Fresh Loaf

Diane Wright, outside her new apartment

Editor’s note: This is the first in a regular series of commentaries that gives voice to those not commonly heard in Atlanta media.

For nearly two decades, Diane Wright, 63, lived in Hollywood Courts, one of the last public housing projects left in Atlanta. Most of the rest have  been demolished to make way for mixed-income communities. Wright was the longtime president of her residents’ association, as well as president of the group representing all Atlanta housing projects. In that capacity, she was an outspoken critic of the displacement of public housing residents. She also was a business owner under the federal government’s Section 3 program, which provides grants to low-income entrepreneurs.

I’m from Chicago. When I moved, I was in my late 40s. I had went back to school. I got a degree in accounting. One of my girlfriends was living down here, and she told me Atlanta was a great place to live. This was ‘88, ‘89.

I moved into public housing. When I first went there, it was hell. But we got together and formed our organization. And then we started working with the residents. We told the dope boys that we wanted them out of there. We knew most of them. I hired some of them, too. I even asked the housing authority about that. They said that would be a good idea.

[Housing authority officials] always would come to me when they want something done. They wanted a Section 3 [business]. They came to me to start the business. I’ve been hiring people that come out of prison and go into a halfway house. I never had a problem.

All of a sudden, here comes the [U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development] investigators. They pulled me aside, into the maintenance shop. And then they showed me a picture of this person, and told me he used my address. I used to go with him, and he became a sex offender. He used my address [on Georgia's sex-offender registry], but he used it without me knowing it. The sheriff’s department didn’t come to my house, didn’t check his address or anything.

I’ve never had any problem, nothing with a criminal check or background check. I’ve never been to jail. But still, all of a sudden, they treat me like I’m the criminal.

(more…)

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Renee Glover, who has overseen the transformation of Atlanta’s public housing complexes into mixed-use communities, is on President-elect Barack Obama’s short list for a cabinet position.

Along with New York City’s housing commissioner and Miami’s mayor, among others, Atlanta Housing Authority Executive Director Glover is being considered for secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Glover has won nationwide acclaim — and some criticism — for using HUD’s HOPE VI program to tear down public housing and replace it with communities that reduce crime and improve neighborhoods. The improvements to the lives of the former residents, however, have been questioned.

Here are the contenders for HUD secretary:

• Miami Mayor Manny Diaz.
• Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C.
• Renee Glover, head of Atlanta’s housing authority
• Nicolas Retsinas, director of Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies
• Shaun Donovan, commissioner of New York City’s housing department.

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East Lake Meadows, in the midst of demolition.

Atlanta was the first city in the country to build a public housing project. By 2010, it will likely be the first to eradicate every last one of them.

At a high point (literally, though not figuratively), the number of public housing units in Atlanta numbered more than 14,000. If all goes according to plan, there soon will be none — aside from a handful of apartments for the elderly and infirm. Most of the Atlanta Housing Authority’s projects already have been replaced by mixed-income communities, which do wonders for reducing crime and improving neighborhoods. But they don’t offer the same assistance to the down-and-out that the AHA projects did.

The big question about this massive urban renewal initiative has been: What happened to all the low-income families who lived in public housing? Did the vouchers they received, for reduced rent, help better their lives? There is some evidence that suggests that many former resident’s lives were, in fact, improved.

Researchers at Georgia State University are trying to find out if that’s true.

(more…)

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Atlanta Housing Authority Executive Director Renee Glover’s longtime wish is about to come true. It appears that four of the city’s last public housing projects — a total 1,200 affordable apartments — will soon come tumbling down.

This morning, the AJC published an op-ed by Glover in which she expressed confidence that Washington would grant permission to raze the few remaining public-housing projects in the city. According to a letter sent to the AHA today from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, permission for all but two of them has been granted. “I am pleased to approve your request to demolish,” the letter states.

In the op-ed, Glover wrote:

We anticipate quick approval for demolition of the remaining major projects: Bankhead Courts, Thomasville Heights, Hollywood Courts, Herndon Apartments, Palmer and Roosevelt. Those projects, together with Bowen, house about 2,400 households – families that can now look to bright futures in good neighborhoods.

When the last of those buildings comes down, we will have made history. (more…)

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By Matthew Cardinale

Atlanta Housing Authority’s plan to destroy all remaining Atlanta public-housing communities in the city is a massive atrocity that will tragically displace families, destroy communities, decrease Atlanta’s affordable housing supply and eliminate a precious safety net we’re going to continue needing for some time.

Make no mistake, developers are salivating over this land, and that’s what this is all about. AHA’s role is to confuse, distract and deceive the people of Atlanta, especially the residents, that somehow tearing down public housing is the best thing, even the only thing, possible.

Most Atlanta residents don’t realize that when 5,500 public-housing units are removed from a city’s housing stock, those people are either pushed into the low-income rental market – either here or in the suburbs – or into homeless shelters.

That means those of us who are already struggling with housing-cost burden – i.e., monthly fear of coming up short on rent — due to the critical lack of affordable housing in Atlanta will now have around 5,500 fewer units to compete for.

Yes, you may say, but the new “mixed-income, mixed-use developments” will surely contain affordable housing, won’t they? AHA implies this, but its definition of “affordable” comes from a parallel universe.

To most people, affordable means what’s actually affordable to working people in terms of how much they earn and what their other costs of living are.

Instead, AHA’s Renee Glover calculates housing policy based on the Area Median Income (AMI). For a family in 2000, the Atlanta AMI was over $55,000.

(more…)

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In last week’s cover story, we looked at the Atlanta Housing Authority’s plans to demolish a second massive wave of public housing — and how that might affect the city’s poor.

Now, the futures of families living in the 12 housing projects scheduled for demolition might be more uncertain — thanks to President Bush’s budget for fiscal year 2008.

When public housing is torn down, it is replaced with mixed-income communities — and most of the displaced families are handed a federal voucher for reduced rent, called Section 8. In Atlanta, the number of public housing units will have shrunk from 14,800 in 1995 to a mere 4,800 in 2010 — while the number of Section 8 vouchers will jump from nearly 5,000 to more than 13,000.

The loss of units bothers some housing advocates, who believe that public housing only should be replaced with actual hard and fast apartments. And they’ve expressed fear that the Bush administration will have an easier time slashing funding for vouchers than it would in making actual buildings disappear.

Those fears seem to be materializing in an analysis released today by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. In a report called, ominously enough, “Housing Vouchers Could Be at Risk in 2008,” the nonprofit compared what Bush wants to spend on Section 8 vouchers to what separate bills before the House and Senate propose:

The President’s budget for fiscal year 2008 would fail to renew 80,000 housing vouchers likely to be used by families in 2007, and the House appropriations bill would fail to renew 55,000 vouchers. In contrast, the Senate bill would fund all vouchers in use in 2007.

Thus the fate of public housing in Atlanta would go something like: tear down housing for the poor, replace with vouchers for the poor, watch as the feds stop funding said vouchers, face the reality that there’s no place left for low-income families in our fast-gentrifying city.

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