Karen Klick
Biography
Karen Klick is the deputy director at Piedmont Housing Alliance, where she’s worked since 1999. She’s also worked at PHA’s chief operating officer, senior planner, and director of fair housing and special projects.
Audio
What does your job entail on a day-to-day basis?
How did PHA’s relationship with Friendship Court come about?
When do you remember the first real conversations emerging about redevelopment at Friendship Court? What was the first step?
What was involved in tailor-fitting PHA’s community engagement process to be specific to Friendship Court residents?
What were some of the most powerful moments of the resident engagement process?
How have you seen Charlottesville change over the last two decades?
How does PHA address the other aspects of poverty, not just housing?
What has shifted at PHA over the last three years of redevelopment at Friendship Court? How have you seen Sunshine Mathon be a part of that?
What have been some of the changes residents have made to the initial draft version of the master plan issued in 2016?
What do you think about intentional mixed-income communities?
Are there any other challenges that you see? And how do you strike a balance?
The Reimagining of Friendship Court
The redevelopment of Friendship Court is slated to be the largest new construction of low-income housing undertaken in Charlottesville in more than two decades. The plan alone is groundbreaking, having been directly created by current Section 8 residents in partnership with Piedmont Housing Alliance. City staff calls it the most nuanced and complex plan they’ve ever encountered. It ambitiously attempts to balance promises of zero resident displacement with the city’s broader affordable housing needs, while also calling for hundreds of new, likely higher-income, residents to move in, as residents hope to de-stigmatize the lasting effects of poverty born out of generations of racist government policy and neglect.
This year will be the make-or-break year for Friendship Court’s redevelopment efforts. Millions of dollars in city, federal, and private funding stand between the massive plan and the highly anticipated 2020 groundbreaking. And while the green lights have begun to align and most residents are excited, the plan has its critics — those who call for greater levels of resident autonomy, greater security measures to guard against social and cultural displacement, and greater reparations for past wrongs.
In crafting this project, we’ve tried to tackle all of this and more by separating the longer narratives into five major questions:
Part 1: What is the plan?
Part 2: How did we get here?
Part 3: Does mixed-income housing work?
Part 4: Who does Friendship Court belong to?
Part 5: What’s next?
But we also wanted to give you access to as much of our reporting as possible, so we’ve created a timeline that details the history of this area, dating back 150 years, through the use of more than 130 maps, documents, archived articles, and photographs. Similarly, we wanted you to actually hear each of the two dozen long-form interviews we conducted, and not merely the portions we’ve included in the individual stories. So we’ve included more than 300 audio clips throughout the story: in the articles, the timeline, and on each person’s profile page. Our hope is that with all this, more of the picture will begin to emerge, and that, as we stand ready to make powerful and significant changes in the city, we all can help craft the solutions.
