One of the greatest challenges facing large American cities is affordable housing: How do you encourage prosperity in a city, often called gentrification, while still maintaining affordable housing?
For Atlanta, a historic milestone has been achieved in overcoming some aspects of this conundrum. Many Atlantans have noticed the impact of this achievement: lower crime rates, healthy neighborhoods and substantially better outcomes for low-income families. Somewhat less apparent, students who a few years ago would have struggled in school are now achieving success in school and thereafter. And, almost invisible to the casual observer has been the increased availability of quality affordable homes to tens of thousands of our neighbors — families who in the past would have been consigned to the most blighted housing in the city.
At the end of December 2009, the last families moved out of the distressed and crime-ridden public housing projects, and demolition is under way. That’s a remarkable and historic event for a city that in past decades had the highest percentage of its residents living in “the projects,” and for the city that during the New Deal era built the nation’s first public housing.
There is nothing counterintuitive about saying that by tearing down the projects, the availability and quality of affordable housing actually has benefitted. It’s been part of a plan and evolving process that many call the “Atlanta Model,” and that model is being adopted and adapted by many large cities across the nation.
In the mid-1990s, Atlanta faced a crisis. Most obvious, the city was slated to host the Olympic Games in 1996. That was great news, but on view for the world would be the awful blight of housing projects such as Techwood/Clark Howell Homes, with its hard-to-miss location directly adjacent to the Olympic Village. But far more important in the long term was the issue of what should replace public housing — more of the same or something new.
The key to the answer was not the condition of the buildings — although it was clearly evident that no amount of money and work could transform the projects into decent housing. Rather, what I faced when I became CEO of the Atlanta Housing Authority in 1994 were two profound questions: Do we understand that everyone has unlimited human potential, and do we as a society value it?
The greatest victims of public housing were the children. As many scholars have attested, when schools are packed with poor children (regardless of the child’s race), unrelenting failure is the outcome.
Dating back to the 1960s, education experts have concluded that “the most powerful predictors of educational success or failure are family income and parents’ educational attainment,” according to David Rusk, a leading urban issues researcher. Rusk’s studies in cities across the nation repeatedly have shown the same race-neutral trend: A healthy income mix of students produces the best outcomes for all students.
Housing projects were ground zero for soaring crime rates in cities. Violent gangs claimed the turf, drug pushers prowled the Perimeter, pimps snatched away children with promises of easy money.
When the projects were first built right after the Great Depression, they were effective stepping stones for low-income families into the American Dream. But with the steady erosion of expectations and standards, and with changes in social conditions, the transitional housing envisioned for low-income working families became permanent enclaves of perpetual poverty.
As we have found in repeated surveys, when asked if they want to leave the housing projects, more than 90 percent of the residents replied with a resounding “yes.”
Mixed-income is a model that works in Atlanta and many other cities. Equally important, we have the extraordinarily positive response from the former residents of public housing to the new model.
In Atlanta, the housing authority serves thousands more people today than it did before it razed all of its projects (other than 11 senior buildings and two small family properties). And all of the families receiving housing assistance live in better physical and social conditions than those found in the now-demolished public housing projects. In part, that is made possible because private investment now leverages the federal funds allocated to the authority. Thus, instead of being barely able to keep up with critical repairs to the decrepit projects, the infusion of private investment has made possible the creation of livable, affordable and quality neighborhoods.
Also, with greater deregulation provided by the federal government, the authority provides long-term counseling and coaching to families as they move into mainstream neighborhoods, resulting in an easier and more realistic transition to the mainstream for affected families. That same flexibility has allowed the authority to attract landlords from throughout the city and not just the poorer areas, facilitating real choices for housing.
Another ingredient to a successful housing program is high expectations. In Atlanta, we have a work requirement for all non-elderly, nondisabled adults receiving housing assistance. The result? The employment rate among our client families is indistinguishable from the general population.
A significant percent of the city’s population once written off now finds the doors opened to much better, more successful lives. Children no longer are trapped in those environments where their future potential was strangled. There has been a significant and enduring reduction in crime throughout the city. Neighborhoods throughout the city that were abandoned are now thriving.
That’s a success story about which all of us can be proud.
Renee Lewis Glover joined the Atlanta Housing Authority as CEO in September 1994.
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