Two years after deadly gas leak, demolition starts at Columbia’s Allen Benedict Court
Demolition crews arrived at the Allen Benedict Court public housing complex Tuesday to raze the property where two residents died of carbon monoxide poisoning in 2019.
The Columbia Housing Authority plans to redevelop the property into new affordable housing units. But it will take at least another five months to complete the demolition before new construction can start, said Ivory Mathews, CEO of the Housing Authority.
“The bulk of that time will be spent removing the 80-year-old infrastructure underneath the buildings,” she explained.
Built in 1940, Allen Benedict Court was one of the nation’s oldest public housing complexes. In the early years it exclusively housed Black residents and was planned as the counterpart to Gonzales Gardens, a whites-only housing project built the year before.
The 206-unit complex was evacuated in January 2019, after residents Calvin Witherspoon Jr. and Derrick Roper were killed by a gas leak at the property. A subsequent city investigation found 869 code violations at Allen Benedict Court including missing carbon monoxide detectors. The housing authority paid an $11,000 fine and the former CEO, Gilbert Walker, retired soon after, but no criminal charges were filed.
Over the next few months, Housing Authority will begin to seek public input on how to best redevelop the property in order to create a place “that people are completely satisfied to call home,” Mathews said
In the meantime, the Housing Authority is working on preserving the history of Allen Benedict Court by interviewing former residents about what it was like living there, Mathews said. She’s encouraging anyone who has memories of the property to reach out and share their stories through the initiative called “Allen Benedict Court: Forever in My Heart.”
This story was originally published October 5, 2021 at 1:25 PM.
