Prospect Homes: One Year Later

JOHNSTOWN, Pa (WJAC) — It’s been one year since the residents of Johnstown’s Prospect Community received notice that they needed to pack up their homes and relocate within 30 days, due to what officials described as “structural issues."

6 News has been following the story since the beginning and have since spoken with several residents who say that, while there have been ups and downs since relocating from the Prospect Community, they are eager to get back to the place they still call home.

It was March 9, 2023, when residents were informed that they had to leave their homes.

“It was just a normal day until I went out to the mailbox and saw the old, dreadful letter that we had to vacate our community because of structural issues, and they gave us thirty days on that,” says resident Jeffrey Matula Jr.

“This letter says, ‘please be advised that you need to vacate your unit within 30 days of this notice. This is not an eviction notice. This action is being required at an abundance of caution due to information received during the outgoing structural inspection of the Prospect Community,’” resident Claressa Pridgea told us.

“At first it was a little crazy, a little hectic, there wasn’t a lot of communication; at the beginning it was just a disaster,” Matula added. “Just seeing all the friends crying and kids crying and elderly people crying, it took a toll on my heart.”

Jeffrey Matula Jr. says that within a few weeks, the entire Prospect Community was cleared out and relocated.

Since relocating, Matula says he has become chairman of the Prospect Tenant Association and tries to keep in touch with all of his neighbors from the Prospect Community, like Cassandra and Bill Stickel.

“They’re family.”

“Leaving our home for 18 years, we cried, I even took an extra hour at Prospect, when it was all empty and I was just like in disbelief,” Bill Stickel said.

The Stickels say they were originally supposed to relocate to an apartment in Connor Towers, but it wasn’t accessible to them.

They needed a wheelchair accessible apartment and got one thanks to a generous 6 News viewer.

For the past year, the Stickels have resided on the 13th floor of Vine Street Towers, but they say it’s not home.

“It’s an apartment; home is still up there; we always claim our address up there still as home. We got everything switched to this place, but it’s not home. We just miss everything about Prospect and living here for about a year, we’re going to be excited to go back.”

6 News spoke with Michael Alberts, the executive director of the Johnstown Housing Authority, about the future of the Prospect Homes Community.

Alberts says contractors began working on repairing the homes on Feb. 12, as officials are one step closer to potentially moving some of the former residents back in.

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