"After four or five years, it started getting bad—it was a different environment,” she said. "It seems like they let in anybody."

Brown, who works for a trucking company, has a son in college. Her home value is so low that she knows she won’t be able to sell it anytime soon, so she’s forced to stay in the development. But sometimes, she doesn’t feel safe.

Unlike other residents I talked to, Brown doesn’t fault the city for building low-income housing in what was supposed to be her perfect suburb. Being surrounded by bushes was no good, either, she said—every day, she’d come home from work and wonder if someone was hiding in the weeds.

But the crime has made her worry, she said.

“I’m really not happy with the stuff that’s been going on lately,” she said.

Ginny Elliot is another resident who has been noticing changes in Walker’s Bend. She and her husband moved in to a single-family home as renters in early 2012, after they lost their home. They live across from a park, created by the city out of empty lots that were supposed to have been houses, but Elliot says the neighborhood kids trash it. Their next-door neighbor was, for a time, a drug dealer, until she got arrested and moved out, she said. Elliot's bike was stolen from her front porch, as was her cordless phone. Her husband recently purchased a rug that sits on the couple’s front walkway that says, “Warning: There is Nothing Here Worth Dying For,” with a picture of a hand holding a gun.

“It looks like Mayberry here, so people come, but they’re looking for an escape, rather than for a place to plant themselves,” she said.

Elliot and her husband had been considering buying their home from their landlords, who are putting it up for sale soon. But recent developments made them question whether the neighborhood is a place they want to continue to live, she said.

Other residents were unhappy about the recently completed apartments in the New Leaf Center because they look like a typical three-story, brick apartment building and aren't the single-family homes that were originally planned. People who live in homes next to the apartment building feel that they are being peered on from above by the tenants on the second and third floors. They also complain about the portable toilets and construction equipment resting in the field where the senior center might someday be.

* * *

I was initially surprised at the negative reaction I got from many of the families in the neighborhood about the building the city had helped facilitate. After all, urban planners hold up Walker’s Bend as an example of planning that worked. And weren’t the new buildings better than vacant lots, no matter who lived there?

John Collins, the owner of Potemkin Development, which built the affordable-housing units, said he wasn’t surprised that residents were grumbling. Walker’s Bend was the first time his company had built low-income units in a failed subdivision, he said. But residents are usually not happy when a low-income development is approved in their neighborhood.