The city’s unprecedented effort to relocate over 100 families from the condemned Forest Cove apartments is ongoing, but running behind schedule, officials said last week.
Fifteen families have been relocated and 165 are “in progress,” interim Planning Commissioner Janide Sidifall told a City Council committee. She said the effort was going “slower than expected” but is considered an urgent matter.
The city has been working for months to find homes for Forest Cove residents, after a judge ordered the run-down complex be demolished due to safety and crime concerns. Just overnight Monday, five people were shot when gunfire erupted at a large Forest Cove gathering.
The property owner is a private, Ohio-based company. But the city stepped in early this year because conditions had become so bad. Officials allocated $9.1 million in federal pandemic relief dollars to assist the families, and is working with the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta to find new homes. (The city expects to be reimbursed by the owner.)
The owners of Forest Cove will repay the full amount to the City upon the closing of a deal for the rehabilitation, rebuild or sale of the property.
A Community Foundation spokesperson told Atlanta Civic Circle that it hopes to have all families “with school-aged children” relocated by the beginning of the school year.
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Speaking of conditions at local apartments: Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis told City Council members on Friday that her office is planning a crackdown on Atlanta’s most dangerous and unhealthy complexes.
Some of the work has already begun. Willis said she has identified apartment complexes with the worst gang activity, and Atlanta City Solicitor Raines Carter released a list of 43 properties with the highest number of crimes and housing code violations.
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
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Atlanta politicians are betting on a new affordable housing complex to make a dent in the city’s housing crisis, and it’s the first within the city limits to have the backing of a health system, the AJC’s Katherine Landergan reports.
Mercy Care officials, Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens and Councilmember Liliana Bakhtiari, and Pennrose, LLC recently broke ground on a new 170-unit affordable housing project that they hope will energize developers and maybe even hospitals to build more low-cost housing.
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Two weeks after Josh Rowan left city hall, the Atlanta Department of Transportation has a new interim replacement.
The mayor looked externally to fill the role. He appointed Marsha Anderson Bomar, MARTA’s former assistant general manager for capital program delivery, to lead the department.
Dickens told us on Wednesday that he wanted to appoint someone quickly amid a national search for a permanent transportation commissioner. We expect Anderson Bomar to be a candidate for that job as she performs the role on an interim basis.
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Pittman Park in the Pittsburgh neighborhood has a new outdoor basketball court. The city cut the ribbon on the court last Wednesday.
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MARTA has officially decided it wants to build a bus rapid transit line (rather than light rail) on southwest Atlanta’s Campbellton Road. The bus vs. rail debate has divided community members over the past several months, with MARTA board members ultimately deciding the enhanced bus line would cost less and take less time to build.
Next steps: The agency and city plan to apply for federal grant funding to get the project moving forward, with a target completion date of 2028. Here’s what the bus rapid transit line could look like:
Credit: MARTA
Credit: MARTA
