So far in this three-part post, using as our text this New York Times story, we’ve followed the Atlanta Housing Authority’s fifteen-year quest to reverse the public-policy error of excessively large purely public housing properties with deep income concentration and physical isolation.

Now the Atlanta Housing Authority has accomplished an impressive feat: it ended a 73-year policy detour by tearing down the last of its original Depression-era public housing, not because it wanted to exit from the business of housing the poorest of the poor, but rather because it wanted to exit from the business of owning that housing rather than insuring its viability.

I’ve got a beef with the owner …

Atlanta has been reforming itself toward the essential housing authority:

As the public body, AHA receives Section 8 voucher subsidies from the Federal government (yellow box), qualifies and places residents (public accountability blue box; program compliance blue box). It further provides asset management oversight on all properties occupied by AHA-assisted residents, whether they have portable vouchers or are part of a HOPE VI or other public-private partnership.

If AHA wants to own or co-own properties (as with HOPE VI), it does so through a series of Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs), each of which owns a single property – and therefore, each of us has separate financial reporting.

By structuring itself into the essential housing authority, the Atlanta Housing Authority is configuring as a Mission Entrepreneurial Entity (MEE), about which I’ve written at length. Some other housing authorities, partly mid-sized ones in the West, are similarly evolving to this better organizational form. In so doing, they have to rehab and reconfigure their housing stock.

Atlanta’s plans to demolish buildings, relocate residents and work with private developers to gentrify destitute neighborhoods are being mirrored across the country in cities like Chicago, Detroit, Miami and New Orleans.

All of which cities desperately need this reinvention. As I posted on New Orleans a year and a half ago:

[S]ome New Orleans neighborhoods are worse than condemned.

The C J Peete complex before its demolition

Yet before these obsolescent and by now dangerous places can be destroyed, those who would do so must suffer their time in the pillory, as reported in The Washington Post:

Friday, December 21, 2007; 12:55 AM

NEW ORLEANS — Police used chemical spray and stun guns Thursday on protesters who tried to force their way into a City Council meeting, the latest strife over plans to demolish some 4,500 public housing units in a redevelopment project that council members ended up unanimously supporting.

New Orleans police officers subdue protesters at the New Orleans City Council meeting where the council is expected to vote for the demolition of housing projects in the city of New Orleans, Thursday, Dec. 20, 2007. Police used chemical spray and stun guns Thursday as dozens of protesters seeking to halt the demolition of 4,500 public housing units tried to force their way through an iron gate at City Hall.

Take a careful look at that photograph. Three protesters, who appear not hurt but acting hurt. One cop, trying to catch a shaved-head man determined to clutch a fence. One photographer anxious to capture the visual. It’s street theater.

Try as I may, I cannot find a good explanation for the faux-hysterical reactions these demolition proposals inspire, usually among well-educated ill-informed outsiders. Is it a primitive reaction to perceived powerlessness, that they have to act out for the attention it will draw? We’re useless but at least you noticed us, therefore we’ve done our part.

At least you noticed me!

Yet in their posing, the protesters are harming the people they claim to care about, because all they do is prolong the status quo and delay the creative destruction:

Over all, 195,000 public housing units have met the wrecking ball across the country since 2006, and over 230,000 more units are scheduled for demolition, according to the Housing and Urban Development Department.

Built property doesn’t live forever. (I recently discovered that in Japan, where they are used to building with light wood, a house is expected to last no more than thirty years.) Structural materials age and decay; physical systems become obsolescent; technology’s advance raises the market standard. After an interval, it must either be substantially renovated – gut-rehabbed – or demolished and rebuilt. If not, it becomes a struldbrug building, condemned to a life of decrepitude.

Valencia Gardens, San Francisco

Atlanta, to its credit, has been aggressively reinventing the authority and changing its inventory:

Only four of the city’s housing projects remain, along with 13 smaller public housing facilities, mostly for senior citizens, that the city will continue to operate.

The high-rise elderlies are a different case. They were built 20-25 years later, in the great second wave of public housing (1955-1965)

“Atlanta’s plan signifies in a very clear way that the social contract that cities and citizens have with the poor has fundamentally changed,” said Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociologist at Columbia University who studies urban neighborhoods. “We’ve decided that the market can function to create housing and the role of government should be to move people into the market.”

If you pay us, we will come

Not quite. The market will always build it if government will pay for it.

Some researchers and policy makers say the model is succeeding. Thomas D. Boston, an economist at the Georgia Institute of Technology who has tracked Atlanta’s housing-project residents since 1995, said those who move are more likely to find work, their children were likely to perform better in school and they report higher satisfaction with their living conditions.

As covered in Saint Katrina?, deconcentrating poverty seems to give those deconcentrated a better chance of success – and that’s only common sense.

The housing authority says the overwhelming majority of residents support the relocations. But critics say [Those anonymous, unquantified, unqualified gripers – Ed.] unsuspecting residents are forced into only marginally better neighborhoods. The vouchers, which usually provide families with $568 to $758 per month, according to the housing authority, are not available to residents with certain criminal backgrounds –

As posted in managing the lifeboats, occupancy in affordable housing should not be an entitlement regardless of your behavior, yet that is the tacit assumption of those who would make it open to everyone.

– and are often viewed suspiciously by landlords in wealthier communities.

Unfortunately, as we saw in Dead-drop housing: Part 1, the value chain, landlords sometimes are right to be suspicious of renter applicants whose background they find questionable.

I spy with my little eye …

Yet suspicion is often cover for racism. Vouchers are no panacea, and there are substantial technical and policy challenges associated with making a voucher delivery system work. Still, Atlanta has an enormous supply of rental housing, and except possibly for Houston or Phoenix, is one of the best American cities to embark on the radical reinvention of a housing authority.

A large majority of displaced residents settle in 10 of Atlanta’s poorest ZIP codes, according to an analysis of housing authority data by Creative Loafing, an alternative newspaper.

Guess where the public housing properties were?

Only about 20 percent return to their communities once the property becomes a mixed-income development, Mr. Boston said.

That statistic cuts both ways; indeed it might be said to be a triumph of the program. We give people choice; we give them the means to be economically mobile; we guarantee they a right to return to their former property (a plank of every HOPE VI or similar redevelopment); and yet 4 out of 5 choose to live elsewhere. Isn’t that a searing indictment of the pre-redevelopment environment?

Yet the Times seems oblivious to the revolutionary success because it is determined to give ‘equal time’ to opposing views, regardless of their credibility:

“Until you have alternative housing that is affordable, available and appropriate, you have no business going into these communities and destroying them,” said Anita Beaty, the executive director of the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless.

Ms. Beaty may not be the best spokesperson for this issue. Her entity’s Web site is flagged by Google as potentially harmful to your computer, and the second link reveals that Ms. Beaty’s shelter has had the water turned off twice in the last month because it has not paid its bills.

“To disperse these people without giving them alternatives is wrong.”

And is it wrong not to pay $180,000 in water bills, Ms. Beaty?

Atlanta has plenty of alternatives.

Ms. Glover, the executive director of the housing authority and a former Wall Street lawyer with graduate degrees from Yale and Boston Universities, is the architect of Atlanta’s public housing model. She has become well known in housing circles, hailed as visionary by supporters and condemned as ruthless by critics.

Ruthless? Renee Glover

Personally, I think she’s terrific, and has built a strong staff.

Ms. Glover — along with Atlanta’s mayor, Shirley Franklin — was considered by President Obama as a nominee for HUD secretary.

Ms. Glover does not blame the social engineers of the 1930s for creating housing projects.

The state-of-the-art housing and the state-of-the-art car

Their solution worked during the New Deal, she said, but collapsed as public housing became more racially segregated and attracted drug crime.

As I know Ms. Glover knows, the full story is more complicated than that conflation. After World War II, whites fled from the cities, leaving public housing to be both income and racially concentrated, and in the Seventies, the cities hit bottom, taking with them the public housing stock.

The cities have since recovered; public housing largely has not.

These days, Atlanta is again the vanguard in an experiment that Ms. Glover acknowledged could have unintended consequences. But her greater concern, she said, is that cities will safeguard the status quo.

Give Ms. Glover credit for seeing the future, and making it happen.

The vision: an integrated and specialized Mission Entrepreneurial Entity

“For us to think that a program that was conceptualized 70 years ago is still the right answer, it makes no sense,” she said. “Today is a whole new era.”

Vision made reality: Ms. Glover in front of redeveloped post-HOPE VI housing

Good for you, Renee. You did it.

Send post as PDF to

Earlier this year, as we saw yesterday via this New York Times story, the Atlanta Housing Authority has accomplished an impressive feat: it ended a 73-year policy detour by tearing down the last of its original Depression-era public housing, not because it wanted to exit from the business of housing the poorest of the poor, but rather because it wanted to exit from the business of owning that housing rather than insuring its viability.

I’ve got a beef with the owner …

In doing so, Atlanta was pursuing what we’ve called the essential housing authority:

So what is a housing authority, in essence?  What is the thing that distinguishes it from all other critters?

It holds a public trust — to provide quality housing at very low cost to those who are least able to find it in the private marketplace.  Effectively a publicly accountable charitable institution, a housing authority receives public subsidy, via the indirect collection agent of government — if it doesn’t, the system breaks down completely — and deploys it for the public benefit of affordable housing and healthy low-income communities.  That’s the essential function:

We can expand this single goal into a short menu of activities:

Everything else is a technical function, which means it can be contracted, and if it can, it should.

Yes, we can do that — what do you want done?

The technical functions associated with public housing consist of all those activities that (1) require expertise, (2) benefit from economies of scale, (3) can be performance-audited afterwards (meaning that government can inspect later and determine if the work was properly done)

Thus the essential housing authority is a holding company:

Yet today’s typical housing authority is anything but a holding company.  Instead it’s an insular expanding universe unto itself.

“The only thing we have to fear … is an endlessly expansive housing authority.”

Way back when Franklin Roosevelt invented the public housing authority, the affordable housing ecosystem was primitive, practically clear-cut forest.  Housing authorities took on technical functions because they had to, and today they maintain those technical functions because they always have.   Until recently, housing authorities could ignore the wider world, so they have continued on, doing a little better the same things they did before, and seldom acting upon the radical restructuring that would bring them into a modern holding-company, effective real estate ownership structure.

To become the Essential Housing Authority, Atlanta could not build from scratch; instead it had to extricate itself from the legacy of 15,000 physically obsolete apartments, which made it the city’s (and state’s) biggest landlord. Atlanta did so with a three-step sequence for each affected household:

Three little steps up

1. Convert the assistance from place-based (public housing operating subsidy) to people-based (portable vouchers)

2. Successfully place the newly portable family in private (or public-private) housing throughout the city.

3. Demolish the gradually-vacated legacy public housing.

The Atlanta Housing Authority pays for more residents’ housing these days than it did in the 1990s.

The net result is more people housed, fewer apartments owned by AHA.

But they are scattered throughout the city in mixed-income communities and private housing financed with vouchers through the government’s Section 8 program.

This is bad?

Still, critics of the demolitions worry about the toll on residents, who must [1] qualify for vouchers, [2] struggle to find affordable housing and [3] often move to only slightly less impoverished neighborhoods.

I deplore this superficial evenhandedness, which abdicates the responsibility of forming an opinion of one’s own.

Start with unnamed and unquantified ‘critics’ (do they have a basis for their criticism? Or are they just whiners?).

Whining? Yu-uck

Then add an irrefutable test ‘worry’ – if you cannot criticize the reality, you can criticize what you imagine might become the reality. As to the substantive concerns:

1. Voucher qualification. Anyone living lease-compliant in public housing will qualify for a voucher – and obviously all the relocated residents have done so.

2. Struggle to find affordable housing. That would be more of a concern were it not in the past.

3. Often move … only slightly less impoverished. Moving is a bitch, as we all know.

Let me ask the question in reverse. Suppose we took 15,000 very low income families, living scattered throughout Atlanta. Rounded them up, herded them into mid-rise and high-rise isolated properties, which we then proceeded to under-maintain. The nation would be up in arms at this ‘quarantining of the poor.’

We’ll just move you all in here for the duration

Atlanta has done exactly the reverse – successfully, mind you! – and for its labors, is lambasted by anonymous worried critics.

How will I placate my critics?

Especially in a troubled economy, civil rights groups say, uprooting can lead to homelessness if more low-income housing is not made available.

Yes, it can. But the housing was made available, and has been rented.

Also, what’s this gratuitous ‘especially in a troubled economy’? More lazy thought abdication. The time to worry about relocation is in a strong economy, when landlords might have the luxury of discrimination, or of charging rents higher than the AHA will pay. A down market is precisely when it’s most effective – and Atlanta’s been doing this for fifteen years, across markets bad and good.

Lawsuits have been filed [A] in many other cities, [B] generally without success, that claim that similar relocations violate residents’ civil rights and resegregate the poor.

In that case, [A] why cite irrelevancies that are not comparable, and [B] lose anyway?

The federal government has advocated variations of this approach for several decades, particularly since President Bill Clinton began the HOPE VI program in the 1990s to disperse residents from centralized projects.

Mission main coming down

I’ve posted at length about HOPE VI in my History of US public housing: Part 6, the HOPE revolution.

What replaced the demolition: the new Mission Main

Atlanta may be the furthest along, but its plans to demolish buildings, relocate residents and work with private developers to gentrify destitute neighborhoods are being mirrored across the country in cities like Chicago, Detroit, Miami and New Orleans.

In all of these cities, the family high-rises should be torn down. Yet some people cling to them:

It’s precarious, but it’s mine

[Concluded tomorrow in Part 3.]

Send post as PDF to

We know that’s the goal, which way do we do it?

1. Place-based. Build quality apartments and move people in to those apartments.

2. People-based. Give people subsidy that enables them to make effective choice and find apartments in the market.

Neither strategy is perfect, and between them theory ebbs and flows based on which failed more recently.

Diametrically opposed choices, with inadequate information

People-basing allows people to filter into their communities. It’s more organic and complementary to the marketplace. It doesn’t arouse developer ire, and because the people choose their own housing, they have what HUD came to call the “shopper’s incentive.” Having privately owned, professionally managed rental apartments also accords more with the American ethos. Economists also love it, because it comports with their vision of how things ought to work as it is taught in the economics textbooks.

Yes, we both agree, choice is better

But people-basing is unsatisfying to politicians. A family living quietly in market housing is politically visible, and when elected officials put out more funding for portable assistance, the result is a piece of paper, not a move-in. Vouchers are also an indirect execution – government relies on a counterparty (the landlord) to deliver quality accommodations if properly motivated. Conversely, place-basing is direct – government can take action, and the result is ribbon-cuttings.

New housing, and we all get credit

Place-basing also has a primitive common-sense: people lack housing. Okay, we’ll build some! Such a spirit motivated Franklin Roosevelt in 1937, as revealed in this New York Times story:

June 21, 2009

Atlanta Is Making Way for New Public Housing

ATLANTA — In 1936, Atlanta built Techwood Homes, the nation’s first housing project.

First Federal housing project. Boston had an earlier state-funded public housing property.

FDR dedicating Techwood in 1936

These properties, Atlanta among them, were seen first and foremost as slum clearance. If thy housing offend thee, ran the thinking, pluck it out and build quality housing new.

By the 1990s, a greater percentage of the city’s residents were living in housing projects — sprawling red-brick barracks that pockmarked the skyline — than in any other city in America.

Place-basing adds to supply, and more homes are better than fewer homes; plus place-basing and production tend to hold back rent increases. (Public housing was designed with cheap rents, based on costs, that everybody paid. Originally it had no deep income subsidy.) It enables concentration of services (e.g. in elderly or disabled properties), and enforcement is more direct (you can always find the owners because you can attach their assets).

Yet place-basing risks resident exploitation through deteriorating housing. It’s expensive. It limits residence choice. It’s institutional, often looking little different from a prison. If under-funded, it dies slowly, and in dying slowly, it destroys families and communities.

Pick a country, any country – public housing has a visible ethos

As an example of the destructive environment in isolated high-rises, I wrote at length regarding the Paris riots of November, 2005; see City of light, city of flames, L’horloge orange, France: riots, jobs, and housing, France: Tinder, meet match?

Clichy-sous-Bois, after the riots

As I put it back then, to fix French housing policy: tear down the high-rises:

Monolithic structures are suitable only for clones.

High-rise public housing never works.  Never has worked, never will work.

Pruitt-Igoe, vandalized (circa 1968)

Pruitt-Igoe, being depopulated (circa 1968)

Tear them all down and build proper communities, with lower density, low-rise, mixed use, and mixed income.

Remarkably, wonderfully, Atlanta has succeeded in doing just that:

Now, Atlanta is nearing a very different record: becoming the first major city to knock them all down. By next June, officials here plan to demolish the city’s last remaining housing project, fulfilling a long and divisive campaign to reduce poverty by decentralizing it.

Amazing how much inaccurate oversimplification can be packed into a single phrase. Allow me to explode it:

Taking it apart takes it to pieces

Long. Yes. Demolishing Atlanta’s public housing took over a decade, a process begun with the HOPE VI redevelopment of part of Techwood Homes into Centennial Place for the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games.

Divisive. By definition, I suppose, anything that lacks unanimity could be seen as divisive. In my experience, demolition of obsolete and decrepit public housing is divisive only in that some few people – residents, some resident advocates – raise a ruckus, or express a litany of conditional doubts, views we’ll see echoed throughout the Times’ article.

Reduce poverty. Wrong – that’s not why public housing is deconcentrated – indeed, it’s not the raison d’etre of public housing at all. Public housing exists to house the poor in decent, safe, and sanitary accommodations, to create the opportunity for poverty reduction but not to do it directly. The purpose of deconcentrating public housing is simply to move people out of unacceptable housing into better housing, better neighborhoods, with better schools.

Mixed-income developments oriented toward families, with trendy shops, golf courses and Y.M.C.A.’s, are emerging where bleak, uniform towers once stood.

What rose where Techwood had been: Centennial Place

This is bad?

Displaced residents are receiving vouchers to move to private housing.

This is bad?

Well built, but obsolete, under-maintained, and unhealthy:

Clark Howell Homes, Atlanta, 1990s

A landmark experiment in housing the urban poor in large government-run facilities that began under the New Deal is being undone.

This is bad?

Over the past 15 years, Atlanta has bulldozed about 15,000 units, spread across 32 housing projects, some of which once contained as many as 2,500 residents.

We had to destroy the exoskeletal shells to save the families: demolishing obsolete Atlanta public housing

As I’ve previously written, some properties need to go somewhere to die, because their exoskeletal structures are so outdated it becomes impossible to maintain people in market-quality accommodations without changing the entire structure.

I have previously written that zoning is destiny. To which add another: building skeleton is destiny. From some destinies, one cannot escape.

From some construction mistakes, you may never recover.

When in doubt, build a bigger skeleton. One day your successors’ successors will need it.

Imagine the muscles we could put on that

Not only are individual building structures constricting, so too are excessive densities, and deep concentration of severe poverty.

“We’ve realized that concentrating families in poverty is very destructive,” said Renee L. Glover, the executive director of the Atlanta Housing Authority. “It’s destructive to the families, the neighborhoods and the city.”

Right, right, and right.

Renee L. Glover, executive director of the Atlanta Housing Authority, at a redeveloped property. Erik S. Lesser for The New York Times

I’ve worked off and on with Ms. Glover on panels and workshops. She’s good people, and she really knows what she’s doing. More to the point – at least for the skeptics and rational paranoiacs, she is committed to the cause of affordability, as demonstrated by Atlanta’s reinvention of itself into the essential housing authority:

The elimination of housing projects does not mean the abandonment of public housing. The Atlanta Housing Authority pays for more residents’ housing these days than it did in the 1990s.

How did Atlanta do it? By strategically reinventing itself into the Essential Housing Authority.

[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]

Send post as PDF to