Stop this HUFD project: Christina Gralinski and a neighbor, Tom Wickizer, stand along a sign erected on the front lawn of Gralinski's house. Photo by MEL TOADVINE

A group of neighborhood residents off of Stacey Blvd. are upset because they say a low-income housing complex, which had been 16 townhouses before it was abandoned by a developer, is being renovated in their community and they were never told about it.

Residents of Camelot Gardens point to the unfinished pink townhouse building in their development as you enter their neighborhood from Beth Stacey Blvd. The units, which are deemed to be housing under HUD, face Beth Stacey but the entrance to the complex is in the Camelot Gardens neighborhood.

Christina Gralinski’s house is the first you see as you enter a neighborhood of well-kept lawns and nice houses that have been affected by the economic turndown which have left their homes worth less than they were a few years ago.

Gralinski has a big sign in her front yard urging folks to help them fight the HUD housing project.

Residents of the neighborhood are so angry that they have appealed to Lee County Commission Frank Man who has agreed to meet with them on May 6 at 10 a.m. in the conference room near his office in the downtown Fort Myers Courthouse.

Affordable Housing. The 16 town houses that are planned to become a low income complex for low income residents is shown behind this "No Trespassing" sign. Photo by MEL TOADVINE

Then they meet again for the second time on May 12 with the Lehigh Community Planning Corp. (LACPC). That meeting is at 6:30 p.m. and will be at the Veterans Park Community Center.

When they attended the LACPC last month to get help in stopping the low income complex from being built in their neighborhood, they caught members off guard.

Gralinski is being joined by people like Tom Wickizer and Jack Reynolds who are keeping residents informed about the complex for low income families.

Already they have nearly a 100 signatures on a petition to stop the HUD project in its tracks, but they don’t know how the story is going to end, since they have been told that HUD does not have to notify nearby residents where it is going to begin a HUD housing project.

Nobody on the LACPC board knew about the low-income units and LACPC Chairman Edd Weiner said he was embarrassed because nobody had notified or called the LACPC to say they wanted to refurbish a town house complex for low income or affordable income housing. Several from the neighborhood were at the LCPC meeting and all angry and wanted some answers.

Neighborhood off Beth Stacy

Weiner said he would look into the matter and asked them come back on May 12 when the LACPC meets again.

Today painters and workers are at the complex finishing up the townhouse complex. When it is finished, residents of Camelot Gardens say it will be housing for low-income people and they don’t want it there and don’t know why they were kep in the dark about it.

Weiner wrote a letter to Ann Arnall, a county official involved in the project, and said, “It seems to me that once again, we are embarking on a road beset with land mines only because, once again, the local residents and the LACPC have not been consulted. As president of the LACPC and chairman of the Economic Development Board in Lehigh, I can’t tell you how embarrassing it is to answer questions or to be able to answer questions without any information, input to your program, or even verification or whether this program fits into the new approved Compressive (land use) Plan for Lehigh Acres.”

Weiner said that as mentioned at the last Weed and Seed Steering Committee meeting, Lehigh Acres being grouped together with Harlem Heights, Paloma Park, is just wrong. Making all of Lehigh Acres a HUD project is just wrong.”

Gralinski said she and neighbors fear the problems the project may bring to their quiet neighborhood. She said she is afraid of the possibility of drugs and crime that she says are attracted to such projects.

“School buses stop there to pick up and let our children off in our neighborhood. We do not like it that a HUD complex is at the very spot,” she said.

Weiner went on to write that “The values of the properties as if not low enough in this community are going to plummet even more if this train keeps heading down the track.

“Although Lehigh Acres appreciates the efforts of the county in trying to stabilize our housing crises, which in part has been created by the county’s poor planning practices and development requirements, through the Neighborhood Stabilization Program, if the entire community is going to be included in the work area, we would prefer NOT to receive this funding.”

He went on to ask housing officials to find out more about Lehigh Acres “before you get much deeper into this” by consulting the LACPC, the Economic Development Board and the Lehigh Acres Chamber of Commerce to get some salient information on what the community Lehigh is all about.

Gralinski said her neighbors are afraid that property values will go down if the housing project is allowed to open.

“It’s not just us; we want the people of Lehigh to help us fight this. If this can happen in our neighborhood and nobody chose to tell us, then it can happen in other neighborhoods in

Lehigh Acres.

“We’ve seen what happens to other HUD projects and we don’t want that here,” she said. “We even gotten in touch with Gov. Crist’s office and they said they would see what they could about it.”