TRENTON - Looking up through the hot morning glare, state Sen. Shirley Turner pointed at the western tower of the dilapidated Miller Homes and recalled apartment 611, where she lived 35 years ago.

Back then, shortly after the complex was built within a stone's throw of the train station, getting a unit was a rare prize, she said yesterday.

Martin Griff / The Times of TrentonState Senator Shirley Turner at the announcement of a $22 million grant to the Trenton Housing Authority to tear down Miller Homes and build new residences on Wednesday, June 2, 2010. Turner said she lived on the sixth floor of the building behind her, when the public housing projects first opened.

"It was a brand new, beautiful place," said Turner, who was a new mother and a college student at the time. "Everybody would give their eyeteeth in order to get an apartment there."

But time was not kind to Miller Homes. By the 1980s, crime and vandalism had turned the 256-unit development from a place where lives were launched into the dangerous, trash-filled "Killer Homes."

Officials began to talk about demolishing its two towers and 40 townhomes and building a new kind of public housing project, more low-rise and spread out, easier to police and administer, and better integrated into the neighborhood.

Those efforts culminated yesterday as Shaun Donovan, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, took his position at a podium across from a boarded-up townhome along with Sen. Frank Lautenberg, Sen. Robert Menendez and other dignitaries.

Martin Griff / The Times of TrentonFrom left, Sen. Frank Lautenberg, HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan and Sen. Robert Menendez at an announcement of a $22 million grant to the Trenton Housing Authority to tear down Miller Homes and build new residences on Wednesday, June 2, 2010.

Donovan announced the Trenton Housing Authority will receive a $22 million HOPE VI grant to tear down the complex and, with the addition of money from other sources, build a new mixed-income neighborhood of rental and ownership units.

"It is a great honor for me to be here today to provide the funding that will make this housing complex, this poster child for public housing failure that we see around us, into an asset for the community for decades to come," he told a crowd assembled on the blacktop under the towers. "There is no community that deserves it more than Trenton."

Donovan said the Trenton Housing Authority was one of six agencies nationwide awarded the grant out of 44 applicants, in part because its application showed it understood the importance of integrating social services and particularly early childhood education into housing.

Martin Griff / The Times of TrentonTrenton Mayor Douglas Palmer speaks during the announcement of a $22 million grant to the Trenton Housing Authority to tear down Miller Homes and build new residences on Wednesday, June 2, 2010.

When the new development opens, the authority will help provide the new residents with job hunting assistance, lessons in improving their credit, and child care and other supportive services to help them get to the point where they can buy their own homes, authority officials said.

Trenton "understood the connection between the bricks and mortar of housing, and the true opportunity that we need to help the residents of public housing achieve, particularly educational opportunity," he said.

Donovan congratulated Mayor Douglas Palmer on the award, calling it the "capstone" of his mayoral career as he prepares to leave office this week, and he thanked Lautenberg and Menendez for supporting the Obama administration's push to put more funding into the 17-year-old HOPE VI program.

Martin Griff / The Times of Trenton From left, Trenton Housing Authority chairman of the board Gary Gentry and executive director Herbert Brown, Trenton Mayor Douglas Palmer, Sen. Frank Lautenberg, HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan and Sen. Robert Menendez at an announcement of a $22 million grant to the Trenton Housing Authority to tear down Miller Homes and build new residences on Wednesday, June 2, 2010.

Menendez, chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Housing, said the federal program was designed to end the model of public housing as a warehouse for people and give it a sense of community.

"We're creating a much better environment for the place we call home, for the residents of this area," he said.

Declaring, "What HOPE VI makes, Trenton takes," Lautenberg recalled the poverty of his childhood in Paterson and the importance of sound housing to the building of strong families.

"We say goodbye, good riddance to Miller Homes. These towers have loomed over the neighborhood, in many ways like a ghostly reminder of its troubled past, for too long," he said.

Palmer, Rep. Rush Holt, Trenton Housing Authority chairman Gary Gentry and authority executive director Herb Brown also spoke. Several speakers mentioned the late executive director Wayne Lartigue, who died last summer, and his years of effort to transform Miller Homes.

"Butch, thank you very much," said Palmer, using Lartigue's nickname and looking up at the sky. "This is your day."

Those attending included Lartigue's widow, Councilwoman Annette Lartigue, as well as Councilman Manuel Segura, East Ward council candidate Verlina Reynolds-Jackson, and a number of housing authority and city officials. Several Secret Service agents hovered at the edges of the crowd.

The project will provide housing for 309 families, including subsidized and market-rate rental and homeownership units, and loans for homebuyers. The units will include rehabilitated and new housing on neighboring streets.