Carmen Porco from the Ministry of Housing looks back on a life of service to the community
As a child in Virginia, Reverend Carmen Porco wondered why his mother, Theresa, donated money from the family restaurant to help families affected by steel mill layoffs in 1956. He asked his mother why, especially because he knew people were unlikely to pay the money back.
“Don’t worry about it,” Porco remembers his mother replying. “That’s not why we’re doing this. It’s about how I behave towards others on this journey.”
It was an early lesson in how to treat people with dignity.
“My mother was instrumental in teaching me the principles of caring, helping and serving,” Porco said. “After that, I started to look at the bar and restaurant differently. They were probably the first community centers.”
Porco, then 19, came to Milwaukee in 1965 as an intern to work at the Milwaukee Christian Center. His focus was conflict resolution among youth gangs on the city’s south side. As a result, he soon found himself in the midst of the city’s open protest marches led by Father James Groppi and others that lasted 200 consecutive days from August 1967 to April 1968.
Groppi’s mission to pursue justice and equity in housing influenced Porco’s approach to his role in developing and leading the Wisconsin Department of Housing. As CEO, he was responsible for managing six public housing complexes in Madison and Milwaukee, including the Greentree Apartments on the city’s northwest side.
“Father Groppi rekindled in me the desire to say that it cannot just be about preaching,” he said. “It has to be prophetic. It has to be effectively confrontational. It has to be professionally disruptive.”
For 50 years, Porco followed the mantra: “Serve others to serve yourself.”
The mission of Housing Ministries of Wisconsin is to provide residents with housing and development opportunities through social programs and educational resources. The hope is that residents will move beyond public housing and toward home ownership.
In January, Porco passed the baton to 69-year-old Keith Atchley, who had worked side by side with him for 33 years as deputy director of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
“I learned a lot on the business side, but what I learned most was his compassion for people and his drive to seek justice where there may not be any and to give people a home and help them advance in what they do,” Atchley said.
Porco sat down for an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Here are excerpts:
What are you most proud of in the community of Greentree?
I’m proud of integrating Greentree back then. It was considered outside of the inner city, where the white people were moving out of the inner city. Greentree was one of those hubs that was considered a great place to live. There was discrimination because Milwaukee was a very discriminatory city when it came to housing; that’s why Groppi and the housing movement were so important. I’m proud that we were able to do that with the staff who were exposed to this discriminatory culture that they didn’t create. They stayed with me all these years, and we were able to implement the program-based centers and the training to say that this housing can’t just be a shelter for the human spirit, it has to find ways to increase the opportunities for the human spirit to have hope and develop its own destiny.
What were some of the hurdles?
The first hurdle in the 1970s was to release funds for Section 8 housing.
Economic conditions made it difficult for anyone to pay rent, because inflation was extremely oppressive in the 1970s, but Congress had approved the Section 8 program and was trying to implement it. As a result of the skyrocketing rents, people were now being told to pay based on their income rather than the price of their home. Real estate agents and managers were raising their prices like crazy because the government would pay the difference. I met with Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire, chairman of the Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Development (Proxmire, a Democrat, was chairman from 1975 to 1981). I appealed to him to get Section 8 released, and miraculously it worked.
How do you see the future of Greentree?
I think it will continue to be an important housing option for lower income people. And if the program continues to be focused on helping people move up to the next housing bracket, once they achieve stability they can move toward home ownership. It will also continue to help children and youth and some adults who are interested in higher education. That opportunity, I think, will enable this tool that creates upward mobility.
Have your dreams and goals been fulfilled during your 50 years of service?
Yes. When they asked me to do the housing in 1974, I said, “I’ll do it if I can set up these internal programs in the churches.” And they said, “Sure.” But what they didn’t say was that we didn’t have any money. When I found that out — because they didn’t teach you about finances in theological school back then — I was overwhelmed. But then I said I had to find ways to get that kind of money. So (we set about) getting a Section 8 exemption and the real estate tax exemption, and when we paid off the mortgage, we used the money we would normally pay for principal and interest to fund scholarships, so it all came together. It took years, but that’s how it goes sometimes when you change institutions.
The side aspect of my joy is that through the way we manage Greentree, we have proven that we could keep costs lower than the required street level rents and put more money into the real estate and the people. In 1998, we built the Greentree-Teutonia Learning Center to house all of these programs that have now demonstrated both financial success and individual success in making people’s dreams come true.
Is there anything you would have done differently?
I wish I had a law degree so I could legally defend my beliefs instead of having to rely on the good conscience of others.
As a person of faith, what do you hope to do when your time on this earth is over? What would God say to you about your work?
“I appreciate that you have taken on the challenge of changing the injustice of the system and using the oppressed to create hope, dignity and justice within the system.” I hope he would say, “I appreciate you institutionally challenging the status quo.”
About the project
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel photographer Angela Peterson spent 15 months at the Greentree-Teutonia Apartments, a public housing complex on Milwaukee’s north side. As part of the O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism at Marquette University, Peterson took thousands of photographs, kept a journal, and wrote stories capturing the heartache and triumph of a community that is often overlooked and misunderstood. She was assisted by Marquette students Isabel Bonebrake and Megan Woolard. Marquette University and the program administration had no role in the reporting, editing, or presentation of this project.
Project loans
- Reporter, photographer: Angela Peterson
- Contributing reporters: Alison Dirr, Piet Levy
- Editor: Jill Williams
- Contributing editors: Greg Borowski, Ashley Luthern
- Image editing: Sherman Williams, Berford Gammon
- Editing: Chris Foran, Pete Sullivan
- Assistants to Marquette O’Brien: Isabela Bonebrake, Megan Woolard
- Design: Kyle Slagle, Krista Wilcox
- Social Media: Ridah Syed
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