By Bill Dries - The Daily News -

Chain link fences went up around the four Memphis Housing Authority high-rises earlier this month.

The renovation work that is about to begin on the public housing units in the next year comes as the city prepares to begin demolition of Cleaborn Homes on April 12.

Both efforts are milestones in the campaign by the past two mayoral administrations – Willie Herenton and A C Wharton Jr. – to rid the city of public housing.

City leaders gathered last week at what will soon be the last large public housing development left standing as the city got a different kind of grant from the federal department of Housing and Urban Development. The $250,000 HUD planning grant is for the renewal of the area in and around Foote Homes.

But Memphis Housing Authority board chairman Ricky E. Wilkins made it clear the future of the area should include those who now live in the area – but not Foote Homes.

We’ll be able to drive around Memphis … and not see a single unit of public housing,” Wilkins told a small crowd under a pavilion at Foote Homes just off Danny Thomas Boulevard.

“That will be a great day and I’m looking forward to it.”

With HOPE VI grants from HUD since the late 1990s, the Herenton administration and now the Wharton administration have demolished all of the other large housing developments except Lauderdale Courts and converted all including Lauderdale Courts into mixed-income, mixed-use developments where those eligible for public housing rent subsidized units alongside other citizens who pay fair market value.

The city still hopes for a sixth HOPE VI grant for Foote Homes.

“We don’t have it yet. But we’re almost there,” Wharton said.

As he and the other dignitaries assembled under the pavilion, a group of MHA police patrolled a tight perimeter around it. Minutes before the mayor and others arrived, the police had cleared the area under the pavilion and a few yards out. But outside of the perimeter, there were signs of life that the officers reacted to.

They used shooing gestures in talking with two groups of young men who reacted with raised voices before withdrawing to the sidewalk beyond the gates of the housing project.

Another young man talking loudly to the officers and into a cell phone stood his ground for a time in front of a set of boarded-up units. The officers approached him several times before he walked briskly around the corner of the building still talking into the cell phone with another arm flailing in exaggerated gestures.

Ed Jennings Jr., regional administrator out of HUD’s Atlanta office, said with the plan created with the federal funding, Memphis will compete for an undetermined amount of money in a federal grant program to create a better neighborhood.

“You need to have more than a home – you need a community,” he said. “It’s not two or three people alone just deciding what this is going to look like.”

A Vance Avenue collaborative is already at work trying to build a consensus on what the revitalized area should include.

The group includes planners and students with the University of Memphis as well as developers and some neighborhood groups. The planning began as a conscious effort to include residents in more of the planning before the demolition and redevelopment begin than had been the case in the other HOPE VI remakes.

The area is also ground zero for the 10-year, $1 billion redevelopment plan called Triangle Noir. The goal is to leverage private financing for commercial and residential development in the area that covers not only the neighborhoods south of FedExForum but into South Memphis and across Crump Boulevard.

The HOPE VI grant secured last year for Cleaborn Homes is a part of the Triangle Noir strategy, which is much larger in its scope and area than any of the previous HOPE VI efforts in Memphis.