Atlanta On Track to Demolish All Its Public Housing

To be rebuilt, of course, as mixed-income communities.

The nation's first public housing project, Techwood Homes, was built in Atlanta in 1936.  Atlanta has long had the highest percentage of its residents living in public housing, though that # was still less than 4% (at least through the 1970s).  Within a year, it will have demolished all of its old projects.  This article laying out ATL's plans is full of interesting, valid and opposing views.

There's the standard chestnut about the exponential problems of concentrated poverty, without any acknowledgment that the reason warehousing poor people has become so problematic is because we stopped sufficiently investing in their housing and social service needs a long time ago.  There's the true statement that most residents support "relocation" - but this reality is distanced from the equal realities that only about 20% of public housing residents qualify for the new units, and the rest end up living in the poorest neighborhoods of Atlanta, where opportunities are not much better.  The correlation between the ability to pick up and relocate successfully and the outcomes - that "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" - is not clarified.

Deconcentrating poverty is a skimming strategy that worsens inequality.  If you can weather relocation and stringent eligibility requirements, then you should really benefit from a new unit in a refurbished neighborhood with more amenities.  If a disability, age, language barriers, economic hardship, or any other issue should disqualify you from the new place or make multiple moves hard on you, then you're likely to be cast out on your own into the market, with only a voucher in hand.  This may be the freedom of choice we Americans so cherish, but it also leaves the most vulnerable among the poorest of poor people of color worse off in an insecure, overcrowded, unaffordable housing market.

Cheer all you want for fancier neighborhoods closer to your job with some poor neighbors beside you to keep it real, neighbors who may benefit in real, substantial ways.  But don't forget all those displaced by the concentration of government subsidy and developer money for a mere two in ten poor Atlanta residents.

(Photo of Centennial Park North, built on the former Techwood Homes site, by Steven T. Moga, used with permission)