Atlanta sits at the center of the history of public housing in America. We were home to the country’s first-ever federally-funded public housing complex, Techwood Homes, in 1936. A little over half a century later, Atlanta had the 5th largest public housing program of any city in the country, with a total of 45 different complexes and roughly 15,000 units housing over 50,000 residents, despite being considerably smaller than many of the cities both ahead of and behind it.
But then, in the wake of the 1996 Olympics, we were the first city to demolish our public housing to pilot the HOPE VI model of mixed-income development, ironically enough, in order to demolish the very same housing project that started the whole thing off. And another decade-plus later we became the first city in the country to completely demolish all of its conventional low-income public housing developments.
While Atlanta’s public housing was plagued with many of the same problems that public housing across the country faced due to underfunding and neglect, it also represented a cornerstone of life in Atlanta. It was one of the key means by which Black women in the city built and exercised political power. It gave rise to some of the city’s best-known artists and cultural producers. But in a city that’s rapidly gentrified since – and in part because of – the demolition of this extensive public housing stock, it’s really the loss of those 13,000 or so units of housing affordable to the city’s poorest residents that hits the hardest.
Like so many other things we’ve touched on here on the blog, analyzing the geography of Atlanta’s public housing – past and present – helps us to understand the full scope of what was lost, what could’ve been and what still could be. Drawing on numbers from my friend and colleague Katherine Hankins’ research into public housing in Atlanta, the maps and figures below provide an alternative visualization of the city’s public housing geographies.
Of the nearly 13,000 units of public housing demolished by the city in the 1990s and 2000s, over half of these units were within two miles of the city’s center at Five Points. Another nearly 2,000 units sat within another mile out from the city center. So the loss of Atlanta’s public housing didn’t simply represent a net loss of affordable housing within the city, it especially represented a net loss of affordable housing in the city that was actually accessible by foot or by transit.
Not all of the city’s public housing was so accessible though. In fact, as others have previously written, starting in the 1970s many of the Atlanta Housing Authority’s developments began to be built further out from the city’s urban core precisely because local leaders were worried about so many poor Black folks living in close proximity to the central business district. Indeed, while the average public housing complex in Atlanta built in the 1930s and 1940s was barely a mile as the crow flies from Five Points, this distance increased to 2.75 miles for complexes built in the 1950s and 1960s, and then further to 3.79 miles for complexes built in the 1970s and further to 6.16 miles for complexes built in the 1980s. And yet, even as the city commenced building projects further away from the urban core, they failed to deliver the infrastructure that was necessary for those residents. This is most infamously the case with Perry Homes, which was promised – but never delivered – an extension of MARTA’s green line train.
In addition, many of the later-constructed developments began to shift in both their form and target population. Rather than low-rise, garden style apartments for families, 12 of the last 15 developments constructed by AHA in the 1970s and early 1980s were high-rise buildings meant for the elderly. While not all of these buildings survived the wrecking ball, these senior high-rises represent just about all that’s left of the conventional public housing stock within the City of Atlanta, totaling just over 2,000 units, though they’re now managed by third-party property managers. Ironically, because this kind of senior high-rise housing was pretty much the only kind of public housing built in Atlanta’s whiter and wealthier northeast quadrant, we’re actually in a position today where this part of the city is home to most of the truly public housing left in the city.
Even though some of the sites were replaced by new developments, these have all been mixed-income communities meant to “deconcentrate poverty” by limiting the number of poor people who live within them. Even if each replacement project had the exact same number of units as the one it is replacing – and they rarely do – only a small number of the total replacement units are set aside for low income residents, and an even smaller proportion for the very low income residents who traditionally made up AHA’s clientele. Part of that gap is filled through the use of Section 8 vouchers, but which are again limited in number and rely on the beneficence of landlords to participate in the program, which they are under no obligation to do because source of income is not included in the Georgia Fair Housing Act. And finding someone to take a voucher is no guarantee that the unit will be centrally located or accessible in the same way that much of Atlanta’s public housing once was.
So what’s the solution? Well, build more public housing!
And, ironically, because the city demolished so much of its public housing in the 1990s, it actually has quite a bit of room to grow its public housing stock. The Faircloth Amendment, passed in 1998, caps the number of public housing units a city can have at the total it had on October 1,1999. Atlanta’s Faircloth Limit sits at 11,965, or nearly 9,800 more units of public housing than the city currently has. So whereas other cities are unable to grow their public housing portfolios even when they have the will to do so, Atlanta has considerable room to use this as the most direct tool in the city’s toolkit for expanding the supply of deeply affordable housing.
The fact that the city is openly toying with the idea of European-style social housing like that found in Vienna is a positive indication, though the reality remains that the need is greatest for the poorest residents who were once served by the city’s public housing. But as long as the number of housing units, their price and location is dictated by the private market and the pursuit of profit, the needs of regular people are going to continue to go unmet. Just as Atlanta was a leader in earlier eras of public housing experimentation – both good and bad – the city not only could be a leader in developing a new era of high-quality housing for everyone, it needs to be.
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