Communities in period of growing pains

LYNN – With three young sons and work to juggle, Alicia Mills is glad she doesn?t have to spend much time worrying about safety on her street or in the surrounding neighborhood.?We all look after each other. We know who is supposed to be here and who is not,” she said.Mills and her husband, Rick, live in Brickyard Village – a collection of townhouses, duplexes and single-family homes – named after a West Lynn neighborhood carved up by 20th-century urban renewal projects.Centered around a dead-end street called June Lane, Brickyard Village is a neighborhood within a neighborhood that, along with similar small developments on Herbert Street in the Highlands and Suffolk Court on Sagamore Hill, was built by the Housing Authority and Neighborhood Development to give new life to old parts of the city.?People living in these places want what you and I want in our neighborhoods: Safety and basic quality of life,” Lynn Housing Authority Executive Director Charles Gaeta said.Mills agrees with that assessment. The Lynn native and her family moved into their two-bedroom Village house five years ago. At first, she did not want to relocate from Peabody to an area marked by reports of shootings, but a friend living in the neighborhood told her about Brickyard Village and she liked the layout and modern construction of its homes.She knows all of her fellow tenant neighbors and her boys, ages 8, 5 and 3, play with other children on June Lane. Neighbors decorate their homes on holidays and gather for an annual Fourth of July party. Mills said most of her neighbors have lived on June Lane for years.?A lot of people want to stay here,” she said.From the ground upIn a city tracing its origins to the 17th century, Brickyard Village, Herbert Street and Suffolk Court are practically brand-new neighborhoods. All three developments were built by the authority in “target areas” identified by neighbors – even police officers – as needing improvements.Authority planners envisioned Suffolk Court as a starting point for a plan to tie in Sagamore Hill and lower Washington Street to Lynn?s waterfront and downtown, where 250 people now live.Gaeta said planners spent eight years assembling a defunct city parking lot, a water bed factory site and the location of an old china factory into lots for four single-family homes.Herbert Street neighbors reviewed 12 draft plans for transforming the corner near Hollingsworth Street before agreeing to a plan for eight townhouses. Like Brickyard Village, the Herbert Street townhouses were built about 10 years ago, and like West Lynn neighbors, the Highland residents living along Herbert were fed up with problems in the former apartment buildings on the street.?There was blatant drug dealing. They became convinced home ownership was the only way to create change,” Gaeta said.Forty-one families lived in 20 apartments in the buildings and complaints about code enforcement and poor construction brought city inspectors, including fire inspectors, to the apartment buildings.?They were doubled up in those buildings with mattresses from one end to the other,” recalled authority Assistant Director Peggy Phelps.Working with Ward 4 City Councilor Richard Colucci, then-Deputy Police Chief Kevin Coppinger and the late John LeBrasseur, the authority spent $1 million in city and federal tax dollars to buy the Herbert buildings and transform the street, in part, by reducing the number of people living in a relatively small section of the city.?That was a game-changer for that neighborhood,” Gaeta said.Like their Highlands counterparts, West Lynn neighbors fed up with problems on Warren and Shepard streets turned to authority planners for help in cleaning them up.?There was a lot of trash, a lot of crime and abandoned cars,” said Phelps.Using nearby Roseville Square, a residential development carved out of Summer Street in the 1990s, as a model, planners secured $5 million in federal tax credit financing to literally graft a new neighborhoo