Atlanta is close to tearing down last housing project

ATLANTA (AP) — The nation’s bulldozer attack on crime and poverty will soon make Atlanta — home of the first public housing development — the first major city to eliminate all of its large housing projects.

Cities from Boston to Los Angeles are following its lead. For more than 15 years, housing officials across the country have been razing the projects where some 1.2 million families live and replacing them with a mix of higher-rent and subsidized apartments and homes.

Alexandria, La., has taken down at least 247 units. Buffalo, N.Y., has demolished about 1,000 aging homes. Atlanta expects to finish tearing down the last of its sprawling projects next June.

Advocates for the poor worry that not enough subsidized homes remain, and thousands of families are being dumped on the street. Less than half of the 92,000 units demolished by cities have been replaced with traditional public housing.

Most of the displaced residents have received vouchers to put them in privately owned housing. The Department of Housing and Urban Development acknowledges, however, that it doesn’t know what happened to thousands of families.

Some longtime residents feel like afterthoughts in an ambitious overhaul that is supposed to help them.

“I don’t think it’s fair,” said Jeff Walker, who was forced out May 30 from Atlanta’s Bankhead Courts project.

Even though drug violence there was once so brazen that mail carriers had police escorts, he said: “We didn’t ask to be moved.”

The housing projects in Atlanta date back to 1936, when the nation’s first public-housing community, Techwood Homes, was built here.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt heralded it as “a tribute to useful work under government supervision” and the first step in building a safety net for the working poor during the Depression.

Decades of cultural and policy shifts transformed that safety net into a permanent home for generations of families surrounded by disproportionately high crime.

When a 1992 report deemed roughly 86,000 public housing units “severely distressed,” federal officials knew it was time for sweeping action, according to former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros.

“There was no kind of forward-looking plan, and no commitment to dramatic change,” said Cisneros, who in the early ’90s helped craft what is known as the Hope VI program.

Hope VI would eventually provide $6.2 billion in federal grants for demolition, revitalization and planning. It also reversed long-standing HUD policy by letting housing authorities replace demolished units with Section 8 vouchers — coupons low-income families can use to cover rent with private landlords off site.

That meant the nation’s more than 3,300 housing authorities could tear down blighted public housing and rebuild smaller, more easily managed neighborhoods while the vouchers would prevent anyone from being left homeless.

At least in theory.

Nationwide, HUD estimates Hope VI will eventually demolish 95,998 public housing units.

A little more than half of those will be replaced with traditional public housing.

HUD is also building more than 50,000 other units in mixed- income communities, which will range from semi-subsidized apartments with higher income requirements to market-rate houses.