By: Jenny Sullivan 

HUD wants to create stronger communities by taking the federal HOPE VI revitalization program to the next level, according to a July 14 speech by HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

 

The East Lake Foundation's mixed income housing units can be seen from the pool area. The former notorious Atlanta housing project has been replaced with modern single family units, a charter school, golf course and a YMCA on the grounds.

 

Now only sparse elements of it remain -- two senior housing high-rises, some 60-year-old oak trees and a single brick building, preserved for antiquity, with the cupola where President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated Techwood in 1935.

In place of it are rows of custom-brick buildings with apartments and two- and three-story townhouses, with two swimming pools and landscaped greenery.

A new model for public housing had its genesis in Atlanta, where the nation's first federal housing project became the prototype mixed-income community. Housing authority CEO Renee's Glover's stated goal is to eradicate all of the city's projects, and her counterparts in Augusta sent people there last year in an attempt to sell the concept.

When Atlanta implemented the mixed-income strategy, the city had things going for it that Augusta won't: the pre- and post-Olympics building boom of the 1990s, a gentrification trend, a multimillionaire philanthropist and a community anchored by Bobby Jones' home golf course.

"That thing was hailed as the new coming, and it wasn't at all," said Richmond County Neighborhood Alliance President Sammie Sias, who took the bus trip provided by the Augusta Housing Authority and wasn't impressed.

With the help of a $42.6 million federal Hope VI grant, Atlanta demolished Techwood in time for the 1996 Olympics and replaced it with Centennial Place. The Villages of East Lake, another much-touted mixed-income community, came out of a massive effort by developer Tom Cousins, who in collaboration with Ms. Glover used East Lake Golf Club to turn a ghetto once known as Little Vietnam into a neighborhood where new homes sell for $1 to $2 million.

Mr. Cousins, the developer of the CNN Center and the first phase of the Georgia World Congress Center, has said he took on the East Lake Meadows housing project after Atlanta's police chief told him the neighborhood was churning out more prison inmates than any other in the city.

He bought the club in 1993 and poured $25 million into rehabbing it, restoring its "great hall" in honor of Jones, a co-founder of Augusta National Golf Club. The nonprofit East Lake Community Foundation raised $120 million for the neighborhood through donations, bonds, tax credits and government funds.

After the housing authority prevailed in a lawsuit filed by displaced residents, East Lake Meadows was razed and in its place came The Villages of East Lake, which has a 50-50 ratio of public housing to market rate units. Dismally performing Drew Elementary School was replaced with Drew Charter School, where golf is incorporated into the curriculum and physical education classes use an attached YMCA.

Centennial Place and East Lake were the first and second of 15 mixed-income developments in Atlanta completed or under construction. Now, simply demolishing projects and moving dirt spurs development in an area, said Richard White, the president of The Alisias Group, the housing authority's publicity firm.

Even during the economic boom of the 1990s, few people invested in the area of Carver Homes in south Atlanta. With construction ongoing at The Villages at Carver and nearby McDaniel Glen, new rooftops are sprouting up -- duplexes, apartments and detached homes marketing for $200,000 to $300,000.

When she was a teenager, Kimberly Woolfolk said she watched a man get shot at an intersection in East Lake, and she considered the area rife with crime and drugs. But as a single parent of two daughters, she rented an affordable housing unit in The Villages of East Lake for five years.

She put her daughters in the on-site day-care center when they were younger, then later they attended Drew Charter School.

"You don't get singled out," Ms. Woolfolk, 30, said, "and you don't get treated like you're different than anyone else. Basically, you have a chance to improve your life."

Antoine Shearer II similarly benefitted from Centennial Place, having moved into an affordable housing unit with his fiancee four years ago. Now the couple and their two daughters live in a new townhouse on the site that they bought for $162,000 through an assistance program. It was recently appraised for $300,000, Mr. Shearer said.

Though he's glad to have a nest egg, he wonders whether helping a dozen or so people like himself was worth displacing hundreds.

"When you look at the aesthetics of it, it's better," Mr. Shearer, 39, said. "But what happens to the people?"

Anita Beaty, the executive director of the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless, said the mixed-income strategy has worsened the city's homeless problem. The loss of public housing units has people on waiting lists lingering in shelters, she said. She also alleges that when the housing authority sets out to raze a complex, before relocating residents it evicts as many as it can by aggressively enforcing lease agreements.

No comprehensive, nationwide study of the strategy's effects has been completed. Narrowly focused studies, both by a Georgia Institute of Technology economics professor and the Urban Institute social policy think tank, reported that families who left traditional public housing -- either through Section 8 vouchers or by returning to mixed-income communities -- made strides in quality of life as opposed to families that remained in projects.

Other indicators show all isn't well.

On the Web site ApartmentRatings.com, Centennial Place has a 26 percent recommendation rate out of 73 reviews, with naysayers deriding poor security, uncleanliness, unruly neighbors and unresponsive management.

The Villages of East Lake fared worse with a 19 percent approval rate out of 37 reviews, with posters lodging similar complaints.

Such sentiments point to an often-overlooked aspect of the concept: its success or failure depends not on appeal to public housing tenants, but to market-rate customers whose rents keep it afloat, said John H. Hiscox, the executive director of the Macon Housing Authority, which aided by a $19.3 million Hope VI grant replaced Oglethorpe Homes housing project with Tattnall Place.

"It's risky business," Mr. Hiscox said. "What really has to be proven is whether the middle-income people or market rate people are going to be comfortable paying rent and living in a mixed-income community."