For more than a decade, a steady stream of housing officials and city planners from across the country have visited Atlanta to view the future of mixed-income housing. They tour sites such as Centennial Place -- where vast public housing blocks were torn down in 1994 to make way for a pioneering $150 million mixed-income community of garden apartments and town homes and then they go on to carry out similar projects in cities such as New Orleans and New York. Despite Atlanta's reputation as a leader in rethinking public housing, City Council members are to vote Tuesday on whether to ask the Atlanta Housing Authority to delay demolition of three of its last remaining public housing projects.
Some council members say they worry about where the projects' 3,800 displaced residents will go. "People who live in these projects have no idea where they will end up," said City Councilwoman Felicia A. Moore, whose district includes the Bankhead Courts, Bowen Homes and Hollywood Courts projects. "Before these buildings are demolished, I want to be comfortable that they will find a home."
The City Council's intervention could present an embarrassing setback for the Atlanta Housing Authority, which pioneered the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's HOPE VI program more than a decade ago. The agency has torn down more than 10,000 public housing units and plans to eliminate all of the city's public housing by 2010.
The housing authority has long maintained that warehousing the poor in vast complexes is a failed social experiment. Yet now, with 10 nationally acclaimed mixed-income projects under its belt, the agency faces the prospect of lengthy public forums with worried Atlanta residents, and legal disputes about how much authority the City Council has over the razing of public housing.
Though there is little doubt that the sites of Atlanta's former projects have undergone dramatic revitalization -- property values have gone up and crime rates have gone down -- the issue is that few former public-housing residents actually live there.
So far, about 17% of Atlanta's former public-housing residents have returned to the mixed-income communities, which are funded primarily by private investors. The vast majority are scattered across the region and use Section 8 housing vouchers to help pay their rent.
For Atlanta housing officials, this is a measure of success: The strategy of the program is to fight the "cycle of poverty" by breaking the concentration of poverty, said spokesman Rick White. Profoundly poor, unemployed public-housing tenants can improve their lives, the theory goes, if they are given the means to live in better neighborhoods. During the first phase of the program, former housing-project residents were given the right to return to the mixed- income communities.
The majority of residents chose to take the vouchers, White said. "It would have been a failure if everyone had returned," he said. "What we want to do is make sure families can make choices about where they want to live. Government bureaucrats are not telling them where to live."
Those who want to return must meet strict criteria and agree to regular house checks. In 2004, the agency required all able-bodied adults, 18 to 61, to have a job, receive job training or enroll in school. Residents cannot return if they have a history of falling behind on rent, or if they or any relatives on the lease have recent criminal convictions.
Residents of the last-remaining projects would not have the right to return, and some council members say they are concerned that former project dwellers would end up shuffled to other poor, racially segregated areas. "We know revitalization is necessary to achieve investment, but redevelopment can't be done totally at the expense of senior citiz
Source: LAtimes.com