul Soglin, mayor for 14 years from the 1970s through the mid-1990s. He faulted his successor, Sue Bauman, mayor from 1997 to 2003. "We didn't follow through," Soglin said. <

Bauman said the city has limited resources and she had to continue a multimillion-dollar revitalization of Broadway-Lake Point begun under Soglin. In 2000, she produced a new plan for Allied Drive and later created a $5.5 million money stream from a special taxing district at the nearby Home Depot development. <

But too little happened. <

"This is an area that particularly the city should have invested in years ago," said Stephen Blue, delinquency services manager for the county Department of Human Services. If the city was going to build a community center, "it should have gone into Allied instead of Warner Park," which opened a $4.7 million center in 1999. <

"There was a lot of lip service given to Allied Drive from Fitchburg and by Madison," said Mark Vivian, Fitchburg mayor from 1999 to 2003. "It's morally wrong to just ignore an area in such need. I think we have. I'll take some of the responsibility for that." <

Landlords bear a responsibility, too. <

Henry Stanley, owner of seven Allied Drive apartment buildings and treasurer of the Allied Terrace Apartment Association, said a lack of consistent tenant-screening standards and a fill-apartments-at-any-cost approach of some landlords let troublemakers squeeze in among the area's many good people. It's important that landlords develop screening standards - a key to revival of other rough areas, Stanley said. <

"As a matter of fact, we've been discussing this for a few years now," he said. "Unfortunately since late last year we've slowed down in association activities, and I'm very disappointed about that." <

Adding to Allied's fragility: More than 180 people on probation or parole are concentrated in the neighborhood. <

The core neighborhood, designed for graduate students and young couples, has filled with low-income families - many using federal Section 8 vouchers that landlords elsewhere won't accept. <

Allied Drive offers opportunities to conceal criminal activity in parking lots behind buildings. The hallways and basements of buildings - most two-stories with eight units - provide more hiding places. <

The neighborhood's layout and location keep it isolated and out of sight. Most passing by on Verona Road don't know it's there. <

Half a dozen gangs, including one for girls, are active in Allied Drive. Sales of drugs - crack and powder cocaine, marijuana, heroin and designer drugs - are managed around the clock at prices twice the going rates in Chicago. <

"This is like living in the projects all over again," said Jarrod Hinton, 22, a Chicago native. <

Hinton is part of a flow of low-income people from Chicago, Mexico and other places who have become increasingly concentrated in Allied Drive, where many crowd in with friends or relatives. <

Many residents say they've probably saved their lives by relocating three hours from Chicago, which had 598 murders last year, most of any city in America. <

Henrickus Echols, 23, will pull down his left sock to show scars where a bullet entered and exited. It's a vestige, he says, of his days as a member of the Gangster Disciples in Chicago - and violence he fled with girlfriend Beverly Williams, 22, and their young children a year ago. <

"You have poor people. You have addicts. You have people who prey on poor people and addicts. It's a vicious cycle," Bauman said. <

The cost to taxpayers is high. A one-tenth square mile area in Madison devours a quarter of police staff resources in Madison's 25-square-mile West District. Fitchburg, a city of 35 square miles, devotes about 20 percent of its police resources to problems in the city's square-mile portions of the neighborhood, or helping Madison police. <

Children pay a price, too. Allied Drive students's reading test scores - a key indicator of later success - are the lowest in the Madison and Verona school districts. <

Madison schools Superintendent Art Rainwater and Verona schools Superintendent Bill Conzemius promise a new approach. "We just can't ever have an excuse," Rainwater said. <

A rebirth of Allied Drive will take more cooperation and resources from everyone. <

Stanley, the new owner of the burned-out hulk at 2306 Allied Drive, said it symbolizes neglect of the neighborhood by landlords and public officials. <

"And it leads into a good question of whether or not people who own property are really required to do anything," said Stanley, who acquired the building and two others from Jim Arndt of Janesville for $715,900 in December. <

Stanley pledged to spend at least $50,000 plus sweat equity to fix and reopen the four units. <

Now, government leaders, landlords and non-profit agencies are promising better methods for handling troubled neighborhoods. It's not good enough, they acknowledge, to shift problems from one troubled spot to a vulnerable area, where new cycles of decay and violence take root. <

On Tuesday, Madison officials will propose that the city provide $300,000 toward a campaign by Boys & Girls Club of Dane County to finally build a neighborhood center, including a gymnasium, for the Allied Drive area. <

Allied Drive must be reborn for humanitarian and economic reasons, Soglin said. The cost could reach $15 million in five to 10 years, but the price of failure is more - police, social services, stagnant property values and wasted lives, he said. <

Cieslewicz, who didn't raise Allied Drive as an issue in winning his first term as mayor last spring, has already led the installation of medians to slow traffic, forced the sale of several troubled properties, and offered a vision. <

But he realizes residents are weary of promises. "They're skeptical, as they should be, of any new plan." <