The Authority Behind the Housing: Wheeling Housing Authority and the City’s Long Fight Over Home

Every housing story eventually reaches a public desk.

It may begin in a crowded room, a leaking roof, a coal camp, a rented house with too many families inside, or a neighborhood where people have learned to endure what no family should have to endure. But eventually, if a city is forced to tell the truth about itself, the story reaches government.

In Wheeling, that story led to the creation of the Wheeling Housing Authority.

Today, the Wheeling Housing Authority describes itself as a public agency, chartered by the State of West Virginia and funded in part through the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development to provide subsidized housing for eligible citizens of Ohio County. Its own public history says it has been “Making a Difference in Greater Wheeling since 1937.”

That date matters.

1937 was not just an administrative beginning. It was part of a national moment when American cities were being forced to confront what reformers, physicians, social workers, Black community leaders, and everyday families had already known for decades: housing was not simply a private inconvenience. Bad housing was a public crisis.

And in Wheeling, especially for Black families and low-income families, that crisis had deep roots.

A City Problem Becomes a Public Responsibility

The Foundation’s earlier posts have already followed this trail through many doorways.

We have written about Black Wheeling families living under conditions that were not just uncomfortable, but dangerous. We have looked at the public language of “Negro housing” in the 1940s, the long pressure for affordable housing, the story of Hil-Dar, the promise of Lincoln Homes, the mining communities tied to Elm Grove, and the way employment, race, school access, and housing all braided together in Wheeling’s history.

Again and again, the pattern is the same: Black residents helped build the city, teach its children, mine its coal, serve its churches, run its fraternal lodges, defend its country, and keep its neighborhoods alive. Yet when it came to decent housing, safe streets, public investment, and municipal imagination, they were too often asked to wait.

The creation of a housing authority did not magically solve that injustice. It did, however, mark a major shift.

It meant the city had a formal public instrument for doing something about housing. Not charity. Not occasional reform. Not private goodwill. A public body with legal authority.

That is why the Wheeling Housing Authority deserves its own place in this story.

What the Law Allowed

West Virginia’s State Housing Law gives us the larger framework.

Under state law, housing authorities were created as public bodies corporate and politic.

That phrase sounds dry, but its meaning was powerful. A housing authority could exist as a legal public instrument capable of studying housing conditions, acquiring property, clearing unsafe structures, building and operating housing developments, borrowing money, issuing bonds, entering contracts, and working with federal agencies.

In plain language: the law gave cities a tool big enough to confront a problem that private charity could not fix.

The law also explained why such authorities were needed. A city could activate a housing authority when unsafe or unsanitary inhabited dwellings existed, or when there was a shortage of safe and sanitary housing available to people of low or moderate income.

That language could have been written for the very Wheeling stories we have been uncovering.

Overcrowding. Unsafe dwellings. Poor sanitation. Substandard housing. Families priced out of decent homes. Neighborhoods where poverty and race narrowed every option.

The state law did not name Black Wheeling directly. It did not need to. The conditions it described were the very conditions that shaped so much of Black urban life across the country, including in the Upper Ohio Valley.

Why Wheeling Needed the Authority

By the time Wheeling’s housing authority emerged, the city had already lived through generations of unequal housing conditions.

Industrial Wheeling produced wealth, but not evenly. Coal, steel, rail, river commerce, and manufacturing shaped the region. Black workers were essential to that economy, but their housing choices were often hemmed in by discrimination, low wages, exclusion, and racial custom.

Some families lived near work because they had to. Some lived where landlords would rent to them. Some lived in neighborhoods that became centers of Black life precisely because exclusion made other options difficult. East Wheeling, North Wheeling, Chapline Street, alley communities, hill communities, mining settlements, and river towns all carry pieces of that larger story.

This is where the city’s housing history meets the Foundation’s mission.

Housing was never just housing. It affected schools. It affected health. It affected employment. It affected family stability. It affected whether children had a quiet place to study, whether elders could age safely, whether a neighborhood could organize, and whether a community’s institutions could survive.

When Wheeling eventually turned toward public housing, it was responding to a need that had been building for a very long time.

From Public Housing to a Two-Part Structure

The modern story, however, is not only about the Wheeling Housing Authority by itself.

A later chapter introduces Wheeling Neighborhood Ventures, Incorporated, often abbreviated as WNV. Public records from the West Virginia Secretary of State show that Wheeling Neighborhood Ventures was established in 1998 as a domestic nonprofit corporation with a business purpose tied to real estate and rental and leasing activities. The same public filing lists its designated office and principal office at 11 Community Street, the same address used by the Wheeling Housing Authority.

WHA’s own website describes Wheeling Neighborhood Ventures as its subsidiary. It also directs applicants to separate forms depending on whether they are applying for WHA public housing and Housing Choice Voucher programs, or WNV properties such as Historic North Wheeling, Jacob Street Apartments, and Wheeling Heights.

That matters.

It shows that the local housing system evolved from a traditional public housing authority model into something more layered: a public agency on one side, and an affiliated nonprofit real-estate/development arm on the other. This kind of structure is not unique to Wheeling.

Across the country, housing authorities have often used affiliated nonprofits, instrumentalities, and development partners to pursue grants, redevelop older public housing, use tax-credit financing, manage mixed-income properties, and move in a world where public housing policy has become increasingly complex.

In Wheeling, the public-facing result can be seen in several properties. WHA’s own pages state that Wheeling Neighborhood Ventures, in partnership with WHA, offers Historic North Wheeling, Wheeling Heights, and Jacob Street Apartments. These communities were constructed through a HOPE VI grant, creating new neighborhoods and in some areas replacing outdated housing. The properties also introduced a mixed-income model.

That is a major turn in the story.

It shifts the frame from “public housing project” to “redevelopment.” From one public authority to a network of public, nonprofit, federal, and real-estate relationships. From the old language of slum clearance to the newer language of mixed-income neighborhoods.

And with that shift comes both possibility and tension.

The Promise and the Problem of Two Halves

The promise is clear enough.

An affiliated nonprofit can give a housing authority more tools. It can help pursue funding streams that a traditional public agency may struggle to access. It can participate in redevelopment. It can manage properties. It can move older housing stock into new models. It can help replace outdated buildings with safer, more modern communities.

For a city with Wheeling’s long history of housing need, those tools matter.

But the tension is just as real.

When a public authority and an affiliated nonprofit operate side by side, the public mission can become harder for ordinary residents to see.

Who owns which property?

Who manages it?

Which board is responsible?

Which rules apply?

Where does public accountability end and corporate discretion begin?

When residents have concerns, which “half” of the structure do they actually face?

This is not, by itself, an accusation of wrongdoing. It is a governance question.

And it is a serious one.

Housing authorities exist to serve people whose housing options are limited. Their mission is public. Their residents are often among the most vulnerable people in a city. When those authorities also operate through development arms, property-management structures, partnerships, and mixed-income models, transparency becomes essential.

The potential conflict is not always a scandal. Sometimes it is a built-in tension.

A housing authority is supposed to protect the public mission. A development arm may be expected to make projects financially workable. A property manager may have to enforce leases. A redevelopment partner may focus on construction, finance, and compliance. A city may want revitalization. Residents may simply want a safe, affordable, dignified place to live.

Those goals can align.

But they can also pull against each other.

That is why the history of WHA and WNV deserves careful attention, especially in a city where housing policy has so often affected Black residents, low-income families, and neighborhoods already carrying the weight of earlier exclusion.

Before the Projects, a Fight Over Power

One important legal thread belongs in this story because it shows that public housing in Wheeling did not arrive quietly or automatically.

Before the buildings, before the later housing projects, before the modern structure of the Wheeling Housing Authority and Wheeling Neighborhood Ventures, there was a basic civic question:

Who had the power to decide Wheeling’s housing future?

In December 1938, Wheeling City Council passed an ordinance allowing the city to enter into a cooperation agreement with the Wheeling Housing Authority. By January 1939, the city and the Authority had entered into an agreement connected to the construction of public housing in Wheeling. But the matter did not end there.

More than 1,000 Wheeling voters signed a petition asking council to repeal the ordinance.

That dispute reached the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia in Bachmann v. Goodwin.

The case was not simply about bricks, contracts, or procedure. It revealed that from the very beginning, public housing carried political weight. The court held that the citizens’ petition could not simply be ignored. Under Wheeling’s charter, council either had to adopt the proposed repeal ordinance or submit it to the voters. In other words, even at the birth of public housing in Wheeling, the question of housing was also a question of democracy.

That matters for our Foundation’s readers because so many later housing decisions in Wheeling would turn on the same deeper questions: who defines a neighborhood as a problem, who gets moved, who receives investment, who benefits from redevelopment, and who is left to live with the consequences?

A companion case decided the same day, Chapman v. Housing Authority, shows the other side of the legal moment. In that case, the state’s highest court upheld the broader public purpose behind housing authorities, slum clearance, and low-cost housing. The court accepted the idea that unsafe and overcrowded housing was not merely a private hardship, but a public concern affecting health, safety, morals, and the welfare of the whole community. It also recognized that the “novelty” of public housing did not make it any less legitimate as a public purpose.

Taken together, these cases help frame the long arc of Wheeling’s housing story. Public housing was born from real need, given strength by law, and surrounded from the beginning by public tension. The law gave cities tools to confront dangerous living conditions. But those tools also required vigilance. Power used in the name of reform could build homes, clear land, reshape neighborhoods, and later create complicated institutional structures that deserve careful public attention.

For Wheeling, that is the lesson hiding inside the courtroom record. The Housing Authority was never just an agency. It was a promise, a legal experiment, a political battleground, and eventually a major force in deciding what parts of the city would be preserved, rebuilt, removed, or reimagined.

“Brick for Brick”: The Policy Question Behind Redevelopment

One national policy phrase belongs in this story because it gets directly to the moral center of public housing redevelopment: “brick for brick.”

In formal HUD language, this is the principle of one-for-one replacement of lower-income dwelling units. The idea was simple but powerful: if federally assisted activity demolished or converted lower-income housing, those homes could not simply disappear from the map. Comparable lower-income dwelling units had to be replaced, including attention to number, size, location, timing, funding, and long-term affordability.

HUD’s regulation required replacement units to be sufficient “in number and size” and, where feasible, located in the same neighborhood as the units being replaced. It also required those replacement units to remain available as lower-income housing for at least ten years. 24 CFR § 42.375

That is why “brick for brick” was both radical and controversial.

To housing advocates, it was a necessary guardrail against the old urban renewal pattern: clear the homes of poor and working-class families, call it progress, and leave the displaced to carry the cost.

To redevelopment officials, housing authorities, and some developers, it could feel restrictive, expensive, and difficult to finance, especially when the goal was to replace aging public housing with mixed-income developments, new ownership models, and more complicated funding streams.

This is where the Wheeling Housing Authority’s modern two-part structure becomes especially important. WHA carries the identity and public obligation of a housing authority.

Wheeling Neighborhood Ventures, as an affiliated nonprofit development arm, represents a newer world of housing tools: redevelopment partnerships, mixed-income properties, tax-credit-style financing, property management distinctions, and projects that do not always look like traditional public housing.

Those tools can produce needed housing. But they also make the accountability harder for ordinary residents to follow.

For the Foundation, “brick for brick” is more than a technical HUD rule. It is a question we should ask of every era of housing reform in Wheeling:

When low-income housing was removed, what replaced it?

Was the replacement truly affordable to the same families?

Was it in the same neighborhood, near the same schools, churches, bus routes, and family networks?

Were residents able to return, or were they quietly scattered by the very process that promised improvement?

Housing history is not only about what was built.

It is also about what was erased, what was promised, what was replaced, and who was allowed to come home.

The Hard Middle of Public Housing

It is tempting to tell public housing history in simple terms. Either as rescue or as failure.

Either as government compassion or government control. Either as progress or displacement.

The truth is more complicated.

Housing authorities were born from real need. They helped create homes where families could live with more stability, more safety, and more dignity. They also operated inside systems shaped by segregation, political compromise, clearance programs, redevelopment pressure, and uneven public investment.

That tension matters.

A housing project could mean relief for a family trapped in dangerous conditions. It could also mean the reshaping of a neighborhood without the community having full power over the decision. A new development could represent hope, but also the city’s decision about who belonged where, who would be moved, and what kinds of neighborhoods were worth preserving.

For the Foundation, that is the heart of the story.

We are not interested in easy villains or polished myths. We are interested in the full record.

Who had power?

Who needed help?

Who made the decisions?

Who benefited?

Who paid the price?

Who was finally housed, and what was lost along the way?

From Policy to Places

The Wheeling Housing Authority’s present-day list of properties offers a visible map of that long public housing story.

Its communities include Booker T. Washington, Garden Park Terrace, Riverview Towers, Luau Manor, Hil-Dar, Historic North Wheeling, Wheeling Heights, Wheeling Heights II, and Jacob Street Apartments.

Those names are more than addresses. They are chapters.

Booker T. Washington carries the name of one of the most significant Black educators in American history. Hil-Dar connects to the city’s later affordable housing efforts and the postwar struggle to meet the needs of families. Jacob Street places us near the geography of Black Wheeling’s churches, clubs, businesses, and social institutions. Historic North Wheeling reminds us that preservation and housing justice are often standing on the same block, waiting for someone to tell the whole story.

Hil-Dar is especially important in this arc. Built in 1963, it came during an era when Wheeling, like many American cities, was trying to answer the problem of housing through large public projects. The development provided townhouse-style apartments, a playground, and a community center. It was built to house families, not just shelter them.

And as our earlier Hil-Dar work explored, the story becomes even richer when we remember what land can mean over time. A place once associated with seasonal beauty, nursery land, and Christmas tradition could later become tied to the promise of affordable housing. That is Wheeling history at its most layered: memory, loss, reuse, need, and hope all occupying the same ground.

A Public Body, Not a Distant Abstraction

One important thing about the Wheeling Housing Authority is that it is not simply a distant federal program dropped onto the city.

It is local. It has a board. Its commissioners are appointed by the Mayor of Wheeling. Its meetings are public. Its decisions are part of civic life.

That matters because housing policy can feel faceless from the outside. But every housing decision has names behind it: commissioners, mayors, directors, planners, residents, neighbors, contractors, advocates, and families.

The WNV layer makes that public accountability even more important, not less.

When a public authority works through an affiliated nonprofit corporation, the paper trail becomes part of the public story. Board minutes, annual reports, property records, grant documents, redevelopment plans, resident notices, and city appointments are not boring administrative leftovers. They are the evidence of how power moved.

For the Foundation, those records matter because the families affected by housing policy were not abstractions. They were grandparents, children, teachers, veterans, church members, workers, and neighbors.

Not Just Buildings, But Power

The deeper we go into Wheeling’s housing history, the clearer one thing becomes: housing is power.

It is the power to decide whose children sleep safely. The power to decide which neighborhoods receive repair and which are allowed to decline. The power to decide whether poor families are blamed for conditions created by public neglect. The power to decide whether Black communities are seen as permanent parts of the city or temporary problems to be managed.

The Wheeling Housing Authority was created because the old way had failed too many people.

Private markets had not housed everyone decently. Segregated custom had not protected Black families. Industrial growth had not guaranteed livable neighborhoods. Charity had not been enough.

So the public had to step in.

That does not mean the public always got it right. It means the public could no longer pretend housing was someone else’s problem.

And in the modern era, it also means the public deserves to understand the structure doing the stepping in.

Why This Story Belongs to the Foundation

The Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation exists to recover, preserve, and tell the stories that explain who we are.

Housing is one of those stories.

It explains where families gathered after work. Where children walked to school. Where churches drew their members. Where fraternal orders recruited leaders. Where teachers, miners, domestic workers, doctors, veterans, and students built lives under pressure. It explains why some neighborhoods became centers of Black excellence and why others were marked by hardship imposed from the outside.

It also reminds us that dignity was never only found in grand institutions. Sometimes it was found in a rented room kept spotless despite neglect. A mother stretching money in a kitchen too small for the family inside it. A child doing homework beside a coal stove. A neighbor carrying groceries up a hill. A church committee raising funds. A civic leader demanding that the city finally see what had been in front of it all along.

The Wheeling Housing Authority sits at the intersection of those lives and those decisions.

Wheeling Neighborhood Ventures adds another layer to that story.

Together, they raise a question every city must be willing to ask: when public need becomes public policy, who keeps the mission at the center?

The Work Ahead

This first installment is only the frame.

The next layer of research should go deeper into the local record: city council minutes, the original 1937 resolution, early annual reports, first board appointments, housing surveys, project approvals, newspaper coverage, WNV incorporation records, HOPE VI grant materials, resident memories, and photographs of the neighborhoods before and after public housing construction.

We should also keep asking how race moved through the system.

Were developments segregated in practice?

How were Black applicants treated?

Which neighborhoods were chosen for clearance or construction?

How did public housing change Black Wheeling’s geography?

How did residents experience these places from the inside?

How did the later WHA/WNV structure reshape accountability?

Those are the questions that turn an institutional history into a people’s history.

And that is always where the Foundation’s work is strongest.

Because the point is not simply to say that Wheeling had a housing authority.

The point is to understand why it needed one.

And to remember the families whose lives made that need impossible to ignore.

-T

Sources and Notes

• Wheeling Housing Authority, official website: Wheeling Housing Authority

• Wheeling Housing Authority, Getting Started page identifying Wheeling Neighborhood Ventures as a subsidiary and distinguishing WHA and WNV applications: Getting Started

• West Virginia Secretary of State business record for Wheeling Neighborhood Ventures, Incorporated: Wheeling Neighborhood Ventures, Incorporated

• Wheeling Housing Authority property listings: WHA Properties

• Wheeling Housing Authority, Hil-Dar property page: Hil-Dar

• Wheeling Housing Authority, Historic North Wheeling property page describing WNV/WHA partnership and HOPE VI redevelopment: Historic North Wheeling

• Wheeling Housing Authority, Wheeling Heights property page describing WNV/WHA partnership and HOPE VI redevelopment: Wheeling Heights

• Wheeling Housing Authority, Jacob Street Apartments property page: Jacob Street Apartments

• Wheeling Housing Authority, Board of Commissioners: Board of Commissioners

• West Virginia Code, State Housing Law: Chapter 16, Article 15

• West Virginia Code, Legislative Declaration: §16-15-2

• West Virginia Code, Creation of Housing Authorities and Determination of Need: §16-15-3

• West Virginia Code, Powers of Housing Authorities: §16-15-7

• West Virginia Code, Annual Reports: §16-15-12

• HUD, Fair Housing Act overview: Housing Discrimination Under the Fair Housing Act

• Bachmann v. Goodwin, 121 W. Va. 303, 3 S.E.2d 532 (1939), Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia, available through Justia. Chapman v. Housing Authority, 121 W. Va.

• Additional context drawn from prior Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation research and blog work on Wheeling housing conditions, Hil-Dar, Lincoln Homes, Black housing in the 1940s, Elm Grove mining communities, Security Settlement, Clay School, and the broader history of African American life in Wheeling.