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Tenants, housing activists celebrate decision not to sell Crystal Towers

Phillip Carter of Crystal Towers United speaks during a rally Tuesday celebrating a decision to take the complex off the market and retain it for public housing. PAUL GARBER/WFDD

Tenants of a downtown Winston-Salem public housing complex gathered Tuesday to celebrate the decision to take the building off the market.

Canceling the plans to sell Crystal Towers means the elderly and disabled residents who live there won't be forced to move.

Samuel Grier has lived in the complex for about 15 years now. He's also a member of Crystal Towers United, a grass-roots group that came together to advocate for keeping the building as public housing.

He says organizing was the key to their victory.

“One person is not going to do it, not in this society,” he says. “We need a group, we need a unit of people, and thank God we got ‘em.”

Last week, the Housing Authority of Winston-Salem, or HAWS, announced plans to work with the city to keep Crystal Towers as public housing rather than sell it.

Several speakers said they were grateful for that decision. The group estimates that the building needs $7 million in repairs over 20 years. Residents too are pushing for important renovations, including what they say is an inadequate and unreliable elevator system. 

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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