3

DEMOLITION IN CHICAGO, NEW ORLEANS, AND ATLANTA

Stephanie Mingo, who had been a 43-year resident of the now-closed St. Bernard project, blinked back angry tears as she spoke during her allotted three minutes. “You are hurting people. You are killing people,” she said [to the New Orleans City Council]. “I don’t know how y’all can sleep at night.”

—Julia Cass and Peter Whoriskey, “New Orleans to Raze Public Housing”

If public housing is dead, it is Chicago that killed it. From the 1960s onward, projects all over the city declined into dangerous and alienating wastelands, with the CHA, paralyzed by “staggering mismanagement,” unwilling or unable to do much about it.1 In 1982 a HUD-commissioned report concluded:

In every area we examined, from finance to maintenance, from administration to outside contracting, from staffing to project management, from purchasing to accounting, the CHA was found to be operating in a state of profound confusion and disarray. No one seems to be minding the store; what’s more, no one seems to genuinely care.2

The Robert Taylor Homes on the South Side and the Cabrini-Green development on the North Side gave Chicago a matching pair of internationally renowned debacles: intense concentrations of poverty and racial segregation that spiraled downward into nightmares of roach- and rat-infested housing, crumbling infrastructure, economic deprivation, and gang violence. All that had failed about public housing in America was manifest in the city’s high-rises, all the dysfunctionality brought to its highest level of expression there.

HUD put the CHA in receivership in the 1990s, concluding that it was fundamentally incapable of managing itself and its stock of more than forty thousand units. The failure of CHA was, in fact, the nation’s biggest public housing collapse. Its housing was so bad that when Congress imposed the viability tests for public housing, more than nineteen thousand units in Chicago failed; this was more units than any other city, except New York, even had.

New Orleans provides a second example of dysfunctional public housing leadership. The Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) also went into receivership in the 1990s when the federal government determined that HANO had no plan for ongoing maintenance and upkeep of its housing stock. In 1996, the U.S. General Accounting Office noted that “for nearly two decades, HANO has been one of the country’s poorest performing housing authorities” and for 1995 was the lowest ranking in HUD’s performance management evaluation system. As in Chicago, public housing residents were forced to live in deplorable conditions. HANO came late to demolition, not moving decisively until Hurricane Katrina forced thousands of public housing residents from their homes. Given the opportunity, however, the city simply condemned the properties and never let those families back in. By 2010 HANO had decided to demolish and redevelop all of its large public housing projects. Though residents resisted demolition in Chicago, the opposition in New Orleans produced scenes of violence not matched elsewhere. Former residents and their supporters were beaten back by police on the night the city council voted to tear down most of the city’s public housing.

In Atlanta, as in Chicago and New Orleans, public housing had been allowed to deteriorate until living conditions in most of the projects were deplorable. The Atlanta Housing Authority (AHA) was on HUD’s “Troubled Agency” list in the early 1990s and had proven itself incapable of effectively managing the thousands of units in its stock. New leadership at AHA, appointed in the mid-1990s, committed to a complete redefinition of public housing in that city, fully adopting the model of mixed-income development that was then emerging. Atlanta is the largest city in the country to commit to tearing down all of its old public housing.

These three cities then represent the vanguard of public housing transformation in the new century. They are not necessarily unique; other cities, such as Washington, D.C., and Memphis, have also committed to almost complete transformation of public housing and to dramatic reductions in the number of units available to very low income families. Chicago, Atlanta, and New Orleans, however, provide opportunities to examine how the factors leading to the dismantling of public housing across the nation identified in the previous chapter, including crime, race, and gentrification/redevelopment initiatives; have played out within specific historical and political contexts.

Chicago

The Chicago Housing Authority has been for a large part of its existence the poster child of public housing dysfunction. Forced by local politicians to funnel projects into slum areas of the city to maintain and reinforce racial segregation, and besotted by mismanagement and cronyism for most of the 1960s and 1970s, the CHA allowed its properties to sink into a hellish nightmare of crime and disrepair.3 Mayor Harold Washington during the 1980s said that the “CHA didn’t have a problem, they were the problem.”4

But just as Chicago set the bar nationally for dysfunction and failure, so, too, has it been a leader in producing the displacement, dispersal, and demolition policy paradigm that has dominated since the early 1990s. In the aftermath of the Gautreaux court cases, the city was home to the first large-scale mobility program that allowed public housing residents to move out of the projects using Section 8 subsidies and into “non-impacted” neighborhoods of the city and the surrounding suburbs. The outcomes of this program led policy makers to create the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) program that virtually duplicated the Gautreaux program in a select number of other large American cities.

The city was also an early innovator in the “mixed-income” development experiment, producing the first-in-the-nation experiment, Lake Parc Place, in 1991. The CHA’s executive director, Vincent Lane, was the coleader of the National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing that ultimately led to the creation of the HOPE VI program. Chicago received one of the first HOPE VI grants, $50 million in 1994, to redevelop Cabrini-Green. When HUD took over operation of CHA in 1995 it had its biggest opportunity to test the new set of ideas about public housing. As HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros declared, “the national system of public housing is on trial in Chicago.”5

The (Mis)management of Chicago Public Housing

As the 1990s began, the forty thousand units that CHA operated housed over 145,000 people. If Chicago public housing had been a separate city, it would have been the second largest in the state of Illinois. Most of the units dated from the 1950s and 1960s, and the CHA had built thousands of units in high-rises.6

The city’s public housing strategy had always heavily emphasized slum clearance and the city council had assumed responsibility and authority over the siting of public housing almost from the beginning.7 The shift in resident demographics to a black and mostly welfare clientele that characterized most cities was more rapid in Chicago than elsewhere. Though few public housing residents were on public relief during the 1940s, the CHA fairly quickly oriented itself toward serving the neediest within the city. When the CHA lowered its rents in 1940 it made one-quarter of the existing tenant’s income ineligible. These tenants, all of whom were white, were evicted.8 After the war, as incomes steadily rose, the CHA continued to strictly implement income guidelines and evicted households who were improving their economic situations. The opposition to public housing within white and middle-class neighborhoods was such that virtually all of the CHA’s housing was situated in predominantly black neighborhoods. Racial tensions within the city led to severe segregation and a shortage of quality housing options for blacks. By the mid-1950s, with most of the developments located in minority neighborhoods, demand for public housing among whites declined significantly. The shift in resident demographics was complete by the end of the 1960s, cementing public housing’s image as a home of last resort for the most marginal residents among the city’s black and welfare population.

The city kept adding large high-rise projects throughout its South Side and West Side black belt during the 1950s and 1960s. In one stretch from 1957 through 1968, 96 percent of the family public housing built in Chicago was in high-rise buildings.9 The city’s Near South Side, including a single corridor along State Street from Cermak Road (20th Street) to 53rd Street, became a long and virtually uninterrupted series of mid- and high-rise public housing projects that contained over twelve thousand public housing units. Here the Robert Taylor Homes dominated the landscape, over four thousand units stretching for two miles from 39th Street to 53rd Street. In the same vicinity, CHA placed Stateway Gardens (sixteen hundred units), Dearborn Homes and Ickes Homes (both over eight hundred units), the Ida B. Wells project (sixteen hundred units), and several other developments accounting for thousands of other units.

Map 1. Chicago public housing sites

The quality of public housing in Chicago was affected by the marginalization of the CHA within city government. The CHA and the projects it created and oversaw were never fully integrated into the city administration. As one Chicago ex-official put it, “the CHA was like a separate universe” within the city government.10 There was no coordination of services with other city departments, there was little to no career movement of executives across department lines into or out of CHA. Congress designed PHAs as quasi-independent agencies to insulate them from local political pressures; in Chicago the CHA was dominated by the city’s politics but insulated from the rest of the city’s administrative and policy structure. The outcome was the worst of both worlds as the city’s public housing was concentrated in declining, segregated neighborhoods surrounding the urban core, the only places allowed by the political power structure, while its operations were ignored by other city departments, leaving the communities virtually bereft of the services and benefits of city government. CHA management jobs were doled out as patronage to political supporters of the mayor who were not up to the challenges of maintaining thousand of units of low-income housing located in many of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in the city. Problems of maintenance and crime spiraled out of control, and the CHA, mired in disarray, was unable to respond to deteriorating conditions.

Over time management and the local police largely ceded the grounds of public housing estates to gangs who controlled the projects and fought among themselves for control of the local drug trade. Families lived in constant fear, devising plans for what to do when the next gun battle broke out between rival gangs.11 Vincent Lane, a private-sector real estate developer, who took over as executive director of CHA in 1988, aggressively attacked the problems of Chicago high-rise projects. His anticrime efforts were especially innovative and only partially constitutional.12 He introduced identification badges for residents, guarded entryways, and initiated apartment sweeps aimed at rooting out crime. The residents of Chicago public housing were in effect asked to surrender many of their civil rights in order to enjoy a less dangerous environment. Conditions in Chicago public housing were such that many of the residents did this willingly. The sweeps, unfortunately, had only a marginal effect.13 The private security guards hired by CHA were ineffective in reducing the control of gang members at most buildings.

When Congress imposed the viability test in 1996 to determine whether rehabilitation was more cost-effective than outright demolition, over nineteen thousand CHA units failed. The viability test presented the CHA with the prospect of tearing down virtually all of its family public housing (including all of the city’s family high-rises). The new congressional rules meant, in effect, wholesale transformation of the Chicago public housing stock. This, however, was a realization that CHA had been coming to on its own.

Vincent Lane was an early devotee of mixed-income redevelopment. In fact, under his leadership, CHA had pioneered the concept of mixed-income redevelopment of public housing projects. In response to lobbying by the CHA, Congress had included a small demonstration program of mixed-income public housing redevelopment in the 1990 National Affordable Housing Act.14 Chicago was the only PHA to run the experimental program, using the federal funds to rehabilitate the Victor Olander Homes (a development of two sixteen-story high-rises) into Lake Parc Place. The project incorporated some design upgrades over previous HUD standards for high-rises, but the income mix was limited to public housing tenants and “moderate-income” wage-earning families at 50 to 80 percent of the area median income. Although these were modest first steps—“modernization” of units rather than demolition and redevelopment, limited deviation from the spartan design guidelines then in place for public housing, and an income mix that did not include market-rate or homeownership units—Lane and the CHA had, by 1991, completed one of the nation’s first experiments in mixed-income public housing redevelopment.

In the same year that Lake Parc Place opened, CHA was sued by residents of the Henry Horner Homes, a public housing project on the city’s West Side.15 The plaintiffs in this case alleged that the CHA had engaged in de facto demolition by leaving the units vacant and allowing them to deteriorate. The parties to the suit began to negotiate a settlement (ultimately signed in 1995) that would turn the Horner Homes into West Haven, a mixed-income community that replaced the Horner high-rises with a lower density townhouse development. Work began in time for some of the redevelopment to be completed in advance of the 1996 Democratic National Convention, which was held at United Center, across the street from the old high-rises. When the HOPE VI program was first created, Chicago was an early and frequent subscriber. Cabrini-Green received $50 million in 1994, ABLA received $24.5 million in 1996, while Horner received $18.4 million in 1996, and the Robert Taylor Homes $25 million in the same year. In the first eight years of the HOPE VI program, Chicago received $200 million in grants, more than any other city in the country.

Despite the considerable energy of the Lane years, and the initiatives in crime prevention and redevelopment, the city’s public housing projects were still plagued by crime, financial mismanagement, and decline. The historian Bradford Hunt recounts a memorable scene in 1995 in which a frustrated Lane, meeting with HUD officials, “threw his large set of keys across the table at HUD assistant secretary Joseph Shuldiner, and told him the federal government could have Chicago’s projects if it wanted them.”16 HUD, after years of watching the CHA flounder, took him up on the offer.

The HUD Years

In 1995 HUD assumed control of Chicago’s public housing system, acknowledging decades of mismanagement, fiscal irresponsibility, and misguided and ineffectual CHA policies. The CHA had been on HUD’s list of troubled agencies since 1979 but there was some worry within HUD that the scale of dysfunction at the agency, the third largest PHA in the country, was beyond the capacity of HUD to reverse.17 HUD assigned its top public housing official, Assistant Secretary for Public and Indian Housing Joseph Shuldiner, to the Chicago case. Shuldiner had previously been the director of the New York City Housing Authority and the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles before joining HUD. Within two years, he had CHA off of HUD’s “troubled agency” list and had improved the agency’s management and accounting systems. He continued to aggressively pursue redevelopment funds, while managing the redevelopment processes at Cabrini, Henry Horner, ABLA, and the Robert Taylor Homes. By the time HUD handed back the CHA to the city of Chicago in 1999, there were five HOPE VI projects under way in the city, accounting for more than $150 million in federal funding. Yet, if anything, the viability tests meant that Chicago would have to expand and accelerate its public housing redevelopment efforts in the near future. Congress had mandated that buildings failing the viability test would have to be torn down and redeveloped within five years. Given the sheer number of units of Chicago public housing that had failed (the city’s failed units were 16 percent of the national total of failed units18), this requirement was unrealistic in the Chicago case. The city’s first task, upon reacquiring responsibility for the operation of its own housing authority, was to finalize a plan for the remaking of public housing within the city.

The Plan for Transformation

The city of Chicago submitted its Plan for Transformation (PFT) of public housing to HUD on January 6, 2000. One month later HUD approved the plan and made a commitment to provide the Chicago Housing Authority $1.5 billion over ten years for demolition and rehabilitation of thirty-eight thousand units of public housing.19 Under the plan the number of public housing units in the city would be reduced from thirty-eight thousand to twenty-five thousand, with essentially all of the reduction coming from the stock of family housing. Only the ten family projects that had passed the 1996 Viability Test would avoid the wrecking ball; these projects would be rehabilitated and continue to operate as “traditional” public housing. The rest of the city’s stock of family units would shrink considerably and operate under the new mixed-income model. Management of the properties would be shifted to private companies, and new and stricter tenant screening policies would be adopted.20 A total of fifty-one high-rise buildings were scheduled for demolition according to the plan.21

The plan was announced with great fanfare by the city and by HUD. Secretary of HUD Andrew Cuomo called it one of the highlights of his administration.22 The MacArthur Foundation pledged millions of dollars in support of the plan. Table 3.1 details the pre- and post-transformation landscape of family public housing in Chicago.

The PFT in Chicago was not merely an effort to remake public housing. It became the city’s major urban redevelopment initiative of the new decade and the largest public works program in the city’s history. The plan, in a complete reversal of previous practice in the city with respect to public housing, was to be a coordinated effort of several city agencies, including the CHA. As one former city official said, “the Mayor said ‘this [the Plan for Transformation] is the major urban redevelopment initiative in the city’—he made it every agency’s highest priority.”23 The redevelopment sites would see new and upgraded city streets and infrastructure, parks and recreation facilities, and in some cases new or improved elementary schools, all of which had been systematically denied to public housing complexes in the past. The city allocated 50 percent of its Low-Income Housing Tax Credit funding to public housing redevelopment sites, and 50 percent of its annual Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) allotment for community improvements. The design of the sites, as in HOPE VI projects across the country, would reintegrate public housing into the fabric of the community by reestablishing street grids, scaling down developments (turning high-rises into row-house and townhome developments), and mixing incomes so that public housing residents would never be the majority of residents in any given development. The PFT would subsume and expand on all of the previous redevelopment efforts that had been completed or begun in the city prior to 2000.

Community Impacts

The PFT has been by any estimate a massive undertaking. Chicago had invested heavily in the high-rise model of public housing and had concentrated the developments in such a way that they dominated several South Side and West Side communities. The demolition of these projects, the relocation of thousands of residents, and the complete remaking of the physical environment at the demolition sites would consume years and billions of dollars of federal and local investment. As one aldermanic aide said, “this whole city is being transformed economically and racially by this Plan for Transformation.”24 Any public works project of this magnitude would send ripple effects throughout the entire city; the PFT did so in at least three ways. First, it was part of a significant revalorization of inner city real estate in Chicago. In some cases, neighborhoods were poised to take off in land value and simply awaited the removal of public housing as in the Near North neighborhood surrounding the Cabrini-Green project. In other cases, public housing demolition has generated unmistakable gentrification trends in South Side and West Side neighborhoods by the sheer size of the redevelopments taking place. The demolition of units along the State Street corridor has helped to trigger gentrification in the Bronzeville neighborhood and in surrounding communities once dominated by Stateway Gardens and the Robert Taylor Homes.

Table 3.1 Summary of Chicago family public housing pre- and post-transformation

Second, the demolition of thousands of units of public housing has necessitated the relocation of thousands of very low income households. Except for the Henry Horner Homes redevelopment, where the CHA was forced by a lawsuit to phase the redevelopment so that residents could remain on-site while construction was taking place, redevelopment of public housing communities has pushed thousands of low-income families into the private housing market. The scale of the PFT produced a concern early on that the housing market would be unable to absorb all of the households displaced by public housing demolition. A market study by researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago reinforced those concerns. The plan began at a time when the rental vacancy rate in the Chicago area was less than 5 percent.25 Through 2009, almost four thousand CHA households relocated with vouchers; most moved into the city’s high-poverty, predominantly black neighborhoods on the South and West sides, reinforcing the overall pattern for the Housing Choice Voucher program in Chicago.26 Between 1995 and 2002, 82 percent of the displaced families using vouchers moved to neighborhoods that were more than 90 percent African American, and half moved to neighborhoods with poverty rates in excess of 30 percent.27 In fact, the independent monitor for the plan, former U.S. Attorney Thomas Sullivan, reported in 2003 that there were significant problems with the city’s relocation assistance. Families were hurried out of their public housing homes, there were too few relocation counselors to handle the workload, and too many families relocated to poor-quality housing. Shortly after that report, residents sued the CHA for failing to live up to its obligation to assist residents in the relocation process and for violating Fair Housing laws in the process.28 The result has been an improved relocation effort in which families have had access to “enhanced mobility counseling” in an effort to move out of segregated, high-poverty neighborhoods. It is unclear, however, whether the enhanced counseling will result in dramatically different spatial patterns among families displaced from public housing in Chicago. Families who moved away from the Henry Horner Homes had access to special relocation counseling, social services, and van tours in an effort to guide them to “opportunity neighborhoods,” yet only 6 percent of the enrolled families made such moves. The majority moved to predominantly black neighborhoods, high-poverty neighborhoods, or to both.29

The reception of neighborhood residents to the influx of public housing families was mixed at best. Complaints about public housing newcomers have been the greatest in more middle class neighborhoods,30 where property owners are concerned about protecting their real estate investments. The conflicts between homeowners and public housing residents reveal a significant split in several communities on the city’s South Side. Both sides felt threatened by the other, with public housing residents worried about being displaced by gentrification and the middle-class property owners threatened by the prospect of living near concentrations of poverty.31 Especially in areas where new investment was occurring, as in the city’s Bronzeville neighborhood on the near South Side, black middle class homeowners and gentrifiers were concerned about what they consider to be the problems associated with public housing—crime, social disorder, and declining quality of life within the community. The studies of Michelle Boyd, Mary Patillo McCoy, and Derek Hyra document the divisions within the South Side black community based on class and housing tenure.32

The third ripple effect of transformation was the displacement of crime from the sites of demolished public housing into other neighborhoods. Reduction of crime at the redevelopment site is a common outcome in public housing transformation; studies of HOPE VI redevelopments have documented this effect in a range of cities and circumstances.33 Crime reduction at the redevelopment site, however, does not mean necessarily a reduction in crime citywide. Indeed, the major effect of redevelopment is not to reduce overall crime in the city, but to push it into different areas. The displacement of crime could reflect two phenomena. First, the displacement of public housing residents who were engaged in gang and criminal activities at the original site simply move their criminal activities to their new residences. In this case, one would see a spike in crime in so-called destination neighborhoods that receive displaced residents. In fact, there does not seem to be much evidence to support this particular dynamic.34 Second, demolition and displacement removes a very low income population preyed upon by criminals and eliminates community design elements that make for easy environments in which to conduct criminal activities. When one inviting environment is taken away through demolition, crime moves to other promising areas. In Chicago, the crime displacement effects were notable.35 The neighborhood where the Robert Taylor Homes once stood saw a large drop in homicides from 2000 to 2008, while two miles south the murder rate tripled.36 A local expert attributes the spike in crime to gangs who had controlled the Taylor Homes “trying to establish new territory” after the demolition of the project.37 For their part, CHA officials argue that fluctuations in neighborhood crime rates cannot be reliably attributed to the Plan for Transformation and the intracity migration it has induced.

In some cases, the displaced households themselves were put at risk when they were moved out of their public housing community. The relocation of public housing residents into other neighborhoods and sometimes into other public housing projects at times moved gang members into the heart of another gang’s territory. Even when a resident was not a member of a gang, the gang dominance of their original project was enough to taint them in the eyes of their new neighbors. Investigative reporters in the city “found several murders that were linked to” disputes stemming from gang rivalries induced by the relocation of public housing residents.38

Resident Opposition

One of the more striking images of public housing transformation in Chicago was the sight of residents carrying signs protesting the demolition of the Cabrini-Green project. The prevailing discourse of disaster that circulated around Cabrini and most of Chicago public housing suggested conditions so bad that residents would be grateful to see the place demolished and grateful for the opportunity to leave. In fact, however, organized opposition to the demolition of public housing in Chicago emerged fairly early in the process. In 1996, Wardell Yotaghan and other residents of public housing organized the Coalition to Protect Public Housing (CPPH) to serve as a voice for CHA families. Chicago public housing residents have a history of organizing; residents have been involved in management activities since the 1960s. The CHA’s system of resident management is the oldest public housing resident management organization in the nation. Organizing among CHA residents dates back to the formation of the Chicago Housing Tenants’ Organization in 1970 to protest what it felt was the misuse of modernization funds and mismanagement.39 As Feldman and Stall argue in their study of life in the Wentworth Gardens project on the city’s South Side, Chicago public housing residents did not passively acquiesce to worsening conditions in CHA buildings.40 They organized grassroots efforts to prod the CHA into better management, and when that did not work they took on the effort themselves. By the 1990s there was little trust between the residents and the CHA. When residents were told that their units were to be demolished and they would be relocated with Housing Choice Vouchers until they could return to the completed redevelopment site, they were skeptical. They were doubtful about whether there would be enough replacement housing built for them. They were unconvinced that the Housing Choice Vouchers would work in the local housing market, and they questioned the quality of the neighborhoods and the housing to which they would be moved. Finally, they disagreed with CHA about the need for large-scale demolition to turn around their public housing communities.

Opposition to demolition by public housing residents in Chicago, as elsewhere, was not an effort to maintain status quo conditions. No one knew the deficiencies of existing public housing in Chicago as well as the residents. Have been ill-used by the CHA for decades, residents easily envisioned the multitude of further harm that could befall them in a displacement and relocation effort managed by that same entity. CPPH was formed to advocate for positive change in the living environments of public housing that would provide existing residents the chance to benefit. By 1996, when CPPH emerged, the CHA was in the midst of redevelopment activities at the Henry Horner Homes and just beginning planning at Cabrini-Green. HOPE VI grants had just been announced for ABLA and the Robert Taylor Homes as well. It was clear that large-scale change was in the works for Chicago public housing, because four years before the Plan for Transformation was announced thousands of CHA units had failed the HUD Viability Test. At first, CPPH focused on a series of informational meetings at which residents from various developments could trade stories about what was happening to them and their communities. Specific concerns began to emerge, including an increased rate of evictions in 1997 and 1998. Some saw this as a way of emptying the buildings to ready them for relocation and demolition, a continuation and spread of the de facto demolition techniques the CHA had used at the Henry Horner Homes years before. The CHA, run at the time by the HUD caretaker Joseph Shuldiner, said the evictions were simply a reflection of better management.41

CPPH organized demonstrations at HUD and CHA offices to demand a demolition and redevelopment process that was more resident-friendly. Specifically, they demanded assurances and rights similar to those that were won through legal battle by the residents of the Horner Homes. The consent decree governing the Horner redevelopment called for phased redevelopment so that residents could remain on-site until such time as they could move directly into their new units. The Horner settlement guaranteed a one-for-one replacement of the public housing units demolished, and the newly redeveloped site, though managed privately, was not to be governed by restrictive tenant screening policies. Thus, the original residents of the project had better prospects of actually being able to reside in the redeveloped community and to directly benefit from the upgraded physical environment and better public services in the new community. CPPH was negotiating with Shuldiner on these points at the time that control of the CHA was returned to the city. Negotiations were cut off at that point and soon thereafter the city announced “The Plan.”42

Once the PFT was announced, CPPH focused their efforts on opposing the absolute reduction in the number of public housing units being envisioned. CPPH’s position was significantly undercut, however, when the traditional mouthpiece for resident concerns, the residents’ Central Advisory Committee (CAC), endorsed the CHA plan.43 The organization experienced a setback when its first leader, Wardell Yotaghan, died of a heart attack in 1999. CPPH continued its efforts to preserve Chicago public housing and to bring attention to the concerns of displaced tenants. In 2009 the organization worked with other national groups to bring the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing to Chicago to examine the displacement of public housing residents. CHA continues to work with the resident representatives from the Local Advisory Committees (LACs) and the CAC, who on occasion have, themselves, been vocal in criticizing the implementation of the PFT. In December 2009, at the ten-year celebration of the PFT, CAC members unveiled a video that focused on the tenant experience. While acknowledging improved conditions at the newly redeveloped sites, the video described the disruption to residents’ lives and the loss of community they had suffered in the process. At the event CAC member and CHA board member Myrna King called for a moratorium on further demolition until more replacement units were built.44

The completed redevelopment sites in Chicago are, for the most part, striking in the degree to which they have altered the physical landscape of public housing. Handsome two- and three-story brick walk-ups, with various architectural amenities, stand where neglected and imposing modernist high-rises once dominated. The great wall of public housing that paralleled the Dan Ryan Expressway on the South Side is now gone. Although large swaths are still vacant, attractive new housing has been built on part of the land previously occupied by the Robert Taylor Homes and the neighborhood shows signs of economic rebirth. Homeowners and the middle class are returning to the South Side; on the Near North Side, prior to the housing crash in 2007, condominiums were selling for $750,000 in the neighborhood where Cabrini-Green once stood. New shops, a park, a new public library, and a new fire station also have gone in near the Cabrini site.

The irony of the Chicago case is that the considerable achievements in coordinating city services were realized in public housing communities only after their demolition. For most of its history, public housing in Chicago was not a priority for public officials. It was, in fact, something of the opposite, at best a necessary evil. Public housing in Chicago, shunted to declining and segregated communities when first approved, marginalized by cost-cutting and excessive frugality when built, and slowly asphyxiated by mismanagement and neglect during its lifetime, would, upon demolition, finally become the city’s top priority. The city that had proven so monumentally inept at providing public housing for its poorest citizens has proven quite adept at removing that housing and creating mixed-income redevelopment sites in its place.

New Orleans

The city of New Orleans was one of the more active in building public housing in the early years of the program; six projects were in place by 1940. The Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO), like many public housing authorities at the time, carefully segregated its projects. Of the original developments, St. Thomas and Iberville were for white residents, while Magnolia (later called C. J. Peete Homes), Calliope (later called D. W. Cooper Homes), Lafitte, and St. Bernard were for blacks. These early projects were notable for their design features and solid construction. Iberville and Lafitte, the two projects adjacent to the city’s downtown district, were especially distinctive architecturally. The projects consisted of three-story red-brick blocks with, according to a New York Times architectural critic, “detailed brickwork, tile roofs and wrought-iron balustrades representing a level of craft more likely found on an Ivy League campus” than in public housing.45 The projects fit the scale of the surrounding neighborhoods, and incorporated a street grid with pedestrian paths shaded by large oaks. The construction was solid and high quality, producing housing with a physical foundation and strength much greater than its political foundation.

Figure 5. Lafitte public housing development in New Orleans. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, 896 units were vacated and never reinhabited. It was demolished in 2008 and replaced by Faubourg Lafitte, a mixed-income community. Courtesy Louisiana Landmarks Society.

Initially, as in most cities, public housing was reserved for the lower-income working class. HANO filled their buildings according to a strict formula, reserving spots for households with incomes in each of five tiers, ensuring both a mix of incomes and a sufficient base of working families to keep the projects financially solvent. As families increased their incomes, especially after World War II, HANO forced them to move out to make way for other families. The strict application of income restrictions meant the cycling out of the highest income tenants, though HANO’s strategies were never as forceful as those used in Chicago and elsewhere where evictions pushed thousands of working families out of public housing in the ‘40s and ‘50s.

The Decline of New Orleans Public Housing

Despite the general success of its early public housing developments, HANO had difficulty finding locations to build new projects. Neighborhood resistance led the authority to ever more isolated locations and to a strategy of simply expanding the size of the original projects; within twenty years of their initial construction Cooper, Peete, and St. Bernard had doubled in size while St. Thomas had grown by over 50 percent. Each of these developments became home to around fifteen hundred households by the time their expansions were completed.46 In addition to the original projects, four additional large complexes were completed by 1964. By the end of the 1960s, the public housing stock in New Orleans was a mix of projects that were well sited, close to downtown job and activity centers, and others that were isolated developments far from the city center, in low-amenity neighborhoods, walled off from the rest of the community by railroad tracks, industry, and highways.

Severe housing segregation and employment discrimination in New Orleans from the 1930s through the 1960s gave lower-income whites greater upward mobility and greater housing choice than blacks who lived in public housing. As a result, turnover in the white buildings was consistently higher than in the black buildings. When HANO moved to desegregate its housing stock after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, forcing the integration of white and black residents within the same buildings, public housing slowly lost its racial diversity. Lower-income whites, with other housing options in the local market, “simply stopped viewing the projects as housing they were willing to accept.”47 The socioeconomic profile of residents also changed during this time period as HANO, like other local housing authorities across the country, focused their resources on a more welfare-dependent population. Waiting lists were dominated by the jobless as working class blacks also began to leave the projects. By the end of the 1960s, public housing in New Orleans was almost exclusively inhabited by very low income African Americans.48

Patterns of white flight, suburbanization, and continued residential segregation left New Orleans more generally with a much poorer and predominantly black population. During the 1960s New Orleans lost 16 percent of its white population to suburbanization. A Brookings Institution study of social hardship in central cities in the mid-1970s ranked New Orleans as the third-most-distressed city in the country.49 It had a large and growing black underclass, poor public schools, low rates of employment, and high rates of violent street crime. The poverty and crime continued to grow throughout the ’70s and ’80s, generating further decline in the public housing stock and in the city’s poorer black neighborhoods.

Over time HANO showed little ability to manage the growing problems of physical decline in its housing stock or the social problems that were overwhelming its developments. A 1983 HUD audit concluded that HANO had no overall plan for the maintenance of its buildings. Conditions had deteriorated so badly in the Desire and Fischer developments that HUD recommended removal of 2,118 units from those communities.50 A 1988 management review by HUD found 241 deficiencies in HANO operations. Six years later, in June 1994, another audit of units found violations of quality standards in every single unit randomly chosen for examination.51 HANO still had no preventative maintenance program, and vacated units sat empty for months, costing the agency millions of dollars in lost revenue each year. In 1996, HUD took over the Housing Authority of New Orleans to correct systemic problems of mismanagement.

The precipitous decline in the conditions of public housing in the city coincided with increasing pressures for redevelopment and the expansion of upscale residential development in closer proximity to some projects. Political scientist Alexander Reichl maintains that the two trends were not unrelated: “Gross neglect serves the expressed political interest of displacing public housing populations. The battle to dismantle public housing in New Orleans is arguably half over at several housing developments.”52 Reichl wrote those words in 1999, six years before Hurricane Katrina.

Redevelopment Pressures

The only asset held by several New Orleans public housing projects that had actually appreciated over time was location. Iberville and Lafitte were next to the French Quarter, within walking distance of Bourbon Street and the heart of the city’s tourist-dependent economy. St. Thomas, located near the Mississippi River east of downtown, was an isolated community of impoverished blacks surrounded by higher income whites, in the middle of a “chain of economically valuable neighborhoods” and directly in the path of the city’s revitalization efforts.53 Developers and city leaders were covetous of the land occupied by these projects. In 1986, an advisory report to the mayor recommended a drastic reduction in the density of all public housing projects in the city. The mayor’s report suggested that vacancy rates at the time (made worse by HANO’s inability to maintain its housing stock) would allow the removal of one-third to one-half of all public housing units at its biggest developments without reducing the number of families then being served.54 The report also contained a recommendation that the mayor assume authority over all HANO decisions, essentially eliminating the agency as an independent decision-making body. The mayor’s plan was to remove public housing to make way for moderate-income housing or commercial development. In some cases, no plan for reuse of the public housing site was offered.55 Though the mayor’s recommendations were never implemented, public housing in New Orleans was in a precarious political position.

St. Thomas, in particular, was vulnerable. Vacancy rates had risen to 29 percent in the project by 1990 and plans for its redevelopment were openly considered by developers and the city. As came to be the case with many public housing projects across the country, the private sector saw the project as an impediment to investment in a neighborhood that was otherwise poised to take off.56 The move toward demolition in New Orleans at this time still lacked sufficient support to move forward. The decisive factor proved to be the orientation of the federal government. The 1994 HUD audit of HANO depicted an organizational disarray so complete that it recommended privatization of “the entire operation of the authority.”57 HANO was one of the first PHAs to win a HOPE VI grant (for the Desire project), and when the federal government lifted the one-for-one replacement rule HANO asked for and received from HUD the authority to shift funds that had been earmarked for modernization to demolition. In 1996, HANO received its second HOPE VI grant, this one to carry out the long-anticipated demolition and redevelopment of St. Thomas.

Map 2. New Orleans public housing transformation sites

Hurricane Katrina

When Katrina hit in August 2005, it devastated the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Already in the midst of an affordable housing crisis prior to Katrina (56 percent of very low income families paid more than half of their income for housing), the city saw flooding in three-quarters of its poorest neighborhoods, where 80 percent of the residents were nonwhite.58 Six large public housing developments were shuttered immediately after the hurricane. Though efforts to begin rebuilding middle-class homeownership-oriented neighborhoods in the city began immediately, rebuilding in the black, low-income Ninth Ward lagged. The loss of rental units produced significant rent increases across the city, which made Section 8 vouchers more difficult to use. HUD adjusted fair market rents upward by 39 percent from 2005 to 2006, but advocates argued the real increases were twice that high.59

Katrina caused some damage to the city’s public housing stock, but most developments escaped significant structural harm. Nevertheless, public housing residents returning to the city in the weeks after the hurricane were kept from reoccupying their units, even in developments that sustained no structural damage from the storm winds or flood waters. In most cases they were not even allowed back in to retrieve belongings. The projects were fenced off and protected against intruders and against their previous inhabitants with razor wire. Residents were provided with “disaster relief vouchers” to subsidize other accommodations or were moved into other public housing developments. An unknown number became homeless or did not return to the city.

Katrina provided the opportunity for a final push to close down public housing in the city and move toward redevelopment. At the very least, the hurricane presented an opportunity for the city to rid itself of the blighting influences that most of those projects had become. As Republican congressman Richard Baker of Baton Rouge said, “we finally cleaned up public housing; we couldn’t do it, but God did.”60

With residents scattered and slowly trickling back to the city and with the units already vacated and arguably damaged by the natural catastrophe, proponents of redevelopment and demolition had the advantage. They also had the support of a HUD eager to implement its vision of mixed-income communities. From the very beginning, as public housing residents fought to be allowed back into their homes, Secretary of HUD Alphonso Jackson broached the subject of a complete dismantling of public housing in the city. To him and to others, the opportunity to radically reshape the city’s public housing landscape presented by the evacuation forced by Katrina was an ideal chance to address the high levels of poverty and crime in the city. The racial dimension of this “opportunity” did not escape him. Indeed, Jackson suggested that post-Katrina New Orleans would not “be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again.”61 In November Jackson publicly promised to build $1.8 billion of public housing along the Gulf Coast, noting, however, that “it will not be traditional public housing.”62 Mayor Ray Nagin also took the opportunity provided by Katrina to advocate for a more comprehensive and complete program of public housing demolition and redevelopment than had existed prior to the hurricane.

The Fight to Preserve

Residents and their advocates began a series of protests in the months after Katrina that were to last the better part of four years. They demanded access to their homes and argued that the public housing closings were exacerbating the city’s affordable housing crisis. In early 2006 rallies were held to demand the reopening of St. Bernard, Iberville, Guste, Cooper, and C. J. Peete. In June 2006, however, HUD announced plans to demolish over five thousand units of public housing in what became known as the “Big Four” developments—C.J. Peete, D. W. Cooper, St. Bernard, and Lafitte. HANO announced it would reopen one thousand units in other public housing complexes across the city—though these had existed before Katrina and therefore did not offset the demolition of the five thousand units. The decision to demolish was in part based on HUD’s contention that rehabilitation of the projects would cost a prohibitive $130 million, a figure questioned by the residents and affordable housing advocates.63 HUD and HANO, furthermore, pointed to the HOPE VI redevelopment of St. Thomas (now called River Gardens) as an example of the possibilities of full-scale demolition and renewal of public housing. Advocates pointed to the same example (and its reduction of public housing units from fifteen hundred to less than two hundred on-site) to highlight the severe reduction in public housing units that they felt would likely result from further redevelopment.64 The HUD announcement triggered a lawsuit to block the demolition, and protests outside of the closed public housing projects intensified. In August 2006 residents and advocates attempted to reoccupy Lafitte; nine were arrested.65 The next month former residents of C. J. Peete reoccupied units in that development without HANO permission. In January 2007, advocates temporarily reoccupied units at St. Bernard, only to be forcibly evicted by a SWAT team from the New Orleans Police Department. The next month, advocates repeated the effort at C. J. Peete. Advocates protested outside the home of city council members, attempted to disrupt HANO board meetings, and protested at City Hall.

The residents received support from advocates across the country, and from some members of Congress. In February of 2007, Representatives Maxine Waters (D-CA) and Barney Frank (D-MA) introduced the “Gulf Coast Hurricane Housing Recovery Act of 2007,” giving residents the right to return to their public housing units and stopping demolition until a plan for one-for-one replacement of the units was developed. The House passed the measure in March. Ultimately, the bill was killed in the Senate by Louisiana’s Republican senator, David Vitter, who argued that fewer public housing units were necessary in a city in which only two-thirds of the original population had returned.66 Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) called on President Bush to halt the demolitions in New Orleans in 2007, and to develop a plan to produce full replacement of the units that were to be removed. As a presidential candidate in 2007, Barack Obama did the same. Obama’s open letter to Bush read in part, “No public housing should be demolished until HUD can point to an equivalent number of replacement units in the near vicinity.”67

When demolition at B. W. Cooper began in December 2007 protesters stood in front of the backhoe, attempting to stop the tear down. The demolition resumed the next day while protesters marched to City Hall and the federal courthouse. Simultaneously, advocates filed suit to impose a restraining order to halt the demolitions. Two days later, Pelosi and Reid sent their letter to Bush. Meanwhile, HANO negotiated with the plaintiffs in the lawsuit and agreed to stop the demolition of three of the Big Four unless and until the city council explicitly permitted it. Demolition at Cooper was allowed to proceed because demolition of that project had been approved pre-Katrina.68 These events set up a climactic city council vote that would decide the final disposition of the public housing developments that advocates and residents had been trying to preserve for more than two years. Prior to the vote, HUD made it clear to New Orleans council members that should they vote to halt the demolition of one of the projects, Lafitte, HUD would withdraw nine hundred housing vouchers targeted for the displaced residents of Lafitte. “Any action that would prevent the demolition of Lafitte will deny housing assistance to the displaced tenants, which …would likely make it very difficult for them to afford to pay their own rent,” said Jackson.69

On December 20, 2007, as hundreds of people crowded into the council chambers, and hundreds more confronted police outside, the council heard more than four hours of public testimony on both sides of the issue. Official tenant representatives said the demolition of these projects was long overdue, and that public housing residents had been subject to substandard living conditions for years. Other former tenants expressed support for the demolition. “No one deserves to live in these conditions; it’s inhuman. I am for demolition,” said the president of the C. J. Peete residents’ council.70 A resident of the Cooper development said she wanted a better home and better schools: “If you don’t rebuild then the rest of the city and the neighborhood behind you will not rebuild…. It’s about us walking into a house and saying, ‘this is a house, it ain’t a project.’ ” Protesters, on the other hand, complained of a lack of voice in the decision-making process, of the loss of homes, and their lack of trust in HANO and HUD to provide enough housing assistance for all who had been displaced. As police battled protesters with pepper spray and taser guns outside of City Hall, the council voted unanimously in four separate votes to approve the demolitions. Mayor Ray Nagin called the decisions made by the council “ones of compassion, courage, and commitment to this city.”71 City council president Arnie Fielkow said, “It’s my hope that the word ‘project’ will never again be used in place of what should be ‘transitional homes.’ Every citizen deserves a safe and affordable place to raise a family.”72 Demolition proceeded immediately at Cooper and shortly thereafter at C. J. Peete. The St. Bernard project began to come down in February 2008. The last of the Big Four, the Lafitte project, began demolition in April of the same year. Of the four, the Lafitte project was the bitterest loss for public housing advocates. The project sustained only minor damage in the hurricane and flood, and was relatively well maintained and almost fully occupied at the time of Katrina. This made it one of the more functional of the public housing developments run by HANO. Architecturally, the project “had a distinct elegance,” according to the head of the local office of the National Trust for Historic Preservation (NTHP), including tile roofs, solid brickwork, and ironwork.73 Walter Gallas, director of the New Orleans Field Office of NTHP, said:

Any arguments I tried to make for the retention and continued long-term use of any of the buildings on the basis of historic preservation, architectural merit, structural soundness or sustainability were fruitless in a public arena filled with rhetoric about the evil nature of the buildings, their dilapidated appearance, the alleged high cost to remediate and repair, and the success of national developers at showing examples of their work in other communities.74

Dismantling New Orleans Public Housing

Residents and their advocates continued to protest, holding signs and shouting with bullhorns outside the fences of the projects being bulldozed. But much of the tension had gone out of the protests by then, with the federal government and the city’s power structure having decisively weighed in on the side of demolition. In the end, the preferences of the residents, whether in favor or opposed to demolition, were not important in how public housing demolition played out in post-Katrina New Orleans. There was a policy consensus among officials and analysts that public housing in the city would not be reoccupied. HUD, HANO, and city officials within New Orleans were in general agreement about the future of public housing in the city in the months and years following Katrina. HANO had already been in the process of demolishing and redeveloping projects prior to the hurricane. The redevelopment of the St. Thomas project (into River Gardens), and Desire (transformed into Abundance) were complete by the time the storm hit. Demolition had been approved for Cooper. Katrina did not initiate a new direction for city public housing policy; it merely provided the opportunity to expedite the complete dismantling of the city’s public housing stock, an objective that had been decided by the city’s political leaders years before.

In 2011, HANO received $30 million in federal funds (from the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative, the successor to HOPE VI) to redevelop its final remaining public housing complex, Iberville. The Iberville Homes are situated along a streetcar line, adjacent to the French Quarter and near a biomedical campus and hospital complex planned by Louisiana State University. The redevelopment of Iberville, according to business leaders, was “pivotal to revitalizing Canal Street” and the centerpiece of “a much more complete and responsible redevelopment” of the entire area.75 Elimination of Iberville will be the last step in a complete shift away from traditional public housing in the city. Though the city actually gained subsidized housing because of the large increase in HUD vouchers after Katrina, the city, as of this writing, still suffers from extreme shortages of affordable housing as a result of stock lost in the storm. The conversion of housing subsidies from public housing to vouchers, furthermore, has generally not meant a greater dispersion of subsidized residents. There is evidence that, as in other cities, displaced families using vouchers have largely moved to other high-poverty, highly segregated neighborhoods. According to one study, “the areas with the largest concentrations of Section 8 units and the best access to public transportation, grocery stores and functioning parks are near former public housing sites.”76

The transformation of public housing in New Orleans post-Katrina was complicated politically because of the larger racial conflicts playing out in the city. The debate over public housing demolition in New Orleans took place in a highly volatile setting in which accusations of racial engineering were made back and forth. Advocates for the poor argued that government officials were trying to remake the color line in New Orleans and inhibit the ability of blacks, especially low-income blacks, to repopulate the city. Racial conflict had played out in ugly ways in the immediate aftermath of the storm. Just three days after Katrina had rendered much of the city uninhabitable, a group of evacuees, most black, attempted to leave the city by way of the U.S. Route 80 bridge that crosses the Mississippi into the predominantly white suburb of Gretna. The group was met on the bridge by Gretna police with guns drawn and ordered to turn around. The next day a different group of refugees faced the same response, this time watched by a police helicopter hovering just above.77 In the weeks that followed, race and poverty shadowed every decision about how to rebuild the city. Efforts to build affordable housing met frequently with political and regulatory obstacles. In mostly white St. Bernard Parish, officials passed an ordinance in late 2005 banning renovation of multifamily housing and a year later enacted another law that would restrict the rental of single-family homes to blood relatives only.78 After having been ruled in violation of the Fair Housing Act and ordered to repeal the blood-relative ordinance, St. Bernard Parish issued a moratorium on the construction of apartment buildings.

Public housing was 100 percent black in New Orleans at the time of Katrina. The boarding up of these projects, and the efforts made to keep the old residents from returning to their homes, were seen by the residents and their advocates as part of an effort to redefine the racial and socioeconomic landscape of New Orleans. This was not a wild-eyed conspiracy theory; indeed, it was the expressed objective of some officials who did little to hide or conceal it. It was reflected in HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson’s comments about the likely racial makeup of post-Katrina New Orleans, and in the Louisiana congressman’s comment that about the divine intervention in cleaning up public housing in the city. It was also apparent in Jackson’s successor at HUD, Steven Preston, when he claimed that he did not “want to replicate what we had if that would mean bringing back certain problems we know about,” and that “New Orleans must be safe and more secure.”79 There is little ambiguity among those advocating for public housing transformation in New Orleans; speaking about the St. Bernard project, the spokesman for the developer said in 2009, “This will not be the redeveloped St. Bernard. This will be a high-end residential neighborhood where St. Bernard once stood.”80

It was Katrina that led a coterie of liberal policy analysts to suggest that the natural disaster had provided a perfect opportunity to disperse the city’s poor black population in order not to replicate patterns of concentrated poverty within the city. Over two hundred scholars signed a petition in the weeks following Katrina urging a program of poverty dispersal in New Orleans to avoid allowing the concentrations of poverty that had existed in New Orleans from simply reconstituting themselves.81 It was columnist David Brooks who wrote about the “silver lining” in the Katrina storm clouds, calling the storm, the flooding, and the mass displacement “an amazing chance to do something serious about poverty,” and an opportunity for rebuilding whose first rule “should be: Nothing Like Before.”82

The city had had almost fourteen thousand units of public housing in 1996. At the moment Katrina hit, nine years later, that number had been cut in half through demolition and redevelopment. The St. Thomas project, Desire, Florida, and Fisher had all been redeveloped prior to the storm. Demolition at C. J. Peete had begun before Katrina, reducing the size of that project by half—at the time the hurricane hit, only 146 families lived in that project.83 The redevelopment of the Big Four after Katrina dropped the number of public housing units in those developments by 80 percent, from five thousand to fewer than seven hundred.84 Four years after Katrina, there were still no public housing units, new or old, occupied in any of the Big Four projects. By 2011, when three of the four redevelopments were reoccupied, only 7 percent of the original residents were rehoused in the new communities.85

In a relatively short period of time New Orleans has eliminated thousands of units of low-cost public housing, all of which had been inhabited by low-income African Americans. In New Orleans the dismantling of public housing was part of a larger dynamic about race and poverty in which transformation played a central role in a conscious effort to deconcentrate poverty and disperse low-income blacks. The New Orleans case illustrates how public housing removal is key to efforts to redefine the city. The remaking of New Orleans was put into stark relief by the rebuilding effort after Katrina. Questions about how black or how poor the city should be were given explicit attention in ways that did not occur in other cities. Yet the effort to reduce concentrations of poverty and disperse low-income black residents was similar to Chicago’s Plan for Transformation. The dismantling of public housing in both cities is part of a fundamental redefinition of the city and a forced mobilization of the poor and of people of color to suit a different vision of what the city should be.

Atlanta

The city of Atlanta is home to the first completed public housing project in the nation, Techwood Homes, constructed in 1935. The project cleared eleven blocks of slums, called Techwood Flats, near downtown Atlanta. Techwood Flats had been home to mostly white, low-income families, and a center of crime, disease, and infant mortality in the city. It was situated adjacent to Georgia Tech University and the headquarters of the Coca-Cola Corporation. Its existence led one city leader of the time to wonder “why such an untended abscess should fester between the lovely campus of our proudest school and the office buildings in the heart of the city.”86 Techwood Homes was well built and well designed. Each doorway had a canopy, and the buildings were solid and trimmed in stone. The project was designed to open up the environment to light and space, using a physical plan that designers thought would create more favorable social conditions. Applicants were carefully screened for employment history and general “deportment.”87 Rents were set above what the previous residents of the Flats could have afforded. In all, over six hundred families were housed in a combination of two-story rowhouses and three-story apartment buildings. Over the years, the project was noted for its historical importance and placed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1993, a study of the project concluded that “it had fulfilled its 60-year life expectancy and could go for another 60.”88 Two years later Techwood Homes was demolished.

The city of Atlanta was one of the pioneers in public housing. In addition to finishing the first public housing project in the nation, the city added thousands of units in subsequent years. The Clark-Howell project, for example, added another 624 units immediately adjacent to Techwood Homes in 1940. Two more projects were added in the same area in subsequent decades. Throughout the 1950s and ’60s Atlanta engaged heavily in urban renewal activities. More than sixty-seven thousand people were displaced in the city as a result of freeway and urban renewal construction, more than three-quarters of them were black. Public housing was built in the previous slum areas and on vacant land in various parts of the city to meet the demand for housing among blacks displaced through urban renewal. By the time it had stopped building new units, Atlanta had more public housing per capita than any other large American city: about one resident of Atlanta in ten lived in public housing.

By the 1970s Atlanta had become a majority black city, the white population having fled to the suburbs of the north. Between 1970 and 1990 the city continued to lose population, declining by one hundred thousand residents over that time period. Despite the active urban renewal agenda Atlanta was a city in economic decline throughout this period. With more affluent whites leaving for the suburbs, the income profile of the city plunged relative to the rest of the region. The poverty rate in the city was almost four times the suburban rate, and the median income of the city relative to the surrounding suburbs fell from 80 percent in 1969 to 59 percent in 1989.89

As in some other large cities, public housing in Atlanta was not well managed. The same patterns of concentrated poverty and civic neglect that plagued PHAs in some larger U.S. cities affected Atlanta’s public housing. In 1980, Techwood and Clark-Howell had almost ten thousand code violations between them, attracting a $17.2 million grant for modernization from HUD. But conditions there and at other AHA projects only worsened during the 1980s. The crack cocaine epidemic hit hard in the 1980s and gangs vied for control of the projects. Gunfire at the East Lake Meadows project, which was a relatively new project that had been built in 1970, was so common that the project was nicknamed Little Vietnam. The AHA, meanwhile, had no answers for residents who wanted conditions in their communities improved. Maintenance orders were left undone, plans to improve security were never fully implemented, and the agency sank under the weight of corruption and inefficiency. By 1994, AHA had distinguished itself as one of the country’s worst PHAs.90

Map 3. Atlanta public housing transformation sites

The Olympic Legacy Program

In 1990 the city of Atlanta was chosen to host the 1996 Olympic Games. Mayor Maynard Jackson and other city leaders saw the Games as an opportunity to leverage public and private financing for revitalization efforts within the city. The Olympic Village, housing the athletes for the Games, was located across the street from the Techwood Homes public housing project. Although some called for the demolition of Techwood Homes, Jackson favored rehabilitation, calling Techwood “fundamentally sound, close in, and historically important.”91 The city and AHA made an application for funds from the brand-new federal HOPE VI program. HUD approved the city’s application in 1993 calling for the rehabilitation of Techwood and Clark-Howell and the preservation of most of the site. Another public housing project, East Lake Meadows, 650 units in a more remote part of the city, received a $33.5 million grant for renovation from HUD in 1992. Within months, however, the political stars would realign themselves and the future of Techwood Homes, Clark-Howell, East Lake Meadows, and all of Atlanta public housing would change dramatically.

A new mayor, Bill Campbell, was elected in 1993 and he appointed Renee Glover to head AHA. Glover was a corporate finance attorney who had worked for Campbell’s campaign staff. Her vision for public housing, supported by the new mayor, called for more fundamental and thoroughgoing transformation. The plans for Techwood and Clark-Howell shifted away from rehabilitation and preservation to total demolition and replacement. The East Lake Meadows renovation was put on hold and in fact never occurred. Although HUD had in 1992 rejected a transformation proposal for Techwood in part because it included too little replacement housing, the agency signaled its willingness to relax replacement requirements, especially with Congress considering a suspension of the one-for-one replacement requirement (an idea they followed through on in the following year). With HUD officials beginning to consider a much more sweeping form of transformation in the HOPE VI program, the plans for Techwood, Clark-Howell, and East Lake Meadows changed. All three, it was quickly decided, would be demolished, the residents relocated, and the sites redeveloped into mixed-income communities.

Following a classic pattern of de facto demolition, vacancies at Techwood skyrocketed in a short period. In 1990, months before the announcement that Atlanta had been chosen to host the Olympics, Techwood Homes was 93 percent occupied. Fourteen months later occupancy had dropped to 82 percent. By April 1993 it was more than half empty, and only 38 percent occupied by August 1993. The vacancies created a self-reinforcing dynamic as families moved out because of the heightened security concerns created by previous vacancies. By the time official relocation activities had begun, only 44 percent of the original residents in Techwood and Clark-Howell were around to benefit from relocation assistance offered by AHA. The site was quickly cleared and redevelopment begun in time for a portion of the new development, called Centennial Place, to be completed for the 1996 Olympic Games. Between the demolition of public housing and the related real estate speculation spurred by the neighborhood changes taking place, an international housing rights group estimated that as many as thirty thousand residents, mostly poor, were displaced from their homes in Atlanta because of preparations for the Olympics.92

In fact, the AHA saw the Olympic Games as an opportunity for widespread transformation of older public housing projects. The agency announced an “Olympic Legacy Program” that expanded the demolition agenda far beyond Techwood and Clark-Howell. The Olympics and the change in political leadership within the city had brought forth an ambitious plan to demolish over a dozen public housing communities and transform them into mixed-income residential developments. The city secured seven HOPE VI grants from the federal government between 1993 and 2005, but also pursued other financing sources and redeveloped several other projects without HOPE VI funding.

The Atlanta Model

The AHA itself was transformed under Glover’s leadership. From an ineffective, almost moribund operation overwhelmed by the multiple and varied problems facing it’s properties, problems that were in large part induced by the agency’s incompetence and indifference, AHA has been largely privatized and streamlined. It shifted dramatically from a public social service agency to a real estate development firm, assembling financing from various public and private sources to build mixed-income communities that it hands off to private firms to manage. Much of its internal operations are also subcontracted out to private firms.

Glover became a national spokesperson for public housing transformation, an enthusiastic supporter of the model with an evangelical faith in the redeeming effects of forced displacement. She speaks at national conferences and visits other cities to share the lessons of the Atlanta experience. Her official biography even credits her with creating the redevelopment blueprint used by HUD in HOPE VI projects across the country. Her statements about large-scale demolition and displacement are strong and unequivocal: “I find it incredible that so many people don’t comprehend the awful, corrosive impact of intensely concentrated poverty and the dehumanizing low standards and expectations” associated with it. “We know with 100 percent certainty that people’s lives will transform if their environment is transformed and we invest in people. Environment matters.”93 Yet, it is clear that Atlanta’s effort goes well beyond merely an attempt to improve the living conditions for public housing residents. When Glover and HUD announced the plans to take down all of the city’s family public housing stock, she said, “Make no mistake. When …the …large family housing projects come down, Atlanta will have made a great step on behalf of all Atlanta citizens.”94

Though Glover declares that the corrosive impact of concentrated poverty is the reason behind Atlanta’s effort to transform public housing, gentrification pressures played their part as well. In the case of Techwood and Clark-Howell, those projects had been targeted for demolition years before the arrival of Glover and the emergence of the new AHA. The projects occupied valuable land next to the Georgia Tech campus and Coca-Cola headquarters. When Atlanta desegregated its public housing in 1968, the two projects began a rapid change from all white to nearly all black occupancy. As the change was taking place, Coca Cola officials first proposed the demolition of the projects, and “Central Atlanta Progress,” a downtown business group, also weighed in to support the demolition. Mayor Jackson, who served from 1973 to 1993, was against the idea and kept demolition pressures at bay during his terms in office.95 But, as previously noted, the election of Bill Campbell in 1993 brought an end to the protection Jackson was able to provide. The revitalization of downtown Atlanta was a top agenda item for Campbell, as was preparation for the Olympics. Glover wanted Techwood and Clark-Howell to be part of the new administration’s downtown agenda.

With Techwood and Clark-Howell cleared, and the publicly funded Centennial Olympic Park in place (which had redeveloped blocks of blighted and underutilized warehouse and commercial land nearby), Coca-Cola invested millions in an interactive corporate museum/attraction called World of Coca Cola and the city located the new Georgia Aquarium nearby. The Atlanta Police Department constructed a new substation near the site, and a new school was built where the children wear uniforms and Georgia Tech faculty help interview prospective teachers. The transformation of Techwood and Clark-Howell into Centennial Place, a transformation that reduced the number of public housing units from twelve hundred to 360 and introduced 311 units of upscale housing in a new mixed–income community, made these corollary investments possible. As one developer involved in the redevelopment said, “Without Centennial Place the area might not have been attractive enough for Georgia Aquarium and ‘World of Coca Cola.’ …None of that would have been built if Techwood Homes was there. Nobody was going to invest real money with 60 acres of that.”96

Similarly, gentrification pressures played a role in the demolition of East Lake Meadows (ELM), a project located in a more remote residential area of the city. Little Vietnam was one of the more neglected projects of the AHA and over time became an island of crime and pathology with a drug trade operating on the site that took in an estimated $38 million annually.97 In 1992, former president Jimmy Carter went to East Lake Meadows to launch the Atlanta Project, a private-sector antipoverty initiative that leveraged millions of dollars in corporate contributions for comprehensive community-building initiatives throughout the city’s low-income neighborhoods. The announcement site was appropriately chosen. ELM was the epitome of neighborhood decline, disinvestment, and neglect in the city. Built and then mostly forgotten by AHA, not served well by city or county services, the project offered a relatively hassle-free environment for gangs and drug dealers, and made life miserable for residents. Carter was able to announce that ELM had received a $33.5 million grant from HUD for renovation and there was hope that the community could be improved to provide a decent living environment for its residents.

In 1993, however, a private developer bought the East Lake Country Club and “by the following year the East Lake neighborhood had been rediscovered by higher-income whites” who began to purchase properties in the area for renovation and upgrade.98 As property values began to rise, the profile of the neighborhood changed, the housing stock improved, and the rehabilitation plans for East Lake Meadows changed. The HUD-funded renovation never occurred. Instead, Glover and the AHA demolished the 650-unit project and replaced it with 406 single-family homes, duplexes, and garden apartments and christened it Villages of East Lake. The new project included 271 public housing units, with the rest a mix of shallow subsidies and market-rate units. The number of public housing units put back on-site was increased only after residents sued the authority to stop the redevelopment. Demolition began in the fall of 1996. Over the following six years the neighborhood saw a 20 percent annual increase in property values, the most precipitous rise in the entire Atlanta metropolitan area.99 Estimates are that the demolition of public housing in Atlanta and the conversion of those communities into mixed-income areas, combined with the spillover development that has followed, has increased the tax base by $2.4 billion.100

Resident Outcomes and Response

Though received enthusiastically by the city’s political elite, the demolition agenda of the AHA has not had the full support of the residents of Atlanta public housing. Part of the resistance put up by residents is project-specific. For example, residents objected to the rushed relocation and demolition of the first HOPE VI project, Techwood Homes. Moving quickly to complete a substantial portion of the project before the 1996 Olympic Games, AHA emptied the buildings well in advance of actual relocation efforts. Most of the residents who were living at Techwood at the time of the announcement of the Olympic Games never received any relocation assistance or benefits. The residents of East Lake Meadows pointed to the Techwood example when they sued to slow down the process at their redevelopment and improve the relocation assistance provided by AHA. In this their actions were similar to those of Chicago public housing residents who sued to improve relocation efforts there. One resident leader at ELM complained at the time that “a lot of the residents feel like this is a sneaky way to get rid of us.”101 Of the negotiations at East Lake Meadows, the former head of the residents’ association noted that “the housing authority walked all over us and pushed people out.”102

As in most places where public housing demolition is taking place, the majority of residents are relocated using the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program. Also similar to other metropolitan areas, the spatial distribution of HCV users is heavily tipped toward high-poverty neighborhoods and racially segregated neighborhoods.103 “Vouchers are a ticket to nowhere,” said one activist in Atlanta, noting that disadvantaged neighborhoods are the main options for displaced families.104 Reflecting the complexities of relocation, however, a detailed analysis of the 2007 relocation from the McDaniel-Glenn HOPE VI redevelopment showed that despite the patterns of relocation noted above, most residents moved to lower-crime areas and reported satisfaction with their new housing. Ninety percent of the McDaniel-Glenn residents did not leave the city limits of Atlanta, and there is some evidence that families that did move farther away from the original site are moving back.105

The suboptimal relocation outcomes of displaced public housing residents became an issue in Atlanta as it did in Chicago. Also as in Chicago and most other cities, very few of the original public housing residents have made their way back to the newly redeveloped communities. In testimony before Congress in 2003, Glover described a planning session with AHA residents who just couldn’t bring themselves to believe that the redevelopment of their public housing homes was for them: “I will never forget meeting with a committee of residents whose community we hoped to revitalize. When we showed them the architectural designs of what a new community would look like, one said to me, ‘I know you’re not planning that for me because that’s too nice.’ All of her neighbors agreed.”106 Glover was using the skepticism of the residents to make a point about the high quality of AHA’s redevelopments and to suggest that the agency was delivering benefits that the resident regarded as unbelievable. This could be considered an effective rhetorical device but for the fact that the unnamed resident and her neighbors were largely accurate in their skepticism—the new developments in Atlanta are generally not for them; only 17 percent of Atlanta’s former public housing residents have returned to the mixed-income communities since 1995.107

Nevertheless, AHA pushed ahead vigorously with its plans to expand the transformation of public housing in Atlanta. In 2008 the AHA announced that it would demolish all of the city’s old public housing and that in some cases new mixed-income communities would be developed in its place. One element of the transformation effort is the use of private property management firms and the institution of more rigorous tenant screening criteria and behavior guidelines. In 2004 AHA imposed a work requirement on all residents. When the agency attempted to press forward with evictions of those who had not complied, the residents resisted. Tenant leaders felt that residents had not been given enough time at some of the developments, and that AHA had not informed tenants how the policy would be implemented: “We want the whole thing to stop because they never told us anything. They never came to the resident advisory boards.”108 Resident representatives also questioned the assumption that all AHA residents would be able to find employment, citing a large number of disabled tenants for whom employment was not a realistic expectation. In April 2007 residents disrupted the agency’s annual plan public hearing. Residents were joined by a range of advocacy groups and some local elected officials. Councilmember Felicia Moore took up the cause of the residents, vowing to “personally intervene [with] …the Housing Authority for people to be treated with dignity.”109 After another protest before an AHA public hearing, the agency announced it would moderate the eviction policy. In a letter to resident leaders, Glover acknowledged that some families “may face unique or special challenges” in meeting the work requirements, and that the agency would work with these households rather than move directly to eviction.

The advocacy of the residents picked up more momentum in June 2007 when the Fulton County Board of Commissioners adopted a resolution asking AHA to stop demolition until all senior and disabled residents were placed in safe and decent housing. The plight of seniors was especially important given the fact that AHA was moving to demolish even the senior buildings in its stock. The majority of seniors did not want to move out of their housing and were afraid of what awaited them in the relocation process. Later in June, public housing activists from Chicago came to Atlanta to join the protests. In August 2007, the citywide Resident Advisory Board filed a civil rights complaint with HUD, alleging that AHA’s plan to eliminate all public housing violates the “Fair Housing Act of 1968 by discriminating against residents of public housing, virtually all of whom are black.” One resident leader pointed out that “most of the public housing is predominantly black and we’re the ones they’re trying to move out.”110

In early 2008, the citywide residents’ board voted unanimously to oppose the demolition of any more public housing. City council members began to question whether AHA needed to be reined in a bit. In January of that year, the city council considered a nonbinding resolution asking AHA to stop demolitions until residents and the council could review the demolition applications. The mayor vetoed the nonbinding resolution to stop the demolitions, but was overridden by the council. Throughout the first part of May, resident groups opposed the demolition in letters, e-mails, and a resolution to HUD requesting delays until their concerns could be discussed and addressed. The resident leader at one senior high-rise located next to the revitalized Techwood Homes said:

Please do not shut us out of this process; this is our home and the seniors want to have a voice. My residents are still saying they don’t want to move. They don’t want to go anywhere. We stayed here during the time it was so bad you couldn’t walk the streets. Why can’t we be here to enjoy the beautiful location of Techwood now?111

At the same time the city council considered an ordinance that would have given it oversight over the demolition plans of the AHA. The oversight ordinance would have provided the Council with a real role in AHA operations and was vehemently opposed by the agency. The oversight ordinance was ultimately withdrawn and AHA retained its full independence. In the end, the agency went ahead with all of its demolitions. At the staged event marking the demolition of the Bowen Homes in 2009, a former resident wondered about the clapping and celebratory mood: “What are they clapping about? Clapping for a demolition? You’ve had generations behind generations behind generations living in this public housing. This is not a time for celebration.”112

“Racing” to Demolition

Chicago, New Orleans, and Atlanta are notable for the size and the extent of their transformations and for the extent to which they illustrate the empirical conclusions from chapter 2. The high crime rates in Chicago, Atlanta, and New Orleans reflect trends across the country associated with large-scale public housing demolition and disposition. Gentrification pressures were critical in all three cities, though Chicago stands out in this regard. In Atlanta and New Orleans the large-scale dismantling of public housing was more opportunistic, arising out of the planning for a mega-event (the Olympics) in Atlanta and from a natural disaster in New Orleans. Importantly, the political regime in each city lent decisive support to the PHA’s efforts to transform public housing. In Chicago, the mayor’s office under Richard M. Daley became closely identified with the Plan for Transformation and made the Plan the city’s major redevelopment initiative from 1999 through 2010. In Atlanta, the close ties between the AHA under Glover and the mayor’s office led to a coordinated effort to boost the fortunes of downtown and to expand the transformation of public housing citywide. Though there was less leadership from the governing regime in New Orleans, the city council provided the critical approval in 2007 that cleared the way for dismantling the city’s public housing system. In each city there was a clear understanding that public housing transformation would facilitate significant private-sector reinvestment and trigger neighborhood upgrading.

Common across these three cities, too, was the resistance of residents to the large-scale transformation of public housing. None of the three housing authorities enjoyed much credibility with their residents; suspicion of PHA motives was high in each. In each city, of course, the resistance of residents was ultimately unsuccessful in halting the demolitions.

Finally, there is the fact that public housing in these three cities was almost exclusively occupied by African Americans, that the projects had become, in the words of Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, reservations for poor blacks.113 Chicago has a history of racial animosity that includes race riots in 1919 and the fairly regular firebombing of black residences during the 1940s and 1950s in order to maintain lines of residential segregation.114 Martin Luther King famously said of Chicago after bringing his civil right campaign to that city, “people in Mississippi should come to Chicago to learn how to hate.” Chicago’s public housing became racially identified as early as the 1950s and the subsequent siting of new projects was restricted virtually without exception to black neighborhoods.115 Chicago’s public housing was the “other city,” almost exclusively black, poor, and systematically neglected by city leaders, a physical articulation of its unresolved racial hostilities.

In Atlanta and New Orleans, blacks had been part of the governing coalition since the 1970s, yet public housing in the two cities suffered from mismanagement and disregard that rivaled the dysfunction in Chicago. In both cities, leaders decided to remake their cities in part by eliminating what had become the neglected repositories of the cities’ poorest people of color. In Atlanta the reimaging began in the context of a mega-event that would attract worldwide attention, in New Orleans it was pursued in the wake of a natural disaster. In New Orleans especially, the question of race was laid bare during the dismantling of its public housing system. The evacuation of the city after Katrina and the subsequent steps taken to discourage resettlement by the low-income African Americans who had occupied the city’s public housing led to the surfacing of a number of disquieting questions about who the city is for, and how race and disadvantage will be accommodated in post-Katrina New Orleans.

The experiences of Chicago, Atlanta and New Orleans suggest that public housing transformation is more than simply a policy shift from one model of subsidized housing to another. In these cities the full-scale attack on public housing was employed as a means of eliminating entire communities of poor black residents. These cities suggest a racial strategy in the transformation of public housing that is more fully examined in the following chapter.