The city of Atlanta is considered the originator of public housing, building the first public housing in the country in the mid 1930’s. Today, it’s being seen as a major renovator in public housing in the country, at a time when they’re also being touted at the 25th best housing market in the country.
What are they doing? They’re tearing them all down, giving people vouchers to go and purchase private housing, then redeveloping the properties into apartments and buildings to revitalize those areas of the city. Their plan? To try to reduce poverty by decentralizing it. They’re not eliminating public housing, just changing it around. Now they’ve scattered people around the city, mixing them in with people of other means so that everyone will supposedly have a better quality of life by not having poverty concentrated in one specific area.
People have been given vouchers to use to buy housing, though they still have to qualify for them. They then have to find other areas of the city to live in, which means they have to uproot themselves from neighborhoods they’ve gotten used to, then try to find a place that will accept their voucher and let them move in, and sometimes those neighborhoods aren’t all that much better than what they’re leaving.
This is the type of thing happening all over the country in urban areas, and minorities, black people in particular, don’t like it. They feel as though they’re taking the blame for the ills of society, when in reality they were shuttled into that life to begin with, not given the means to get out of it, and thus were entrenched into that way of living without knowing any other way.
Cities like Harlem are indicative of this type of thing, where the lower half of Harlem is experiencing a renaissance with upscale housing being built that former residents don’t come close to having enough income to live in, so they get pushed further into the outskirts of Manhattan, while new residents, predominantly white and wealthy, take over and now have quicker access to the city without living in the most expensive areas of the city. Even the area where Bill Clinton moved his offices into are nothing like what Harlem was before he decided to relocate there.
Atlanta started the demolition project in 1995, in preparation for the Olympic Games, with the encouragement of local politicians and real estate developers. Now, they’re getting ready to tear down the last remaining public housing from the 30’s, and it will all be complete. It’s a new way of living for the city that has, per capita, as many black residents as cities like Washington D.C. and Detroit.
There’s no stopping progress, but it can’t end here. Communities are going to have to figure out a better way at some point to work on helping people still living in poverty to help themselves, instead of finding ways to get rid of them entirely.
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Atlanta Housing Authority
Moving to Work in Atlanta
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Unfortunately it is the same the world over, the haves always want more from the have nots even though they have nothing. In the UK they has been a reduction in social housing which now means we have a waiting list no amount of money is going to be able to reduce.
This is a case of something that sounds great on the surface, but doesn't pan out so well in reality. When you are just looking at numbers on a piece of paper, moving people around in this manner sounds like a great idea, but the human factor of uprooting people from their neighborhoods isn't quite so nice. Hopefully, the end results will be worth the growing pains.