She laughed. She cried. Let’s just understate it and say LaTisha Brown overflowed with joy and jubilance, excitement and emotion as she toured the nearly completed, four-story apartment building that in a few months will replace apartments, including the one in which she lives, that were outdated 30 years ago.

“This is something to treasure and enjoy,” Brown said as she savored a downtown Austin view from a top-floor apartment.

Brown was among the residents of the Housing Authority of the City of Austin’s Chalmers Courts in East Austin who will move out of the old complex into the new Chalmers South this summer.

On Wednesday, they got their first glimpse inside the building they’ve watched go up in East Austin at East Third Street and Chalmers Avenue. It’s not done, but in it the future residents saw a future beyond their apartments from the distant past.

“We’re going to have a gym!” 87-year-old Hope Valle, who has lived in Chalmers Courts for 10 years, told her adult daughter Nancy Ramirez, who does not live with her.

They’re also going to have central air conditioning, walls they can hang pictures on and the kind of modern plumbing and electricity not doable in Chalmers Courts, which opened in 1939. And they’re going to live in a new building that fits in well with all the other new buildings going up in that gentrifying part of town.

The housing authority’s three vintage complexes in East Austin were among the nation's first public housing projects. Chalmers Courts was for white people. Santa Rita Courts was for Hispanics. And Rosewood Courts was for African Americans.

Like that disgraceful old segregated notion, all three are past their prime.

Chalmers Courts now has 158 units. When the three new phases are done, there will be 400. The old buildings will be torn down, save for two that will be preserved and converted into medical and dental clinics.

The housing authority plans to move 86 tenants into the new Chalmers South this summer. There’ll be laundry facilities in the building and washer and dryer hook-ups in each apartment. No more hanging clothes out to dry on the outdoor racks that have been a dominant feature for generations at the old Chalmers Courts.

“They’re outdated, and the cost of modernizing them and improving them for modern families is prohibitively expensive,” Michael Gerber, the housing authority's president and CEO, said of the units in the old complex.

“The move is going to be challenging,” he said. “We’ve got a large number of seniors. We’ve got a large number of persons with disabilities. We’ve got lots of people who’ve transitioned out of homelessness.

“This is, in many cases, the first stable, safe place they’ve had an opportunity to live in. And asking those folks to trust us, to have confidence in us and to move to a new home at Chalmers South has been a little bit frightening for some of them," he said. "And today they’re going to get a look.”

They did more than look. They oohed. They aahed. And this is before cabinets are installed, walls are painted, and elevators are up and running.

“They’re going to have computers for the children,” Valle told her daughter.

I listened and learned as I overheard people sound amazed by things the more fortunate among us take for granted: “A master bathroom!”

Throughout the tour, Brown made no attempt to contain her contagious enthusiasm and appreciation. In response to my suggestion, she told me she already drinks decaf.

“New and nice things to change our lives,” Brown said. “New beginnings, something new, something nice — and I just want to thank everybody that did this for us. We all love you.”

On a west-facing, fourth-floor balcony she said she saw a view of downtown she’d never seen before. It was enough to make her do something she had planned to do later in the evening when no one was watching. Tears of joy, she called them.

This is what can happen when things — defined here as community support, government backing and financing opportunities — come together. As I’ve been writing for several years, finding that combination has been elusive at Rosewood Courts. It looks like that’s on track now, with a plan to build new while preserving up to eight units on the historic site.

Why did Chalmers Courts advance while Rosewood Courts was stalled? Gerber said there were several factors, including greater need.

“Plus this community readily embraced going in and undertaking this redevelopment,” he said. “We were excited to work with the neighborhood association, the community at large, Councilman (Sabino "Pio") Renteria. They all really embraced the idea of a new home.”

“Rosewood is a little different,” Gerber said. “Rosewood has strong ties to the city’s African American community. The site of Rosewood Courts was the site of the city’s original Emancipation Park. And it’s fair to say that there’s a higher historic preservation calling at Rosewood Courts.”

He talked about the need to be culturally sensitive as the housing authority moves toward “new housing and new opportunities” for Rosewood Courts residents. The next hurdle is finding financing.

“This property didn’t have some of those same overlays and challenges,” Gerber said of Chalmers Courts. “Most of the residents here were able to look within a block of this site and see the new properties that are going up all around it. And their request was ‘we’d like to live in a quality home just like those folks do.’ And we were able to do that for our residents here and, hopefully, it will give more confidence to our residents and to the neighborhood up at Rosewood Courts, just six blocks up the road, that HACA can get this job done, done right.”

After the tour, Valle, engagingly sharp as a tack at 87, smiled broadly. “I think it’s wonderful,” she told me. “I think it’s time for a change for the new generation. And for the older citizens, like us, we need a place we can be settled in.”

Valle said “time for a change” several times during the tour.

Fact is, it’s been way past time for a change at Chalmers Courts and Rosewood Courts for a long time.

Up on the fourth floor, Gerber looked around and said, “This is what affordable housing should look like.”