Atlanta Is Making Way for New Public Housing
June 23, 2009
Atlanta Is Making Way for New Public Housing
By Robbie BrownATLANTA — In 1936, Atlanta built Techwood Homes, the nation’s first housing project. By the 1990s, a greater percentage of the city’s residents were living in housing projects — sprawling red-brick barracks that pockmarked the skyline — than in any other city in America.
Now, Atlanta is nearing a very different record: becoming the first major city to knock them all down. By next June, officials here plan to demolish the city’s last remaining housing project, fulfilling a long and divisive campaign to reduce poverty by decentralizing it.
Mixed-income developments oriented toward families, with trendy shops, golf courses and Y.M.C.A.’s, are emerging where bleak, uniform towers once stood. Displaced residents are receiving vouchers to move to private housing. And a landmark experiment in housing the urban poor in large government-run facilities that began under the New Deal is being undone.
pOver the past 15 years, Atlanta has bulldozed about 15,000 units, spread across 32 housing projects, some of which once contained as many as 2,500 residents.
“We’ve realized that concentrating families in poverty is very destructive,” said Renée L. Glover, the executive director of the Atlanta Housing Authority. “It’s destructive to the families, the neighborhoods and the city.”
The elimination of housing projects does not mean the abandonment of public housing. The Atlanta Housing Authority pays for more residents’ housing these days than it did in the 1990s. But they are scattered throughout the city in mixed-income communities and private housing financed with vouchers through the government’s Section 8 program.
Still, critics of the demolitions worry about the toll on residents, who must qualify for vouchers, struggle to find affordable housing and often move to only slightly less impoverished neighborhoods. Especially in a troubled economy, civil rights groups say, uprooting can lead to homelessness if more low-income housing is not made available. Lawsuits have been filed in many other cities, generally without success, that claim that similar relocations violate residents’ civil rights and resegregate the poor.
The federal government has advocated variations of this approach for several decades, particularly since President Bill Clinton began the Hope VI program in the 1990s to disperse residents from centralized projects. Atlanta may be the furthest along, but its plans to demolish buildings, relocate residents and work with private developers to gentrify destitute neighborhoods are being mirrored across the country in cities like Chicago, Detroit, Miami and New Orleans.
Over all, 195,000 public housing units have met the wrecking ball across the country since 2006, and over 230,000 more units are scheduled for demolition, according to the Housing and Urban Development Department.
Atlanta began its demolition effort in 1995 in preparation for the Olympic Games, with the encouragement of local politicians and real estate developers.
Only four of the city’s housing projects remain, along with 13 smaller public housing facilities, mostly for senior citizens, that the city will continue to operate.
“Atlanta’s plan signifies in a very clear way that the social contract that cities and citizens have with the poor has fundamentally changed,” said Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociologist at Columbia University who studies urban neighborhoods. “We’ve decided that the market can function to create housing and the role of government should be to move people into the market.”
Some researchers and policy makers say the model is succeeding. Thomas D. Boston, an economist at the Georgia Institute of Technology who has tracked Atlanta’s housing-project residents since 1995, said those who move are more likely to find work, their children were likely to perform better in school and they report higher satisfaction with their living conditions.
