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Razing the projects: When housing isn't home
Atlanta Journal Constitution ^ | 10/17/07 | Ernie Suggs

Posted on 10/20/2007 10:46:29 AM PDT by Lorianne

complex into their own house, she promises not to look back. That might not be a problem.

She and her family are trading in their cramped apartment in the heart of a concrete campus of one- and two-story "projects" for a tree-lined single-family home in one of Atlanta's best neighborhoods, the Cascades.

Housing Authority's sweeping plan to get rid of virtually all the city's traditional public housing facilities. Jonesboro South is one of five that are being cleared out this year. In the coming years, seven more — including the notorious Bankhead Courts and Bowen Homes — will close and be replaced by market-rate, mixed-income communities like Centennial Place, the Villages of East Lake and the Village at Castleberry Hill.

Renee Glover, executive director of the Atlanta Housing Authority, said that in the end, traditional public housing will have all but vanished in Atlanta with the exception of a dozen senior citizen towers and two very small conventional properties currently tucked away in residential areas.

"That will not, however, mean that the Housing Authority is abandoning its mission to provide great housing opportunity for people in Atlanta," Glover said. "We are doing it differently, providing better outlets for families."

Rather than concentrating low-income people in specified areas and housing, the agency is giving displaced families Section 8 vouchers, which pay a portion of rent for a private apartment or house the family finds on its own. In addition to the Jacksons, more than 700 families are moving out of the soon-to-close complexes of Jonesboro South, Jonesboro North, Leila Valley, U-Rescue Villa and Englewood Manor.

(Excerpt) Read more at ajc.com ...


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Government
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To: wmfights

>>All they do is perpetuate slumlords<<

Totally true.


21 posted on 10/20/2007 12:25:50 PM PDT by fleagle ( An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last. -Winston Churchill)
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To: keepitreal
I agree completely with the fact that Section 8 ruins good neighborhoods. I have seen family members loose tens of thousands of dollars by the government deem that the nice neighborhoods they lived in could use more diversity and implemented section 8. A suburb of Denver went from the official name of Montbello to Montghetto. All of the supermarkets and stores closed down due to extreme increases of theft. The only thing left there is basically gas stations, bars and liquor stores.
22 posted on 10/20/2007 12:34:27 PM PDT by SledgeCS (A pacifist destroys his weapons and welcomes a non-pacifist into his home - to have it destroyed.)
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To: SledgeCS
Understand where you’re coming from. Have you seen what has happened to the southwest part of Denver. 20 years ago we tried to fight Pena’s dispersed housing plan which called for the city actually buying up houses in our neighborhood and putting “housing clients” into them. We were called racists by dear Mayor Pena at a town meeting for opposing the plan. What was once a beautiful area full of well-kept modest homes has really gone downhill.
23 posted on 10/20/2007 12:45:30 PM PDT by keepitreal
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To: businessprofessor

Once you give an able bodied person a nice home, what’s the motivation to ever get off welfare? All the government is doing is condoning bad lifestyles. But of course, according to the liberal school system, that is racist to say that someone’s lifestyle is bad. Not working, living off the government, getting all the handouts you can get, not bothering to get married, letting a bum of a boyfriend who doesn’t work live with you while you are raising someone else’s children, that’s bad, and the government shouldn’t be in the business of subsidizing people’s wicked life-style choices.


24 posted on 10/20/2007 12:53:15 PM PDT by rodeo-mamma
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To: goldstategop

It’s been going on for years. Techwood Homes was the first Federal housing project, opened by FDR in 1936 (-ish); it was torn down before the 1996 Olympics, replaced with the Olympic village (now dorms for Georgia Tech and Georgia State) and mixed-income apartments.

East Lake Meadows, one of the worst projects in the area, was razed 8 or 9 years ago and replaced with a mixed-income community. The nearby golf course, once Bobby Jones’ home course, was revitalized and has hosted at least one PGA championship (I don’t follow golf) and a ton of pro-am and charity tournaments. I have several friends who’ve bough houses in East Lake, in areas where none of us would want to be caught after dark just a decade ago.

It’s not just Atlanta. Chicago’s Cabrini Green, one of the largest, most ambitious and most infamously drug-, crime- and gan-riddled projects, is no more.

As I’ve been saying for years, the War on Poverty is over, and we won. Our “poor” have color TVs, two cars and air conditioning. Their primary nutritional problem is not malnutrition, but obesity.

Housing projects made sense when the problem was a lack of decent, basic shelter, when people were living in shanty towns with leaky roofs, no running water, and third-world sanitation. Food stamps made sense when the problem was hunger — literally, folks suffering severe and chronic ailments from malnutrition.

Those days are gone. The problem today is not a lack of food or shelter, but a lack of family and community. Housing projects are nothing but stockyards for a permanent underclass, grim places devoid of much hope for the future. Children who grow up there grow up with no positive role models, because by definition success means leaving the projects. The only folks who have any material success, who have anything interesting going on, are the pimps, drug-dealers and gang-bangers.

Getting poor families into real neighborhoods gives those kids examples to follow. Folks who get up in the morning and go to work, and reap the rewards. Whether they’re on Indian reservations, in urban housing projects, or in the Appalachian backwoods, what perpetually poor families need is integration to the American mainstream — it may be too late for some of the adults, but at least the children can see that there is a better life within their reach, and the way to get to it is to stay in school and work for it.

And not to put a damper on FR’s favorite pastime, but sometimes an idea makes so darn much sense that it ceases to be partisan. Enterprise zones were Jack Kemp’s pet project as Bush 41’s HUD secretary, and were then adopted enthusiastically by the Clinton administration. Atlanta’s mayors, city council members and housing board members have been almost all Democrats, but they’ve been supported in this new direction by both Republicans and Democrats at the county, state and federal level. It’s a rare and heartening example of folks wiling to admit that something works and get behind it, even if the other guy thought of it.


25 posted on 10/20/2007 1:06:54 PM PDT by ReignOfError
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To: ReignOfError

It’s like the old saying, no matter where you go, there you are.

Just changing the location of a person doesn’t change their way of thinking. Yes, the environment plays a role, but it isn’t the only thing that needs to change.

sec 8 alone doesn’t work.


26 posted on 10/20/2007 1:09:26 PM PDT by durasell (!)
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To: durasell
It’s like the old saying, no matter where you go, there you are.

Just changing the location of a person doesn’t change their way of thinking. Yes, the environment plays a role, but it isn’t the only thing that needs to change.

sec 8 alone doesn’t work.

Alone? Certainly not. But it's a step in the right direction. It could hardly have a worse record than the New Deal model of federal housing projects.

27 posted on 10/20/2007 1:21:02 PM PDT by ReignOfError
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To: keepitreal

East New Orleans used to be very nice. It was called the Pearl of New Orleans. Then came Section 8 and the rest is history.


28 posted on 10/20/2007 1:58:52 PM PDT by BBell
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To: ReignOfError

Maybe a step in the right direction, but it shouldn’t be the step that’s taken first. Jobs should be the first step via workfare.


29 posted on 10/20/2007 1:58:59 PM PDT by durasell (!)
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To: Lorianne

bmflr


30 posted on 10/20/2007 3:04:26 PM PDT by Kevmo (We should withdraw from Iraq — via Tehran. And Duncan Hunter is just the man to get that job done.))
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To: ReignOfError; goldstategop
Getting poor families into real neighborhoods gives those kids examples to follow.

The flaw in the theory is that the role models will leave in short order, or where they live Sec. 8 housing is not taken by landlords.

In Chicago there are a group of small towns on the southeast edge of Chicago that are highly concentrated with Sec. 8 housing. On the northern end of Chicago you have some of the most affluent towns in the country. They don't have any Sec. 8 housing. How did the Sec. 8 housing tenants end up in the southeast suburbs?

31 posted on 10/20/2007 3:41:51 PM PDT by wmfights (LUKE 9:49-50 , MARK 9:38-41)
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To: ReignOfError
You really need to take a tour of Northeast medium size cities and then see what you think.

The poor in this area spread their problems to new community after new community.

A good proxy to figure out where this has happened is median home price by zip code drawn on a map.

This may be of a case of where a program that works in the metro Atlanta area totally fails in the Northeast. That is one of the problems with Federal programs--one size does not fit all.
32 posted on 10/20/2007 4:24:11 PM PDT by cgbg ("I give you health care and I say 'no smoking'". "Yass'm Miss Hillary.")
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To: goldstategop
Its great! This is the direction public housing should be moving... to transform perpetual wards of the state into real homeowners.

It's hard for me to tell if you simply forgot the < /sarc > tag or if you're from another dimension.

You haven't lived until you've lived near one of these "Section 8 families".

If ever there has been an attempt to define "hell on earth" this would be among my top three definitions.

You can't "create" a civilized homeowner out of a "family" used to getting everything for free with no personal stake, responsibily or effort on their part...

Never could. Never will.
All you can accomplish is to spread filth and crime more "democratically". I hope you like pit bulls...

33 posted on 10/20/2007 4:24:55 PM PDT by Publius6961 (MSM: Israelis are killed by rockets; Lebanese are killed by Israelis.)
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To: cgbg
btw I do have a solution to the urban cult of dysfunction, crime, drugs laziness and poverty that will work in one generation that I have posted previously. Folks around here have a fit when I bring it up, but if you want to "fix" the problem instead of pushing it around town there is only one way I know how to do it.

End the cycle of single teenage moms by taking their kids from them and putting them in orphanages.

(ducks as chairs start getting thrown around the room).

Sorry, but the only way to change the culture is to _change the culture_, and if you really care about wasted lives of generations of kids you will not allow single teenage moms to ruin their kids lives.
34 posted on 10/20/2007 4:31:49 PM PDT by cgbg ("I give you health care and I say 'no smoking'". "Yass'm Miss Hillary.")
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To: cgbg
What a heartless beast!
How can you so casually deprive a young, helpless mother her only means of existence?

Oh, and the kids. For God's sake, think of the kids!

35 posted on 10/20/2007 4:35:00 PM PDT by Publius6961 (MSM: Israelis are killed by rockets; Lebanese are killed by Israelis.)
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To: cgbg
This may be of a case of where a program that works in the metro Atlanta area totally fails in the Northeast. That is one of the problems with Federal programs--one size does not fit all.

Valid point. Atlanta has roughly quadrupled its population in the last 30 years -- in the '80s and early '90s, the growth was concentrated in the suburbs. Starting with the run-up to the Olympics, a lot of development has gone on downtown, reversing white flight to a degree, because the traffic in the 'burbs got so nightmarish.

Intown housing has been on a years-long boom, so far (knock wood) with enough population growth to support it. Developers have moved eagerly into neighborhoods formerly on the skids, both with new construction and a lot of warehouse and office conversions to residential. In designated enterprise zones, developers get property tax abatement -- but a condition of that is that they have to set aside X number of units for rents below $Y a month. I don't know if they're required to accept Section 8 or not.

Whether poor residents pull a neighborhood down or the neighborhood helps pull them up is in part a function of numbers. And there Atlanta also benefits from local trends. The new housing -- in which I include renovations of neglected properties as well as construction or conversion of new ones -- has been sufficiently widespread that the population of section-8 recipients in a given neighborhood doesn't hit the ripping point (an overused, but still useful, concept).

Of course, what I'm talking about is only a little more than a decade's experience. It could still go wrong, especially if Atlanta's boom slows down (if, for example, we have to halt new development because we run out of *&^ing water). And that's where your point about one-size-fits-all programs hits the nail on the head -- the programs need to be flexible enough to adjust not just from place to place, but over time.

In cities where population growth is stagnant or even negative, where there's aging surplus housing, the dynamic would be very different. Even leaving out medium-sized cities like Camden, NJ and Gary, IN, which are just basket cases, and Detroit, which is headed toward becoming a medium-sized city,

36 posted on 10/20/2007 5:20:08 PM PDT by ReignOfError
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To: cgbg
End the cycle of single teenage moms by taking their kids from them and putting them in orphanages.

They wouldn't be in orphanages very long. People are so eager to adopt they are going to other countries to find babies.

37 posted on 10/20/2007 9:16:13 PM PDT by wmfights (LUKE 9:49-50 , MARK 9:38-41)
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To: keepitreal
Those who get the voucher

According to one essay I read, vouchers are especially insidious.

Some vouchers pay (at least as much as) the average rent in the area. That can mean they cover a higher rent payment than a "working-poor" individual in the same area can afford.

The landlords might dislike the habits of vouchered tenants, but they find it hard to turn down the increased income. The result is, the voucher holders get the better housing and the working poor get the leftovers. This is a disincentive to work.

Also, landlords have often been more eager to accept the vouchered tenants, because the government would pay the landlord automatically each month.

38 posted on 10/25/2007 9:37:59 AM PDT by syriacus (30,000 Americans died in 30 months in Korea under Truman, REWINNING SK freedom.)
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To: Lorianne

Chicago did that and murders dropped by 33%.


39 posted on 10/25/2007 9:41:07 AM PDT by <1/1,000,000th%
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