Published: April 04, 2011
Why We Did This: The Opportunity to Turn Failure Into Transformational Success
In the early 1990s, after Atlanta had won bragging rights to be the host of the 1996 Olympic Games, civic leaders soon realized they'd been handed a blessing - and a liability. On the one hand, Atlanta would be showcased for the world to see. On the other hand, what the world would see was not all showcase material.
True, Atlanta was the booming economic capital of a resurgent Sunbelt South, a transportation hub of unparalleled importance in the nation. Many global and national corporations flew their corporate flags from soaring Atlanta skyscrapers. The state's universities repeatedly won national acclaim. Pro sports teams and a multi-faceted entertainment industry brought excitement and glory to Atlanta.
Then there were the problems. Atlanta was one of the poorest, the most crime-infested and dangerous cities in the nation. Much of the city's population had fled to the suburbs in the 1960s and '70s - and with the mounting problems in the city, the families never returned. Atlanta's public schools exemplified only one trait: failure.
And behind all of those problems were more than 40 public housing projects that distilled concentrated poverty into a toxicity from which there was no escape. There was a direct link between that blight and many problems, such as the high crime rate caused by criminals whose first and weakest targets were public housing residents. In other cases, such as the many distressed and declining neighborhoods in Atlanta, the plethora of public housing enclaves was a contributing cause. On a percentage basis, more of the city's population lived in public housing than in any other major metropolis in America. Those numbers meant that crime would never decrease, jobs for working-class Atlantans would never materialize and schools would never improve as long as the city's landscape was cratered with "the projects."
Most daunting to civic leaders was the location of one of the most decrepit and foreboding projects - Techwood/Clark Howell Homes - directly adjacent to the planned Olympic Village. When the TV cameras of the world lit up in Atlanta in the summer of 1996, they wouldn't be able to ignore the blight of those projects.
Regardless of the Olympic Games, Atlanta was shamed by the awful neglect of its housing projects. Tens of thousands of people were condemned to lives of failure because of the indelible stigma of public housing. An honest look at the projects revealed:
Deteriorated physical conditions;
Dangerous, crime-plagued, drug-infested places;
Hopeless, dispirited residents who were disconnected from, and afraid of, the mainstream because they rightly felt they were labeled and marginalized;
Children being poorly educated and socialized because they were taught in "captive elementary schools" located as part of each public housing project campus;
And tragically low participation in the work force and high rates of illiteracy and/or
under-education
Public housing didn't begin with a mission to destroy lives. Indeed, Atlanta was America's pioneer city in building public housing during the Great Depression. Seven decades ago, public housing was where families of modest means lived briefly while the worked hard to win a share of the American Dream.
In 1936, Techwood Homes, near the campus of the Georgia Institute of Technology, was the first public housing project in the nation to open its doors to residents. It was followed quickly by adjacent Clark Howell Homes and, a short distance away near what is now called Atlanta University Center, University Homes and John Hope Homes.
"The expectation was that both white and black families were preparing themselves to live independent, successful lives, albeit in racially segregated communities," says Renee Lewis Glover, CEO of the Atlanta Housing Authority. "Over the years as society changed, the government faced new and very difficult challenges, numerous and often conflicting rules and regulations were crafted to address these challenges. Many of these rules and regulations were reactive rather than strategic. And, in many cases, the rules and regulations were developed based on the historical and political context of the times, political expediency and, in some cases, priorities that trumped decent and safe affordable housing, such as urban renewal or highway expansion."
As a consequence of these complexities, the public housing program lost its vision and mission and was drafted to address all of society's social problems. To accommodate this very complicated, and some would say impossible, mission, the rules and regulations drove the expectations and standards down to a level where there no longer were any meaningful expectations and standards.
The changing policies and the lowered expectation for public housing tenants turned Atlanta's projects into warehouses for people. The plight for public housing residents was twofold: What had begun as a bold social experiment to open the door into the middle class became a wall that forever separated public housing residents from economic opportunity. And, even more insidious, during the 1960s, '70s and '80s, public housing projects were built far away from the centers of urban life. These projects, almost exclusively inhabited by African-American families, became just one more devious expression of Jim Crow segregation.
That dual isolation - economic and racial - produced a hostile relationship between the projects and the city. "Housing authority leaders from '60s through the '80s were so antagonistic and protective of public housing to the exclusion of its own neighbors that the relationship between housing authority and commissioners and tenants to its neighbors was hostile, adversarial, and in a downward spiral," recalls AHA board Chairman Cecil Phillips. "It hit bottom in late '80s early '90s. Something needed to be done."
All of the indicators flashed an alarm. Crime around housing projects was as much as 35 times that of the city as a whole, which in the 1990s was the most violent city in the nation. Employment rates plunged to 20 percent or less. The elementary schools embedded in housing projects ranked at the very bottom of all Georgia schools.
There were other less obvious problems that destroyed the lives of public housing residents. Retailers fled the areas around the projects, fearing crime and knowing there was little money in the pockets of residents to buy goods. That meant quality grocers were nowhere to be found - and the diets, often a continuous menu of fast food fare, were deadly. For example, studies show a quarter of public housing residents live half a mile or more from the nearest food store with fresh produce - and nearly 40 percent don't have cars to get there.
Health problems, in general, were known to multiply in the concentrated poverty of the projects. Numerous studies showed that diseases and health risk factors - asthma, diabetes, hypertension, and mental illness - soared in public housing.
The cost in human life is impossible to calculate, but these questions are worth pondering. How many potential scientists never got the chance to develop because their schooling in the projects was stunted? How many humanitarians withered on the vine because they never got the chance to blossom? How many families fell apart because their homes could never become fully nurturing? How many women and men never grew to greatness because they died as children, victims of rampant crime in the projects? There is no way to know for sure, but even one would have been too many.
Had change not come, says AHA board member Eva Davis and a former resident the East Lake Meadows housing project, the losses would have been greater. "We would have had so many more high school dropouts, so many drug addicts, so many prostitutes, so many babies having babies, they would have been lost," she says. "We don't have that any more. That is a major change."
Next: "How we made things work."
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