You have to treat affordable housing as if it were market housing; you have to make the residents feel they have a choice; you don't want them to think they have no place else to live.

Mark Kelly is regional manager and vice president for Maloney Properties, the manager of Haynes House in the Roxbury section of Boston. The development received a $210,000 Affordable Housing Program grant to help renovate the property in 1994.

We manage Haynes House for Madison Park Development Corporation, the nonprofit owner. Madison Park Village consists of five properties, one of which is Haynes House. The building has 131 units of affordable housing marketed toward low- and moderate-income residents. The building is 30 years old, but we have been managing it for about 20 years.

We call ourselves a company with a human focus. We pay a lot of attention to resident needs. Residents control most of our properties in one way or another. At Madison Park Village residents serve on Madison Park's board and run the residents' organizations that we work with in carrying out the day-to-day management of the building.

Unfortunately, lower Roxbury is going through one of the highest crime rates in 10 years. Lately, we've experienced some very serious violent crimes, including a homicide 10 days ago and shootings almost every week. The 17-year-old victim was the son of a resident but did not live here. This summer we had two homicides on our property: the first was in front of Haynes House and the second was within sight of Haynes House.

This is taking up a lot of our residents' time. We try to get residents to participate in public-safety meetings with the Boston police. We have upgraded our private security and are trying to implement a camera security system at Madison Park Village.

Residents are concerned about an escalating cycle of violence; we've been trying to offer support through youth groups that will get teenagers more involved in activities and help them address crime and violence issues.

We have methods to deal with this; some have proven successful at a number of properties, others are unique approaches for the property in question. We have resident service coordinators who work with youth, families, and the elderly. The camera systems are models that have been used successfully at other sites.

Many residents have grown up at Haynes House. Sometimes a young resident who has grown up here has issues that impact the community. When this happens, we approach the family and try to hook the person up with supportive services. We will sit down with that person and discuss what has been happening. We will try almost every avenue before taking the legal eviction route. We do fairly strict screening of new residents, so we seldom have problems with them.

It's a constant struggle to keep the building up to snuff. It involves having quality maintenance mechanics, good managers, and good systems in place. We have state-of-the-art software for managing maintenance and work orders; we have a number of checks and balances to make sure maintenance is accomplished.
The building still looks good. We have done a good job of keeping it up under some pretty tough circumstances.

Many of the building's systems have not been replaced during the last 30 years, primarily because of funding limitations. We have organized a building committee made up of residents to help us educate residents on the financial limitations faced by the owners and the financial structure that makes it difficult to implement improvements.

We've taken them through the operating budgets and shown them how rents are determined; we've educated them on building systems and gone through the cost and need for roof replacement. We have had a lot of back-and-forth discussion with residents to prioritize various building needs.

I think the key to good management and a healthy building and community is listening to and caring for the residents. You need a multifaceted approach.

Over the last five years I have seen an incredible advance in the degree of sophistication needed to manage affordable housing, including tighter enforcement of Low Income Housing Tax Credit regulations and the desire of owners of affordable housing to have their properties produce income for their activities.

Managing these properties has become much more complicated. It has evolved over time. Both the owners and the properties have grown and changed. We, as a management company, must adapt to this change.

You have to treat affordable housing as if it were market housing; you have to make the residents feel they have a choice; you don't want them to think they have no place else to live. Knowing you have a long wait list and that residents can be replaced easily can affect the way you manage the property. The physical quality of the building could suffer because you don't feel the need to be concerned about curb appeal and residents' quality of life.

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