AHA 15-Year Progress Report by ALISIAS

Atlanta Housing Authority 15 Year Progress Report

1995-2010

15 YEAR PROGRESS REPORT

That was then...

THIS IS NOW. Because in existing Because of of new new construction, construction, investment investment in existing private public/privateventures: ventures: privateproperties properties and and other other public/private AHA nearly6,000 6,000more more AHAprovides provides housing assistance to nearly low-income todaythen thaninin1994. 1994. low-income families today Another5,000 5,000 mixed-income, mixed-income, workforce Another workforcehousing housingunits units will be be available in the city over will overthe thenext nextfive fiveyears. years

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www.atlantahousing.org

hope

Atlanta Housing Authority 15 Year Progress Report contents

letter from the chairman

Why we did this:

The opportunity to turn failure into transformational success

Lesson Learned No.1

How we made things work

Lesson Learned No.2

What we learned:

Lesson Learned No.3

What powered our mission:

Lesson Learned No.4

What the future holds:

Appendix

The toxic impact of concentrated poverty

A lot of flexibility and ingenuity

The road to restoring human dignity

The principles that evolved

Children face the greatest risk

We realized we could save the children

The truth about AHA: making a better community and strengthening families

Creating better, healthier cities

hope

The view from where I sit, indeed, the view from where nearly all of us sit, is much different now than it was in 1994. When I joined the Atlanta Housing Authority’s board, it was an institution crippled by paralysis. Its reputation at the time was as one of the worst housing authorities in the United States. The residents it served had sunken increasingly into corners of the city nearly everyone wanted to forget, places where the lives of thousands of residents were on a downward slide into deeper poverty, no opportunity for advancement, shabby housing, and increasingly violent crime. I knew, and never wavered in my belief, that the policies that had taken us to this bleak point in the history of the city’s most vulnerable residents must change. Despite Atlanta’s justifiable pride and reputation as being the first in the nation to open its doors to public housing residents, to continue on the path that had led to the ruins I faced when I joined the AHA Board would have been wrong. We had to change our way of doing business in order to improve the lives of our residents. The poor policy decisions of the then-recent past were disastrous and had to change. As we continue our march to deconcentrate poverty, to demolish the city’s old public housing sites, I look forward also to the next 15 years. I like to think of the past 15 years as a time of necessary change that will ultimately improve the lives of our residents, people with potential that is only waiting to be unlocked, and so too change for the better a city we love so much. Respectfully,

Atlanta Housing Authority 15 year Progress Report

1995-2010

(above): Photograph of Amari Dunn. Cover, photograph shot by Shannon McCollum. (left): From concentrated poverty to choice, opportunity and healthier environments - 2007 ad

Cecil Phillips Chairman of the Board, AHA

15 YEAR PROGRESS REPORT

The opportunity to turn failure into transformational success In the early 1990s, after Atlanta had won bragging rights to be the host of the 1996 Olympic Games, civic leaders soon realized they’d been handed a blessing – and a liability. On the one hand, Atlanta would be showcased for the world to see. On the other hand, what the world would see was not all showcase material. True, Atlanta was the booming economic capital of a resurgent Sunbelt South, a transportation hub of unparalleled importance in the nation. Many global and national corporations flew their corporate flags from soaring Atlanta skyscrapers. The state’s universities repeatedly won national acclaim. Pro sports teams and a multi-faceted entertainment industry brought excitement and glory to Atlanta. Then there were the problems. Atlanta was one of the poorest, the most crimeinfested and dangerous cities in the nation. Much of the city’s population had fled to the suburbs in the 1960s and ‘70s – and with the mounting problems in the city, the families never returned. Atlanta’s public schools exemplified only one trait: failure.

15 YEAR PROGRESS REPORT

And behind all of those problems were more than 40 public housing projects that distilled concentrated poverty into a toxicity from which there was no escape. There was a direct link between that blight and many problems, such as the high crime rate caused by criminals whose first and weakest targets were public housing residents. In other cases, such as the many distressed and declining neighborhoods in Atlanta, the plethora of public housing enclaves was a contributing cause. On a percentage basis, more of the city’s population lived in public housing than in any other major metropolis in America. Those numbers meant that crime would never decrease, jobs for working-class Atlantans would never materialize and schools would never improve as long as the city’s landscape was cratered with “the projects.” Most daunting to civic leaders was the location of one of the most decrepit and foreboding projects – Techwood/ Clark Howell Homes – directly adjacent to the planned Olympic Village. When the TV cameras of the world lit up in Atlanta in the summer of 1996, they wouldn’t be able to ignore the blight of those projects. Regardless of the Olympic Games, Atlanta was shamed by the awful neglect of its housing projects. Tens of thousands of people were condemned to lives of failure because of the indelible stigma of public housing. An honest look at the projects revealed: • Deteriorated physical conditions; • Dangerous, crime-plagued, drug infested places; • Hopeless, dispirited residents who were disconnected from, and afraid of, the mainstream because they felt they were labeled and marginalized; 6

• Children being poorly educated and socialized because they were taught in “captive elementary schools” located as part of each public housing project campus; • And tragically low participation in the work force and high rates of illiteracy and/or under-education. Public housing didn’t begin with a mission to destroy lives. Indeed, Atlanta was America’s pioneer city in building public housing during the Great Depression. Seven decades ago, public housing was where families of modest means lived briefly while they worked hard to win a share of the American Dream. In 1936, Techwood Homes, near the campus of the Georgia Institute of Technology, was the first public housing project in the nation to open its doors to residents. It was followed quickly by adjacent Clark Howell Homes and, a short distance away near what is now called Atlanta University Center, by University Homes and John Hope Homes. “The expectation was that both white and black families were preparing themselves to live independent, successful lives, albeit in racially segregated communities,” says Renée Lewis Glover, CEO of the Atlanta Housing Authority. “Over the years as society changed, the government faced new and very difficult challenges, numerous and often conflicting rules and regulations were crafted to address these challenges. Many of these rules and regulations were reactive rather than strategic. And, in many cases, the rules and regulations were developed based on the historical and political context of the times, political expediency and, in some cases, priorities that trumped decent and safe affordable housing,

such as urban renewal or highway expansion.” As a consequence of these complexities, the public housing program lost its vision and mission, and was drafted to address all of society’s social problems. To accommodate this very complicated, and some would say impossible, mission, the rules and regulations drove the expectations and standards down to a level where there no longer were any meaningful expectations and standards. The changing policies and the lowered expectation for public housing tenants turned Atlanta’s projects into warehouses for people. The plight for public housing residents was twofold: What had begun as a bold social experiment to open the door into the middle class became a wall that forever separated public housing residents from economic opportunity. And, even more insidious, during the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, public housing projects were built far away from the centers of urban life. These projects, almost exclusively inhabited by African-American families, became just one more devious expression of Jim Crow segregation. That dual isolation – economic and racial – produced a hostile relationship between the projects and the city. “Housing authority leaders from the ‘60s through the ‘80s were so antagonistic and protective of public housing, to the exclusion of its own neighbors, that the relationship between housing authority and commissioners and tenants to its neighbors was hostile, adversarial, and in a downward spiral,” recalls AHA board Chairman Cecil Phillips. “It hit bottom in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Something needed to be done.” All of the indicators flashed an alarm.

WHY WE DID THIS

(above): Techwood Homes was the first public housing project in the nation for white families. (right): Future African American residents preview soon-to-open John Hope Homes, 1940.

15 YEAR PROGRESS REPORT

(above): Eva Davis, AHA board member and former resident of East Lake Meadows, participated in the CATALYST campaign supporting families by providing them with resources to help them achieve their self sufficiency and education goals. (right): The projects had become dangerous, crime-plagued, drug infested places its residents disconnected from mainstream society.

WHY WE DID THIS

Crime around housing projects was as much as 35 times that of the city as a whole, which in the 1990s was the most violent city in the nation. Employment rates plunged to 20 percent or less. The elementary schools embedded in housing projects ranked at the very bottom of all Georgia schools. There were other less obvious problems that destroyed the lives of public housing residents. Retailers fled the areas around the projects, fearing crime and knowing there was little money in the pockets of residents to buy goods. That meant quality grocers were nowhere to be found – and the diets, often a continuous menu of fast food fare, were deadly. For example, studies show a quarter of public housing residents live half a mile or more from the nearest food store

with fresh produce – and nearly 40 percent don’t have cars to get there. Health problems, in general, were known to multiply in the concentrated poverty of the projects. Numerous studies showed that diseases and health risk factors -- asthma, diabetes, hypertension, and mental illness – soared in public housing. The cost in human life is impossible to calculate, but these questions are worth pondering: How many potential scientists never got the chance to develop because their schooling in the projects was stunted? How many humanitarians withered on the vine because they never got the chance to blossom? How many families fell apart because their homes could never become fully nurturing? How many women and men never grew to

greatness because they died as children,victims of rampant crime in the projects? There is no way to know for sure, but even one would have been too many. Had change not come, says AHA board member Eva Davis and a former resident of the East Lake Meadows housing project, the losses would have been greater. “We would have had so many more high school dropouts, so many drug addicts, so many prostitutes, so many babies having babies, they would have been lost,” she says. “We don’t have that any more. That is a major change.” Change was imperative – and to achieve real change required ingenuity and innovation …

Lesson Learned No.1 The Toxic Impact of Concentrated Poverty

(Editor’s note: In 2009, Atlanta Housing Authority CEO Renée Glover began a series of articles exploring what AHA has learned over the previous 15 years, and how and why its programs have been developed.)

By Renée Lewis Glover Where do we start our discussion about public housing? One of the underlying problems in any such discussion is that it always starts in the middle. As a nation, we have never agreed on the source of the problem. That’s understandable – as a nation, we are uncomfortable about the issue of poverty. We are unsure about why people are poor, we vacillate about the following: Are people poor because they are incapable? Are people poor because they are 10

“minorities, primarily black people”? Are poor people capable of moral behavior? Are the projects crime-ridden because the people are “bad” people? We must address these issues. An obvious statement is: People are poor because they have fewer resources than they need to live a more affluent life. If you believe that objective assessment, as opposed to believing that poverty is a punishment or natural state for some people, then we can make a bold conclusion: Poverty does not have to be a permanent condition. How we, as policymakers and administrators, approach issues of poverty makes all the difference. The fact of the matter is that in order to solve the issue of poverty, we must accept the “truth” of the “universal humanity of all human beings.” The second “truth” that we must accept is that “environment matters.” To solve the issue of poverty and how best to address the need for housing that is affordable to people who are poor, we must diagnose objectively and with integrity the problem with “public housing.” To attempt a solution, without

under-standing the root cause of the problem, is to insure continued failure. That is exactly the type of thinking we rejected in Atlanta. We took an honest look at the symptoms and found the following about each and every housing project in Atlanta: - Deteriorated physical conditions; - Dangerous, crime-ridden, drug-infested places; - Hopeless, dispirited and stigmatized residents who were disconnected from, and afraid of the mainstream; - Children being poorly educated and socialized because they were taught in “captive elementary schools” located as part of each public housing project; - And tragically low participation in the work force and high rates of illiteracy and/or under-education. Rather than address the real issues, many would prefer to debate whether the projects are really communities and whether these “incapable” poor people would be better off in the projects because as bad and destructive as they are, these are their “communities.” Therefore, the issues are intentionally debated around the margins: e.g. Where will the people go? Will the people be capable of living in “mainstream” America? Will they destroy the communities into which they move? Will they choose to move to better communities? Will they move next to me? Are they moving to places that they have not earned or deserve? Will crime go up when they bring their low morals and incapacity to my neighborhood? What is the best “next” for public housing residents?

A4 / Atlanta Housing Authority

No doubt, these questions are important, and they must be answered. But as the starting point for decision-making, I think we can all agree that doing nothing or continuing to do things that have failed in the past makes no sense. There is simply too much at stake. Affordable housing is not just a bricks-glass-and-steel consideration. The physical aspects of affordable housing are important, but these issues are dwarfed by the sociological design. And that sociology can be summed up in two concepts: Concentrated poverty and low expectations. When we comprehend the full implications of those two phenomena, we then begin to understand the reasons we felt compelled to provide radical alternatives to old-style housing projects. The importance of asking these first questions can’t be overemphasized. Often, those of us involved in providing affordable housing to the very poor are faced with concerns from Congress or the federal administration. Questions from many officials – well-meaning officials – assume that the best place for public housing residents is in conventional public housing. Thus, any solution or next step is wedded to the belief that anyone who requires assistance to pay their rent can’t function in mainstream society and cannot meet civil standards of law-abiding citizens and of a civil society, and they must be kept where they are. And, of course, as we have learned, “where they are” is the wrong solution! I find it incredible that so many people don’t comprehend the awful, corrosive impact of intensely concentrated poverty and de-humanizing low standards and expectations. Let me state up front that the linkage of the grinding poverty in public housing projects with failed sociology of concentrating poverty and low expectations

15 YEAR PROGRESS REPORT

and standards is not a uniquely American experience. Nor is it, as some would have us believe, a matter of race. Elsewhere in the world, notably Europe, the findings are the same. Confine any group in a virtual prison of poverty, coupled with low expectations and standards, and social failure is the result. National Public Radio, for example, reported in 2005: “Analysts blame recent rioting in France on the discontent and alienation fostered by bleak housing projects on the poor outskirts of French cities. The location and architecture of public housing can contribute to a sense of isolation and hopelessness.” “Isolation and hopelessness” is one way to define “concentrated poverty”. There are others. I wasn’t content to read reports and studies. I went to all of the housing projects AHA owned and managed. I vividly recall hundreds of conversations, one with a woman living at East Lake Meadows. She told me about the death threats she faced on a daily basis, about worrying day after day because her children were threatened by the violence and crime that preys on public housing residents. I realized that she had become exactly what society expected, someone whose life was doomed to failure. I recall the dismal epiphany when I learned that no child (black or white) living in Techwood Homes during recent decades had crossed the street to attend our state’s most prestigious university, Georgia Tech. It struck me that there was something fundamentally wrong here. And it was wrong at many levels. For example, many in Congress believe that social design doesn’t matter. Well, it does matter. In the mid-1990s, Atlanta was cited as one of the most crime-ridden and violent cities in the nation. That’s bad – but what’s unacceptably horrible is that in one of Atlanta’s housing projects violent crime was 35 times greater than the entire city. In another community, known in the

1990s as “Little Vietnam” there was a $38 million drug trade being operated from that site. Those horror stories are repeated over and over. Other statistics were equally appalling. Just 10 percent of the children attending schools embedded in the housing projects passed basic reading comprehension tests. We found unemployment rates at a staggering 70 percent to 80 percent. And, about 80 percent of our residents were women and children, along with the men who illegally resided with them. In short, families were broken or nonexistent. Education was broken. Economic success was unattainable. The threat of crime was a daily, sometimes hourly, reality. We know that people are not inherently bad or defective. I personally believe that all people are children of God with unlimited human potential. We know with 100 percent certainty that peoples’ lives will transform if their environment is transformed and we invest in the people. Environment matters. We not only believed that, over the last 15 years we have been innovative with our programs and we have believed, challenged and invested in the people, and we have measured their successes. The good news is that the successes number in the thousands! What we did will be detailed in this series of newsletters. In closing this first one, however, I want to say that while much of what I write in the future will be heavy with statistics and analysis, what we did in Atlanta began with matters of heart and spirit. I’ll never forget my promise that, as a community and nation, we can do better than allow the horrible conditions at housing projects to go unchallenged.

How we made things work 15 YEAR PROGRESS REPORT

How

we made things work

May 2009 demolition begins at Bowen Homes, the last of the obsolete large, family public housing projects

A lot of flexibility and ingenuity

here was no question two decades ago that something had to change with Atlantaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s public housing. After winning the bid to become the 1996 Olympic Games host, Atlanta was compelled to remedy the awful conditions at its obsolete housing projects. That was especially true at Techwood/ Clark Howell Homes adjacent to the Georgia Tech campus and directly across the street from the proposed site for the Olympic dormitories. If those projects had been left standing, Techwood/ Clark Howell would have been center stage while the world was watching its best athletes compete. So, the thinking in the early 1990s was to do a thorough renovation of the projects.

15 YEAR PROGRESS REPORT

“I knew that would never be enough, not in a million years,” says Egbert Perry, CEO of the Integral Group, which eventually would become a private partner to AHA in transforming many of the sites of former housing projects. “To put it bluntly, the situation was so bad that all that we were doing was grooming young men for prison and young women for public housing. There was no way to change the population without a fundamental change in our thinking towards housing.” The dysfunctional projects had become dead ends for people segregated by economics and race, cut off from mainstream society. World-famed Atlanta architect John Portman, who designed AHA’s Antoine Graves high rise for senior citizens more than 40 years ago, regrets seeing the building torn down but he understands the structure is now obsolete. “What worked in the 1960s doesn’t work today,” he says. “I guess one of the first things is to start to think about is how the project will be used by the tenants, and what could we do in public housing to make it not just a storage unit for people, but to create a lifestyle, to create something that goes beyond just a shelter. That was the basis of our approach to Antoine Graves.” In September 1994, the catalyst for transformation arrived at AHA in the person of Renée Lewis Glover, an attorney who had agreed to become CEO of the agency. She assembled around her an informal “kitchen cabinet” whose mission was to find breakthrough solutions to problems that had festered for decades. “The beauty of it was that none of us was part of the system,” says Carol Naughton, who joined Glover’s staff as 14

legal counsel. The law firm Naughton had left had no ties to public housing. CEO Glover had been a corporate real estate attorney. Perry was a successful developer of mainstream residential communities. All brought a fresh perspective to old problems. Perry explains: “It doesn’t make sense to go to 100 percent public housing because we’ve been there, done that, and it didn’t work. So why try to re-create it? We were never in the business of developing public housing communities, we’d never done one, never desired to do one, but the concept of creating a healthy and sustainable community that had a mix of units for lower income families seamlessly integrated into the development made sense.” With this group’s first battleground being Techwood/Clark Howell Homes, the vision for the future began to crystallize. Congress had given some flexibility to local housing authorities under a program called HOPE VI, first enacted during the administration of President George H.W. Bush and then expanded under President Bill Clinton and his secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Henry Cisneros. “We knew HOPE VI was out there encouraging the demolition of the most distressed housing projects,” Perry says. “The first time that was actualized was at Techwood/Clark Howell. The solution wasn’t to renovate. We proposed that the whole thing come down.” HUD Secretary Cisneros agreed, and that HOPE VI was the answer. The program provided much-needed deregulation, covered much of the nonfinanceable cost of the developments and created a platform for dramatically reshaping approaches that no longer worked. It was uncharted territory.

(top left to right): Egbert Perry, Carol Naughton, John Portman, (bottom right) Herman Russell

“We felt that not only could we make great improvements to the city, but even more important, we had a strong belief that we could break the cycle of poverty for those who have been held as economic captives in the housing projects for so many years,” says Hope Boldon, CEO of the Integral Youth and Family Project, which using Hope VI funding provides almost three years of coaching to assist relocating public housing residents to transition smoothly into society’s mainstream. For Centennial Place to come into being, everything --all the historical baggage that public housing carried in 1995 -- had to be rethought. The pockets of racially, economically and socially isolated poverty could only be replaced with fresh thinking and new ways of getting an old job done. The changes included the revolutionary approach of using public-private

HOW WE MADE THINGS WORK

partnerships to create the new communities. The communities were to be made up of residents from a broad range of incomes (minimum wage to white collar executives), and the new communities would have a variety of uses - rental housing, home ownership, retail and commercial space, schools and recreational facilities. “What I think was noble in the new concept under Renée Glover’s leadership,” says developer Herman Russell of Atlanta-based HJ Russell & Company, one of the nation’s largest minorityowned construction firms, “is having reduced the percentage of public housing and having introduced a new concept of mixed-use living.” As AHA’s revolutionary concept moved forward, eventually all that remained of Techwood/Clark Howell was the dirt on which the housing project once sat. What grew on the landscape, 15

15 YEAR PROGRESS REPORT

From resident community meetings to ballots, we heard the voices of more than 90 percent of project tenants who wanted out.

HOW WE MADE THINGS WORK

the mixed-use, mixed-income Centennial Place, made the turf unrecognizable as the same area that had blighted Atlanta just a few years earlier. The key was mixed-income housing developed by public and private partners – in the case of Centennial Place, AHA was the sponsor, public investor and co-developer, while Atlanta-based Integral and St. Louis-based McCormack Baron Salazar were the private developers, bringing both knowhow and private investment. Seeding the project was a $42.5 million HOPE VI grant, leveraged by $150 million in private investment. Mixed-income communities as a wholesale replacement for public housing were so novel that tenants at the old projects adopted a “show me” attitude. Meeting after meeting were faceoffs between the tenants and AHA CEO Glover, her aides and the private developers. AHA officials agreed that each step of the process needed the support of those most affected, the agency’s tenants. No tenants of the projects were tossed out of housing – many moved into the mixed-income communities and others used housing assistance vouchers to move into homes of their choice. The people most affected – the

former public housing residents – were convinced. When in recent years AHA asked tenants at the remaining public housing if they wanted the projects razed, more than 90 percent said, “Yes!” In the mixed-use, mixed-income communities such as Centennial Place and Villages at East Lake, former public housing tenants lived side by side with others whose incomes were often far higher than theirs, affording a view of life denied them for decades. A core belief was that everyone, if held to the same high expectations and standards, can enrich the lives of their neighbors by sharing cultural wealth and lifestyle examples. “The mixed-income model doesn’t work if market rate families or people with choice don’t come,” Integral CEO Perry says. ”You have to develop, design, build and manage to the highest standard possible by producing a product that people of choice would want to consume.” Revitalization of the old public housing projects into these new amenity-rich communities is a way to spread the good news of opportunity and growth. By scraping the landscape clean and building market-rate mixeduse, mixed-income communities and

setting and enforcing high expectations and standards, life has been and will continue to be improved for those living there and for anyone considering living within them. Beyond just the former sites of the housing projects, whole areas of Atlanta have blossomed because the blight of public housing has been erased. Revitalization is particularly striking in Midtown Atlanta in and around Centennial Place. The growth of Georgia Tech, the relocated World of Coca-Cola, the Children’s Museum and the Georgia Aquarium to just name a few, show how AHA’s beliefs, begun 15 years ago in the shadow of poverty, have manifested themselves into a brighter present and a glowing future. Success breeds success. In the case of AHA’s programs, Centennial Place was the cornerstone for what was called the Olympic Legacy Program, which employed the same development and financial model and principles to revitalize other obsolete housing projects. “Centennial Place gave us the opportunity to do East Lake,” says Cecil Phillips, chairman of the AHA board of commissioners. The first four Olympic Legacy Program projects were Techwood/ Clark Howell Homes, East Lake Meadows, John Hope Homes and John Eagan Homes. Eventually 16 distressed public housing projects were revitalized under the banner of the Olympic Legacy Program, leveraging HOPE VI and non-HOPE VI public housing development funds. Since then, $220 million from those funds have been leveraged to about $3 billion in private investment in the new communities and their surrounding areas.

15 YEAR PROGRESS REPORT

AHA wasn’t perfect at the beginning. “We constantly had to assess what we were doing and make refinements and mid-course corrections, as needed, to do our work better,” AHA CEO Glover says. “Our yardstick wasn’t how many buildings we put up, but how much better the communities and neighborhoods became and how many of the lives of AHA-assisted families had improved.” AHA is constantly piloting new ways to integrate AHA families into the larger Atlanta community. For example, Project-Based Rental Assistance, or PBRA, was designed to leverage the pre-recession private sector real estate development activity taking place throughout the City of Atlanta by providing a renewable, long-term rental subsidy to a private owner, who agrees to rent a percentage of its apartments to

(top): left to right from podium Renée Glover, then Secretary of HUD Henry Cisneros, former Atlanta Mayor Bill Campbell at the groundbreaking for Centennial Place (bottom): Centennial Place was the prototype for revolutionary change to publicprivate relationships and mixed-income communities

HOW WE MADE THINGS WORK

persons who earned minimum wage up to 60 percent of the metropolitan area median income. There are more than 35 PBRA arrangements with private owners in the Atlanta area, adding to the list of mixed-income communities in the city. “PBRA gives AHA-assisted households a broader array of choices,” says Joy Fitzgerald, AHA chief operating officer for real estate operations. “It is an efficient tool for expanding housing opportunities.” Slightly different – but with the same goal of giving families more choices – is a program that could only be implemented with the regulatory autonomy that AHA’s success has won from HUD. Typically, HUD pegs voucher rent subsidies based on a metropolitan-wide average of apartment rents. This ignores the wide disparities in neighborhood quality, amenities and characteristics. It also has the unintended consequences of distorting rents and pushing voucher holders into lower-income neighborhoods. With its regulatory autonomy, AHA has divided Atlanta into numerous sub-market areas, aligning the voucher subsidies to be comparable with the neighborhoods’ prevailing rents. The impact of sub-market rent alignment has been significant. Today, AHA families live in neighborhoods that, on average, are 27 percent more affluent than the neighborhoods surrounding the housing projects, according to a recent analysis based on tenant ZIP codes. In 2003, AHA became what HUD calls a Moving to Work, or MTW, agency. MTW is a very broad program of local autonomy reflected in an agreement negotiated and executed by HUD and the MTW Agency. Granted to only about 30 public housing authorities across the

nation, AHA’s MTW Agreement allows it to use private-sector real estate principles and local strategies to meet Atlanta’s affordable housing needs. These strategies, in most cases, don’t fit into more rigid federal guidelines. AHA’s MTW allows for single block grant funding, which includes operating funds for low-income housing, Section 8 voucher funds, and capital funds. In this way, the money can be used as seen fit for eligible MTW activities as set forth in AHA’s HUD-approved MTW Plan. AHA upped the ante for personal responsibility when, in 2004, leveraging the lessons from AHA’s HOPE VI revitalization program. As part of MTW, AHA required compliance with the work or education requirement for non-elderly, non-disabled adults in order for them to receive housing assistance. At that time, 16 percent of those adults were working full time. By 2005, 80 percent of the households were compliant with AHA’s work program, although that number has decreased to 56 percent during the current recession. MTW is a factor in AHA’s success and it can lead to economic independence and home ownership, as public housing was originally intended. Just as independence has meant opportunities for AHA, it has also created new areas of work. Long-term family-centered coaching and counseling families moving out of the projects and into mainstream housing has become a major endeavor – one in which AHA has invested about $27 million over the last decade, utilizing professional firms such as Integral Youth and Family Project and Families First. Similarly, AHA’s Service Provider Network includes organizations that can help in such areas as credit counseling,

domestic violence, home ownership, faith-based resources and substance abuse treatment. AHA’s motive for such programs is simple. “We have got to stop losing generations of people just because they’re temporarily poor,” says Renée Glover. When Glover began her work, one of her strongest allies was the then-secretary of HUD, Henry Cisneros. Although he left HUD in 1997 – just as AHA was beginning to see the fruits of HOPE VI – Cisneros has followed progress in Atlanta. His praise is strong. “A combination of people coming back to sites, market homes, for sale, schools, both at the East Lake charter school and Centennial Place in the center city, and Section 8 for individuals and the aggregation of Section 8 to create additional new kinds of subsidy-based apartments, using all of those strategies, assisted housing in Atlanta is not what it was before and it’s a model for the country,” Cisneros says. “Atlanta has done the best job of any city in the country of using a variety of strategies, not just HOPE VI but improvement and modernization funds, private investment, and slowly transformed the entire system.” Michael Dobbins, former commissioner of planning for the City of Atlanta, has witnessed that transformation. “For many, many years we’d sort of developed and cultivated and repeated what I think has always been a myth, that somehow lower income people, and middle income people and upper income people can’t live with each other,” he says. “The reality is the initiatives AHA has implemented have been absolutely vital to what I think has been a really successful overall program to revitalization and reinvestment in the city.” 19

15 YEAR PROGRESS REPORT

Looking back, the process has been one of inventing solutions to problems, assessing the success of the solutions, modify the programs, and then tackling new problems with more innovations. “The truth is, we were making it up as we went along,” Perry remembers. “We really didn’t know what we were doing. I mean that seriously. We knew how to develop, but we were doing something that was totally outside the box because we were trying to transform communities beyond the physical and the financial and integrate a human outcome in ways that hadn’t been done before.” Yes, AHA’s transformation was a success – but only because strong values guided the work…

HOW WE MADE THINGS WORK

Revitalization in and around Centennial Place sparked great economic growth in the area from the Georgia Aquarium and the World of Coke to restaurants, hotels, a YMCA, and more.

Lesson Learned No.2 The Road to Restoring Human Dignity

(top) Shunquille Peterson said her children’s grades picked up once she moved from University Homes to a healthier community with higher performing schools

By Renée Lewis Glover For decades, our society has struggled with the social issues surrounding poverty. Some believe that people are poor because they were born into the wrong family, race or culture, while others believe poverty is a matter of being unlucky, unwilling or incapable. Sound reasoning shows us that there is no single reason why, at any given time, an individual has fewer resources. Yet, public policies are often based on such generalities or assumptions, and that’s wrong. However, while we know stereotypes and generalities lead to inaccurate conclusions, 22

we can be certain that many expectations often become reality. That is, if we expect people to fail – based on the judgment that somehow they are inherently incapable – then often they will fail. On the other hand, if we expect people will succeed – and that it is mostly external forces that have impeded their success – then when nurtured, prepared and afforded access to opportunities, people will travel a path to success. We also know that the public housing program started out as temporary housing assistance for working poor families. The vision was clear and the expectations and standards were high. Even with clarity of vision, the program was conceived and developed during a period of racial segregation and conflict. Notwithstanding that historical context, the expectation was that both white and black families were preparing themselves to live independent, successful lives, albeit in racially segregated communities. Over the years,

as society changed and the government faced new and very difficult challenges, numerous (and often conflicting) rules and regulations were crafted to address these challenges. Many of these rules and regulations were reactive rather than strategic. And, in many cases, the rules and regulations were developed based on the historical and political context of the times, political expediency and, in some cases, priorities that trumped decent and safe affordable housing, e.g. urban renewal or highway expansion. As a consequence of these complexities, the public housing program lost its vision and mission and became positioned to be all things to all people and to address all of society’s social problems. To accommodate this very complicated (and some would say impossible) mission, the rules and regulations drove the expectations and standards down to a level where there no longer were any meaningful expectations and standards. Most of the politicians and administrators charged with overseeing the public housing program assumed that all people who received housing assistance in public housing were helpless and incapable of being successful in the mainstream. I refuse to accept this premise. In fact, in 1994, when I decided to take on the challenges at the Atlanta Housing Authority, I knew that the only way to address the myriad problems was to call on my faith and follow my belief that all people are children of God, with unlimited human potential. I firmly believe that when our lives and our work are not guided by our faith

A4 / Atlanta Housing Authority

and by high moral and ethical standards emanating from our faith, our vision becomes distorted and we lose our way. When we fail to apply high expectations and standards to ourselves and to the people we serve, we get outcomes that fall far short of what is possible. I further believe our faith requires us to advance the notion that each individual, because of his/her God-given potential, is responsible for his or her own life and that each individual is capable of success regardless of family, race, creed, culture or financial circumstance. I know that when discussing public policy it’s not popular to talk about faith because it makes people uncomfortable. Let’s not forget that while America’s Founding Fathers insisted on the separation of church and state, they were mostly men guided by their own strong faith-derived values. That combination of secular government shaped by strong values has created discomfort throughout our nation’s history, and with this writing, I also intend to make the reader uncomfortable. I will start by describing the bleak, on-the-ground reality faced by Atlanta in the 1990s, and by many other large cities today. Because of failed public policies and low expectations, the public housing program in Atlanta became a system that created an institutionalized culture of poverty for people who were temporarily down on their luck. Temporary became permanent for most, recycling itself to fit generations of families. The program suffered from several fatal flaws, including: - A failed social design of concentrated poverty. - Very low expectations and standards. - No requirements for personal responsibility. - No support for personal

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transformation. - No opportunities for economic independence and upward mobility. - And, no access to quality education; all of the “captive” schools that served the public housing projects were failing. The public housing program had become the “devil’s bargain.” That is, in exchange for a social, financial, and housing arrangement – with no or low standards and without personal accountability or responsibility – one could live in a compromised, dangerous and dysfunctional housing development. Because it was the only affordable option available to them, families needing assistance with paying their rent, found themselves in environments where, over time, they were exploited and destroyed by the chaos that resulted from concentrated poverty and low expectations and standards. The unintended but predictable consequence of these environments was that society’s criminals and predators were empowered, and the vulnerable, lawabiding, very low-income families who found themselves trapped in these no-win situations were imperiled. After a few years of living in this social disorder, families that were only seeking rental assistance tended to become poorer and poorer, more dependent, distrustful and further stigmatized. In due course, the law-abiding residents, in their hearts, questioned why a system was allowed to exist when it so overwhelmingly favored thugs and predators over children, mothers and the elderly. Ultimately, all families learned they couldn’t trust housing authority officials, elected officials, or government officials of any ilk because they had been compromised and entrapped by the system itself. For sure, the issues of poverty are

complex. And, we would be well-served to remember that there is a big difference between having little income and being institutionalized into a culture of poverty. Given this background and context, in September 1994, when we started our public housing transformation in partnership with private sector developers, we understood that the old model of concentrated poverty and low expectations and standards had failed and must end. We knew our efforts would not be successful if we could not restore integrity and human dignity by pursuing strategies that insure great outcomes for the assisted families and the larger society, earn their trust and change the culture, minds and hearts of both the assisted families and the larger society. One of AHA’s strategic goals for mixed-use, mixed-income revitalization is to mainstream the families. In order to encourage, motivate, and facilitate better outcomes, we had to restore the human spirit and dignity by providing customized, long-term human development support, setting high expectations and standards, and requiring personal responsibility. Low expectations and standards only serve to break the human spirit and rob individuals of their dignity. Not only had this type of destructive thinking destroyed the public housing program, it has also systematically destroyed our public schools, child welfare system, publicly subsidized healthcare, and most other social institutions and programs. Because I believe that our faith must inform our work, I called on my faith to restore trust with the assisted families and to develop a rational system of thoughtful policies, expectations and standards. I believe that bringing faith-informed levels of integrity and accountability to this work shaped my thought process in a completely different manner. Race, sex, 23

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culture, religion and income differences are required to be eliminated as considerations. Now, the same high level of expectations, standards and personal responsibility is demanded of everyone and for all situations. In a faith-informed context, the work becomes focused on building God’s Kingdom, the place Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. so beautifully refers to as the “Beloved Community.” In this new context, mediocrity, low expectations and standards, segregation, discrimination and concentrated poverty are not tolerated. All of us, without exception, are called upon to use our God-given gifts of

unlimited human potential in building the Beloved Community. All of us are required to live with civility and respect for our fellow human beings. We are required to develop our strategies and policies and to take actions that create a kingdom that benefits everyone equally. Our mission is to strengthen the people we serve so that they are empowered, educated and enabled to tap into their own God-given human potential. I further believe that high expectations and standards of personal responsibility are required of everyone. We are expected and required to educate and train ourselves

I was struggling with some personal challenges, but the move to this new apartment community gave me a new lease on life. Now I am thriving at my job and my children are succeeding in school. - Janice Thompson, former public housing resident 24

and to support and encourage our fellow human beings so that we can all live a decent, full, and productive life. Failing to teach and train with excellence and integrity is not an option. Education is the language of life, civility and humanity. So, what have these faith-informed expectations, standards and policies yielded? AHA determined that as part of this restoration process, it needed to invest in each family impacted by AHA transformational activities by providing, through professional counselors, family based human development services for almost three years. As a result of our new direction, the outcomes of assisted households have been stunning. More than 56 percent of the assisted, non-elderly, non-disabled households that reside in mixed-use, mixed-income communities are engaged in the work force , and that number would be higher if not for the recession. W hen AHA adopted a work requirement for non-elderly and nondisabled households who resided in its traditional public housing developments not undergoing transformation in 2004, only 16 percent of those households had working members. By 2005, 80 percent of the households were compliant with AHA’s work program, although that number has decreased to 56 percent during the current recession. Moreover, the families have been able to continue working (including finding new employment) during the current economic recession. Families are becoming homeowners, children are graduating from high school and going on to college, and individuals are becoming entrepreneurs. Our work has demonstrated that if we are faithful, there is no obstacle that cannot be overcome.

we learned

What we learned

The principles that evolved

cattered across Atlanta, 16 healthy mixed-income, mixeduse neighborhoods are bustling with successful residents, highperforming schools, exciting recreation facilities and economically robust retailers. The miracle is that such vibrant communities thrive on land that

in past decades had been marred by deteriorated housing projects. That physical renovation is obvious. But as the Atlanta Housing Authority pursued its paramount goal to deconcentrate the poverty of the housing projects, another type of renovation was underway: a renovation of human spirit. 25

15 YEAR PROGRESS REPORT

At the heart of AHA’s work are several core principles that have driven the changes of the past 15 years. One of those core beliefs is that selfsufficiency and self-empowerment are immensely important goals for families receiving housing assistance. Bricks and mortar are one thing, but the heads and hearts of residents are entirely another. After all, if their lives aren’t measurably improved and if their children aren’t welcomed into the full opportunity of the American Dream, then AHA’s work would be meaningless. “If families are not successful, AHA is not successful,” says Barney Simms, chief external affairs officer of AHA. “Our mission from the mid-1990s onward has been guided by a commitment to families, and especially to children. Getting the redevelopment right was important, but you must ask, ‘Why was it important?’ The answer is that people’s lives are measurably and dramatically improved by leaving the projects and stepping onto the escalator to the middle class. And

within the families, those who will benefit most are children. They no longer will be steeped in failure, but will now have the same opportunities as every child in Atlanta.” Fortunately, former housing project residents’ lives have been transformed. The past decade and a half have seen enormous strides in that direction by encouraging pride, enabling residents to become less dependent and to move toward the satisfaction that comes with competing, creating and succeeding on their own. “We know human development services are key to family success,” says AHA CEO Renée Lewis Glover. “As families find a location, they get settled, folks get comfortable, they’re in their new jobs, as long as their lives are improved by a whole bunch, families often choose not to come back. Many did not want to come back because the memories of the place were so harsh, some people had seen their children killed on that plot of ground. It makes no sense to facilitate a person

moving from one bad arrangement to another.” “Residents can and should become competitive in mainstream society,” Simms says. “This is a dramatic shift in policy and worldview from the early 1990s, when the prevailing philosophy across the nation was that public housing residents were somehow flawed and that society needed to care for them. That paternalism has smothered potential for generations. Everyone – man, woman and especially the children – should have the same rights and opportunities to compete as anyone else. The economic, racial and educational islands of isolation that AHA properties had become over the 1960s, ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s have been replaced by economically diverse, mixed-use, amenity-rich communities. This dramatic shift, mobility counseling, has taken thousands of people from a dearth of opportunity and moved them into the mainstream of American life.” Glover often speaks of “unlimited human potential,” and the guiding ideal

WHAT WE LEARNED

for all of AHA’s work has been removing the chains of the failed public housing model so that families’ potential would be unfettered. Flowing from that ideal are a series of principles (see Page 29) that, in turn, are embodied in the policies that have evolved at AHA. Motivating residents was a paramount goal. Economic independence for residents is at the heart of AHA’s mission since the mid-1990s. Personal responsibility was a concept that had gone out the window in the decades leading up to 1995, and it was something that needed to be brought back inside. The goal became providing a means of self-sufficiency and selfempowerment for residents who had very little of either. To achieve that goal, AHA provides almost three years of intense coaching to arm former housing project residents with the tools they’ll need for successful mainstream lives. Life skills aren’t inherited – they must be taught and nurtured. Hope Boldon, CEO of the Integral Youth and Family Project, which

works to ease the transition from public housing and into mainstream life, says she is constantly amazed how much residents accomplish with just a little help. Boldon has worked at making the Integral Youth and Family Project successful for the past 15 years. A representative from the Integral Youth and Family Project visits each family two or three times a month for almost three years until the transition is complete. Families receive visits at their homes and at their jobs, all in an effort to integrate them into a better life. “Because of Renée’s vision, she made a decision that many other housing authorities have not made, and that’s a decision to invest significantly in people,” Boldon says. That investment begins with sessions six months before the families move out of their old homes and into their new homes. Each client and family is helped to reach their full potential with one-on-one sessions at home, school, work, wherever the family happens to

be. The goals include: • Basic motivation and life skills • Education, training, and employ ment opportunities • Career development and increased employability • Entrepreneurship promotion • Community and family responsibility • Disability connections • Youth education and character building • Senior health and recreation The goals may appear lofty, yet Boldon says most families say they just needed that extra push to help them improve their prospects and their lives. Eva Davis, an AHA commissioner who was the resident president of one of the worst housing projects, East Lake Meadows, observes: “Lots of people got a chance to get out of the wilderness. They had the option and opportunity to be free from slums, and when I say slums it means we lived in an overcrowded, drug-infested community. The reason we had so many

(left): Tomekia Dunn, mother of 4, took advantage of human and relocation services and moved her family from Hollywood Courts to a new town home community, (middle): Hope Boldon (right): Residents received much support including this brochure on how to empower your S.E.L.F.

EMPOWERING YOUR S.E.L.F. FOR SUCCESS A Comprehensive Vision for AHA Clients

15 YEAR PROGRESS REPORT

“My sons and I lived in public housing before we got the opportunity to live in a mixed-income community. I love where we live now. Our apartment is larger and we have all new appliances. I’m minutes away from my sons’ school and my job.” Latasha Kendrick

Former public housing resident

WHAT WE LEARNED

(adjacent page): MTW flexibility helped Latesha Kendricks’ family move to a healthy mixed-income community. (left): Ambassador Andrew Young supported an early CATALYST direct mail campaign.

problems in East Lake Meadows because people didn’t have nothing to do with themselves except sit around and look at soap operas all day, and smoke marijuana, and keep up the devil. They didn’t have no jobs and didn’t keep their homes clean. They were able-bodied people!” And, Glover recalls the testimony of a woman, who having started working for the first time in her life, said: “Now that I am working, my children respect me and my pride has been restored.” Another woman, who had recently earned her GED, told Glover that she “loves the joy in the faces of her children now that she can read to them.” Today, the principles of opportunity, achievement, education and work are embodied in what is called the CATALYST Program, AHA’s adaption of the federal MTW program. AHA’s activities under CATALYST are focused on using MTW flexibilities to achieve three strategic goals: • Quality living environments –

provide quality affordable housing in healthy mixed-income communities with access to excellent quality of life amenities; • Economic viability – maximize AHA’s economic viability and sustainability; and • Self-sufficiency – facilitate oppor tunities for families and individuals to build wealth, reduce their dependency on subsidies, and ultimately become financially independent. AHA’s vision is to promote “Healthy Self-Sufficient Families” and its mission is to “provide quality affordable housing for the betterment of the community.” The vision and mission serve as the foundation for the agency’s five Guiding Principles: • End the practice of concentrating the poor in distressed, isolated neighborhoods. • Create healthy communities using a holistic and comprehensive approach to assure long-term marketability and sustainability of

the community and to support excellent outcomes for families. • Create mixed-income communities with the goal of creating market rate communities with a seamless affordable component. • Develop communities through public/private partnerships using public and private sources of funding and market principles. • Support residents with adequate resources to assist them to achieve their life goals, focusing on self-sufficiency and educational advancement of the children. Children pointed the direction for AHA, and children’s success will be the measure of AHA’s success…

Lesson Learned No.3 Children Face the Greatest Risk

By Renée Lewis Glover Fifteen years ago, we knew that we must abandon the model of concentrating poverty in public housing projects and move in the direction of creating economically integrated, market rate quality, mixedincome communities. We knew that the concentrated poverty of traditional public housing projects was having an insidious and corrosive impact on the lives of the residents, the surrounding neighborhoods, and the entire Atlanta community. What we had not fully comprehended was the negative impact these concentrated poverty residential arrangements were having on the neighborhood public schools and the educational outcomes of the children who attended those schools. As my dear friend Dr. Norman Johnson, a former professor at Georgia Tech, Carnegie Mellon and Florida A&M, and a former Atlanta public school board member, puts it, “If you concentrate poverty in the residential arrangement, you cannot help but concentrate poverty in the neighborhood school. And, if you concentrate poverty in the school, it doesn’t work.” The nation for decades has been divided about education reform. Progressives are blamed for merely wanting to throw money at schools. Conservatives are accused of 30

wanting to undermine public schools in favor of private education. What’s often missing in this debate is a clear strategy towards proven success. Those extremes aren’t the answer. A pragmatic approach that is based on proven, successful strategies is what is needed. The educators, sociologists and economists who have extensively studied education issues have all concluded that concentrating low-income children as a sociological design in schools does not work. This is not a statement about the ability or capacity of low-income children to learn. It is, indeed, a statement about the sociological environment that is needed to facilitate learning and great educational outcomes for children. We all know that education is the language of life and civilization and education is the great equalizer. While engaged in this debate, the world has changed and the educational challenges have become more urgent because we are now engaged in global competition. In order to sustain our globally competitive posture, we must resolve to better educate a larger percentage of our population. David Rusk, the former mayor of Albuquerque and one of America’s foremost urban thinkers, has written a paper titled “Housing Policy Is Education Policy.” This paper should be a primer for everyone engaged in national housing and education discussions. As the title implies, it makes little sense to talk about housing policy unless you factor in education or to talk about education policy unless you factor in housing policy. Rusk’s central thesis is that if you

deconcentrate poverty among school populations, the success rate goes up. However, deconcentrating poverty in neighborhood public schools has proved to be difficult and many large urban public school systems are broken and troubled. Policies that favor concentrating families in public housing projects only exacerbate the problem of poverty-dominated schools. Sadly, academic failure under these conditions has been almost a certainty. By contrast, in schools with a mix of income groups, we know that average test scores go up as the percentage of middleclass students increases. Ah, you say, that’s only because if you put low-income children in a middle-class school the blended rate of success, such as test scores, is likely to be higher than the average test scores at a predominantly low-income school. Not the case! Rusk found a stunning trend in his research: ‑ In an Albuquerque study of 1,108 students, the average pupil from a public housing household showed a 0.22 percent increase in a basic skills test for every one percent increase in middle-class classmates. ‑ In Baltimore, the average basic skills test scores for low-income students went up 0.18 percent for every one percent increase in the middle-class classmates. ‑ A study of 186 Texas school districts showed that for every one percent increase in the number of middle class students in a school, low-income students improved their chances of passing state exams by 0.27 percent.

A4 / Atlanta Housing Authority

Rusk also cited two schools in Buffalo, NY, to illustrate his thesis. The school with the smallest class size and greatest per-pupil expenditures was not the school with the highest achievement rate. Why? As Rusk explained, the more successful school, with larger classes and lower funding, had a poverty rate of only 7 percent of its students. The less successful school, even with its class-size and monetary advantages, had a poverty rate of 81 percent. Put another way, in those studies the average scores of poor children attending a predominantly middle-class school will show a double-digit percentage improvement over the average scores of a poor child relegated to a largely lowincome school. “When there are significant socioeconomic disparities, the effects of poverty and low parental education just wipe out other factors,” Rusk reported. That opinion is echoed throughout academic research. A 2004 Rand Corp. study found the “most critical factors associated with the educational achievement of children … appear to be socio-economic ones. These factors include parental education levels, neighborhood poverty, parental occupation status and family income.” The impact of socio-economic background of school-children’s families on academic outcomes was first documented in 1966 by renowned sociologist James S. Coleman in “Equality of Educational Opportunity.” He studied American schools in depth and here are several of his major findings: ‑ “The educational resources that a child’s classmates bring to school are more important than the educational resources that the school board provides. … [T]he social composition of the student body

15 YEAR PROGRESS REPORT

is more highly related to achievement, independent of the student’s own social background, than is any school factor.” ‑ “Poor children learn best when surrounded by midd le-c lass classmates.” In Atlanta, we have studies that mirror these findings. Poor children who move from schools embedded in, or captive to, public housing projects to mainstream schools do much better because of the improved socio-economic environment. Georgia Tech’s Dr. Thomas D. Boston,

in a 2005 paper, “Environment Matters,” found that “children who live in highpoverty communities do not receive proper educational guidance, and miss out on important early childhood learning experiences, recreational and after school activities, and/or other enrichment programs which help their development and lay the ‘foundation for success or failure in school’ and in life.” As administrators of housing programs, real estate developers or professionals in related fields, we know that concentrating poverty in public housing projects or other residential arrangements leads to terrible human failure. We must never forget that a huge percentage of the people living in public housing projects are children. Thus, the toxic impact of concentrated poverty

has had a disproportionate impact on our children, setting the stage for generational devastation. When we began reshaping Atlanta’s housing policies 15 years ago, we knew that if we overburdened schools with children of poor families, the failure would spread. So, the goal was blending children of all economic backgrounds in schools where the positive sociology would support every child. The results of achieving that goal were clear. At Techwood Homes, one of Atlanta’s worst projects, Boston found that in 1995 just 10 percent of the students at the neighborhood elementary school passed a basic writing skills test. By 2002, there was a new mixed-income community, Centennial Place, with a new neighborhood school, Centennial Place Elementary. Boston found that 62 percent of the neighborhood children passed the basic writing skills test – a level that was about 50 percent higher than all elementary schools in the Atlanta system. With the studies of Rusk, Coleman, Boston and many others, we realize what works best: schools with a healthy mix of income groups, which optimally means that low-income students account for no more than 20 percent of the pupils. Achieving goals for schools is a matter of sensible policymaking. By adopting and implementing policies that result in the creation of economically integrated communities, we can embrace a strategy and a sociological design for the schools that has a proven track record. With this improved sociological design (coupled with progressive school reform), our nation’s public schools have a substantially improved prognosis. As the studies have shown, deconcentrating poverty in housing and schools is a great idea and even better public policy. 31

15 YEAR PROGRESS REPORT

We realized we could save the children

15 YEAR PROGRESS REPORT

oon after Renée Lewis Glover took the helm of the Atlanta Housing Authority in 1994, a tragic and horrible event occurred in one of the public housing projects: A toddler died after choking on a cockroach. The new AHA leadership already was focused on the plight of the housing project residents. Indeed, opening the doors to society’s mainstream for the residents, and ending their virtual imprisonment in concentrated poverty, was a much higher priority than merely replacing the decrepit and obsolete buildings they lived in. But that infant’s death, along with many other issues that doomed children living in housing projects to lives of failure, crystallized AHA’s mission. The compass to chart change in Atlanta’s public housing had a needle pointing in one direction – to the children. AHA’s leaders knew the task was immense. Embedded in housing projects across the city were elementary schools. The experience of those schools underscored what studies dating back to the 1960s have shown: Classrooms overwhelmingly dominated with poor children would produce failure. It’s not that the children didn’t have the raw intellectual material to be successful in school and later in life. It’s the environment they grow up in that counts most. “Spending more money and having smaller class sizes in school A than in school B would probably produce somewhat better results for school A when both pupil populations have almost identical socio-economic backgrounds,” says urban researcher David Rusk. “But when there are significant socio-economic disparities, the effects 34

of poverty and low parental education just wipe out other factors.” A recent study by the Rand Corporation found: “The most critical factors associated with the educational achievement of children … appear to be socio-economic ones. These factors include parental education levels, neighborhood poverty, parental occupation status, and family income.” Poor children who move from schools captive to public housing projects to mainstream schools do much better because of the improved socio-economic environment. Georgia Tech’s Dr. Thomas D. Boston, in a 2005 paper, “Environment Matters,” found that “children who live in high-poverty communities do not receive proper educational guidance, and miss out on important early childhood learning experiences, recreational and after school activities, and/or other enrichment programs which help their development and lay the ‘foundation for success or failure in school’ and in life.” Beyond education, the plight of the children living in housing projects is very clear to anyone visiting those neighborhoods. Changing policies over the decades undermined the original concept of public housing as transitional housing for people moving on and up. The unintended consequences of new policies were devastating to families, and produced generation after generation of housing projects dominated by single women and children. Without the influence of fathers and without the positive socializing influence of cohesive families, children grew up with every disadvantage imaginable. With constant exposure to crime and criminals, many children fell into the pit of gangs, drug dealing, stealing and worse.

WHAT POWERED OUR MISSION

(top left to right) Drew Charter School, Dr. Norman Johnson (bottom left) Children at Centennial Place Elementary School

While AHA couldn’t solve all of those problems, it was compelled to make positive differences, especially with schools. Schools situated in the isolated pockets of poverty of housing projects were failures when measured against those that were not. Children from Atlanta’s public housing, which made up about 40 percent of Atlanta Public Schools’ student population, were clustered together and weren’t mingled with students from other socioeconomic backgrounds. The result – as researchers across the nation could have predicted – was failure. The solution? As AHA redeveloped old housing projects, creating healthy mixed-income communities, repositioned schools have the opportunity to reflect the new mix of incomes in their student population. Again, results were predictable: All students will benefit. “Education will always be the great equalizer,” says Renée Glover, AHA’s CEO. The educational improvements are best seen at Centennial Place Elementary School and Drew Charter School at the Villages of East Lake. Centennial Place Elementary epitomizes the change needed. It draws students from the revitalized Centennial Place neighborhood and its mixed-income residents. Centennial Place Elementary opened in August 1998, replacing the obsolete Fowler Elementary, which had served Techwood/Clark Howell Homes. Fowler was just across the street from Georgia Tech, yet it had been decades since a child from Techwood had crossed the street to attend the prestigious university that sat only a few feet away. Test scores and graduation rates

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rose as the new student mix flourished. In 1995, only 10 percent of the students at Fowler Elementary passed a basic writing-skills test. By 2002, at Centennial Place Elementary School, 62 percent of the students passed a basic writing skills test. That is roughly about 50 percent higher than all elementary schools in the Atlanta school system. “Did we deconcentrate poverty and get children going in the right direction?” asks Dr. Norman Johnson, a former Georgia Tech professor and former president of the Atlanta Board of Education. “Yes.” Cynthia Kuhlman was Centennial Place Elementary’s first principal. “We wanted to create a neighborhood school that would prepare children for attending Georgia Tech,” she recalls. “There was a great deal of commitment from the community, the planning committee, Atlanta Public Schools and the housing authority and its private development partner. Everyone stood by their commitment.” Education achievement has driven the overall success of Centennial Place, now one of Atlanta’s most desired addresses, and one that arose out of the failed Techwood Homes. “The single most important economic development engine in the entire Centennial Place community is Centennial Place Elementary,” says Egbert Perry, chairman and CEO of The Integral Group, which developed the neighborhood. The health and safety of youngsters are also improved by moving out of areas of concentrated poverty and into the amenity-rich communities. There is far less crime today in Atlanta than in 1995, and police cite the elimination of housing projects as a primary reason. 36

There is access to better food. These are links in the chain that lead to better health all the way around – less hypertension, less diabetes, less obesity, less tobacco use, and better mental health. As the last of the old-style public housing projects in Atlanta is demolished, one of the final chapters in a failed public policy will be closed for the city. As the first city in the nation to raze its large family public housing projects moves forward to healthier communities built on these sites, it is the children of the entire city who win. For a decade and a half, AHA has labored to make Atlanta a better place for all citizens to live in. Looking forward to the next 15 years, we see …

(top right) Darrel Lightfoot and his children have improved quality of life in their new amenity rich community (bottom)2001 Senator Barbara Mikulski (D, MA), a champion of Hope VI ,visits Centennial Place Elementary school

WHAT POWERED OUR MISSION

Lesson Learned No.4 The truth about AHA: Making a Better Community and Strengthening Families Editor’s note: Despite the documented success of the Atlanta Housing Authority’s programs, misperceptions and myths remained. AHA Chief External Affairs Off icer addressed those issues in this column. His statements were evaluated and affirmed as “true” by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s PolitiFact reporting.

By Barney Simms Utter dismay. That was my reaction when I read an article recently in the Atlanta JournalConstitution (“DeKalb Resists Unwelcome Image,” May 30, 2010) that quoted someone I respect who was lambasting the Atlanta Housing Authority. Steen Miles, a former TV reporter and state senator, told the AJC that many suburban counties’ problems with crime, schools and falling property values are due to low-income blacks moving into the community. “The people dumped from the Atlanta housing projects went to Clayton and DeKalb counties,” Miles stated. Checking further, I found that Miles had written in a DeKalb newspaper, The Champion Free Press (“The downward spiral,” April 9, 2010): “Many of the Atlanta transplants [to DeKalb] are 38

former residents of the housing projects. … [M]ost of these low-income families have not had adequate counseling on how to adjust to living in single family homes. … Without serious counseling, how does one adjust from living in cramped, crime and drug-infested apartment complexes to being ‘integrated’ into middle class neighborhoods?” Miles is wrong, very wrong on all points. But the fault isn’t hers. It’s mine, as the person responsible for explaining AHA’s work to the community. AHA is in the midst of completing a historic transition. In the mid-1990s, Atlanta was pockmarked with more than 40 housing projects and had the highest percentage of people living in public housing of any major U.S. city. Of the 15,000 housing units, fully one-third weren’t fit for human habitation and the rest were only marginally better. Residents had been condemned to never-ending concentrated poverty. They were prey to criminals and victims of isolation from the mainstream community. The schools their children attended were among the very worst in the state. Residents faced lives devoid of jobs and economic opportunity. In 1994, when Renée Glover became CEO of the Atlanta Housing Authority, we set out to change that. This year, the last of the big housing projects will be demolished. We have ample proof from academic studies and from our own experience that families when integrated into the mainstream – either by living in the mixed-income communities that

have replaced the projects or in housingvoucher assisted homes of their choice – become mainstream. Their employment statistics mirror those of society at large. Their children attend schools where success is instilled. They no longer are the most vulnerable victims of criminals. Not all poverty has been eliminated in Atlanta, but AHA has replaced the worst pockets of despair and impoverishment with healthy neighborhoods. Crime rates have fallen dramatically, property values in once-depressed areas have risen, and for the first time in decades, citizens of all races and income groups are clamoring to move into the city. As the projects, which were exempt from property taxes, were replaced with taxable mixed-income housing, the city’s tax base was significantly augmented, a financial boon to the city’s homeowners and businesses. AHA deserves credit for its strategic intervention in ending poverty and for much of the civic regeneration that has followed. Yet, misperceptions remain. Chief among those are ones Steen Miles asserted, plus one other, that in demolishing the projects AHA has contributed to homelessness in Atlanta. Here is the truth about AHA’s work: Does AHA serve fewer families now that the projects are gone? Absolutely not. About 6,000 more families receive housing assistance today than at the peak of the projects. Have the suburbs been inundated with former residents of Atlanta housing projects? Absolutely not. Families who

A4 / Atlanta Housing Authority

receive Section 8 assistance living outside Atlanta is nothing new. Today 2,968 families live in 87 zip codes across the state – but since 2004, the year we announced all the large family housing projects would be razed, only 369 families have relocated outside of the City of Atlanta. If every one of those families had relocated to DeKalb, as Steen Miles implied, they would have had no measurable impact on the demographics and certainly couldn’t have caused the problems she described. The former housing project residents, by an overwhelming majority, now pursue productive lives and are indistinguishable from most working families. All of the families are required to comply with the terms of their lease and the rules of the program or else they will lose their eligibility to receive the housing subsidy – and some do. If not from AHA, then, from where is the suburban poverty coming? Some counties, such as Clayton, have encouraged vast building of rental housing (the ratio of rental to ownership is staggering), attracting transient and low-income residents from, for example, the Hurricane Katrina exodus. It was reported that thousands of families relocated from the Gulf Region to metro Atlanta. In total, fewer than 60 of those families received housing assistance from AHA (suggesting the balance moved to other, presumably suburban, communities where the rents were affordable like Clayton and DeKalb counties). In fact, according to a Brookings Institute report issued this year, the Atlanta metro area has the highest percentage of its poor living in suburbs of any major urban region – about 84.5 percent of the region’s low income families live outside the core city. That’s about 900,000 people, of which former Atlanta housing project residents constitute, at most, a negligible

15 YEAR PROGRESS REPORT

one-tenth of one percent. Suburban poverty has many causes, but AHA isn’t one of them. Are former housing project residents “dumped” into the community without preparation? Absolutely not. AHA, in the last decade, has invested $26.7 million in coaching families to move smoothly into the mainstream. That program engages families for at least 27 months. AHA also has implemented other programs, such as one called Good Neighbor which is administered through Georgia State University, to ensure positive outcomes for both families moving from the projects and the neighborhoods into which they move. No other housing authority in the nation makes anywhere near that level of commitment. Former residents of AHA projects are now well-endowed with the tools to be good citizens, workers, students and neighbors. Don’t former project residents move into neighborhoods just as poor as the projects? Not at all. A Zip Code analysis conducted this year showed that on average, former Atlanta housing project residents are now living in neighborhoods 27 percent more affluent than those surrounding public housing. That means better schools, better access to good retailers and grocers, more good jobs nearby and greater proximity to community resources. In tearing down the housing projects, hasn’t AHA contributed to Atlanta’s homeless population? Absolutely not.

AHA has fostered more quality affordable housing in Atlanta than the city has seen in decades. Moreover, working with the Regional Commission on Homelessness, AHA has entered into long-term rental assistance agreements that support 500 units in concert with a variety of private developers, faith-based groups and nonprofit organizations. The goal of this work is to develop various supportive housing communities with services to house the homeless and give them the skills to overcome homelessness. AHA recently increased its rental subsidy to support 200 additional housing units. The group responsible for monitoring homelessness in Atlanta and Fulton and DeKalb counties, The Pathways Community Network, found in a recent report that “homeless count numbers from 2003 to 2009 were steady. There was no dramatic change.” Pathways also found that a 6.5 percent increase in homeless people during the period was much less than population growth of 17 percent. That stability occurred during the very period when the housing projects were coming down. No organization is perfect, and no work in building a better community is ever complete. But AHA, over the last 16 years, has cleaned up a great mess, one rife with social injustice, and we have done so with the mission of improving the lives of children and families while at the same time building a great city.

15 YEAR PROGRESS REPORT

the future holds

Creating better, healthier cities In 1996, Renée Lewis Glover, who had not yet completed her second year as CEO of the Atlanta Housing Authority, was asked by a documentary filmmaker what she predicted her work in transforming the agency would produce. With a mixture of boldness and introspection, Glover responded to the filmmaker that she envisioned “seamlessly knitting together the fabric of the community.” She foresaw that “the city only can benefit” from AHA’s pioneering work in deconcentrating the pockets of poverty that were synonymous with the housing projects. Glover also predicted that AHA’s adaptation of the federal government’s HOPE VI program – which allowed housing authorities to replace obsolete housing projects with innovative development – “would light the way for several HOPE VI communities across the nation.” A decade and a half later, Atlanta is transformed. All of the major family housing projects have been demolished. Sixteen have been replaced by masterplanned mixed-use, mixed-income communities. Most of the phases of mixed-income multifamily rental development have been completed and are occupied, but additional phases of

15 YEAR PROGRESS REPORT

Centennial Place has matured into a successful mixed income community. Now the goal is to attract quality retail development

development under the master plans are yet to be done. Each of the master plans calls for great parks and green space, “for-sale” single family homes, high performing neighborhood public schools, world-class early childhood development centers and upscale recreational, retail and commercial uses. Each of these communities has been planned to offer a superior quality of life to the residents and to insure long-term desirability and sustainability. At the same time, AHA has greatly expanded the housing opportunities for low-income families in amenity-rich mixed-income communities, which serve thousands more people than when all of the projects were operating. The city itself has been a major beneficiary of AHA’s work – without the blight of projects overwhelming Atlanta’s landscape, an urban renaissance is flourishing, and for the first time in decades the population inside the city is rising. 42

So, Glover’s work is done, right? Well, no. “In many ways, we are at the mid-point,” AHA’s CEO says. Glover sees her future work focused on two areas: • Re-energizing the community building work to finish out the master plans, when the economy recovers, and planning the revital ization work at the recently demolished public housing sites; and • Pushing what Glover calls the “Third Wave of the Civil Rights movement.” She says: “Many people forget that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke out forcefully linking civil rights with poor people achieving economic equity in society. Eight months before he died, in his “Where Do We Go From Here?” speech, Dr. King stated, ‘Of the good things in life, the Negro has approximately one half those of whites. Of the bad things of life, he has twice those

of whites. Thus half of all Negroes live in substandard housing. And Negroes have half the income of whites. When we view the negative experiences of life, the Negro has a double share. There are twice as many unemployed.’” Glover notes that King was pointing to two things that became the hallmarks of AHA’s work in the last decade and a half: quality affordable housing in economically vibrant neighborhoods and economic empowerment. But while AHA has pioneered programs that address both areas, real success is still a goal and not yet a reality. “Many would say that things have improved and they are right, but more is needed,” Glover says. “Yes, we’re proud of our achievements at AHA, in housing, employment, education, caring for seniors and disabled persons and in other areas. But poverty, especially among people of color, is still a condition that holds back all of society. The ultimate goal of our work is to end multi-generational poverty.” She notes that, according to a study by New York University Economist Edward N. Wolff, blacks in 2004 held $11,800 in net worth, or about 10 percent of the $118,300 held by whites. The picture has not improved in recent years. The wealth gap was narrowest in 1992, and even then, median total wealth for blacks was only 16 percent of their white counterparts. “The First Wave of Civil Rights was ending slavery,” Glover says. “The Second was ending Jim Crow

WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS

segregation. People need to understand that public housing 50 years ago in the South was conceptualized and executed during the Jim Crow era, the consequence of which was vast populations of poor black people were exiled from the mainstream of civic and economic life in the cities. Thus, my first 15 years at AHA was, in part, finishing the work of erasing a vestige of Jim Crow by eliminating the economic concentration camps of public housing, which over time became populated predominantly by AfricanAmericans.” The “Third Wave,” economic empowerment, will ensure that poor people, especially African-Americans, gain economic equity in America, equity they have been systematically denied through economically segregated housing and poor education opportunities for decades. “Our work at AHA starts with housing,” Glover observes. “Make no mistake, if we get the social design wrong, everything else is unobtainable. The measure of our work is how we strategically unlock the human potential of the many people who were trapped in and stigmatized by public housing. For example, one of the worst aspects of public housing has been the destruction of families by ill-conceived public policies. As Dr. King observed in 1968, ‘The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the means to seek selfimprovement.’” Meanwhile, despite the national acclaim AHA has garnered by its work in deconcentrating poverty and replacing the projects with healthy neighborhoods, “We can never rest on our laurels,” Glover says. “Because the

work is complex and touches so many aspects of the society and involves structural and systemic change, it inevitably comes under attack by the advocates and persons who benefit from chaos. In response to those attacks, Congress is debating the very aspects of the policies and programs that have proven to be critical to successful outcomes. Fortunately, here in Atlanta, we have had the political support and, with that support, we have conceived, developed and applied strategies that have shown they will strategically attack the roots of poverty. We have evolved a model that puts communities on a long-term trajectory towards health – health in the sense of a better city, yes, but more importantly providing people long trapped in poverty with the means to move up in society.” To understand Glover’s vision for the next decades, it’s essential to recall the past 15 years. At the heart of Glover’s early work at AHA was confronting the awful failure of public housing. No one was under any illusion that life in “the projects” was an acceptable way for any American to live. Despite claims that public housing somehow constituted a “community,” the people who actually had to live in the deteriorating projects knew better. For example, Sylvia Porter, a tenant leader, told WAGA-Channel 5 in 1992: “We are not going to continue to tolerate the dungeons we have to live in.” Ironically, public housing had become a dismal echo of the early 20th Century slums that government-subsidized housing had been created to replace. With decades of public housing failure handicapping Glover’s ambitions to reform AHA and transform the lives of the people who depended on the

agency, how well did her predictions in 1996 pan out? Pretty good. This year, the last of Atlanta’s large family housing projects will be demolished. Replacing them, there are already 16 mixed-use, mixed-income communities, with more on the drawing boards. Glover accurately predicted that when given a chance, residents trapped in the housing projects wanted out – and subsequent polls of the residents vindicated Glover’s forecast with more than 90 percent of the residents saying they wanted to move into mainstream housing. Rigorous academic studies show dramatic improvements in the lives of families after leaving the housing projects – from the education of children to the economic security of the families. People who once were written off as failures are now indistinguishable from society’s mainstream. Moreover, Atlanta has flourished with healthy development and a growing population – things that would not have been possible if the city was still cratered by the old housing projects. “We’ve made the radical changes, and we’ve gone from being a liability to the health of the city to being a tremendous asset,” Glover says. “Now the mission is to mature, to use what we’ve learned to do the job better, and to assist other communities that face similar problems. What we’ve done is very exciting. What we have planned is even more exciting.” With that record, we can understand Glover’s emphasis for community building and economic empowerment. Glover cites, as evidence of success, the 2005 study “Environment Matters” by Georgia Tech Economics Professor Thomas D. Boston, which showed significant improvements in 43

15 YEAR PROGRESS REPORT

employment and educational success among families who had left Atlanta’s housing projects, as well as much lower crime rates in the neighborhoods around the former sites of public housing. “Dr. Boston’s research demonstrated that we had achieved some strategic goals,” Glover says. “Now our job is to shore up the work, improve on the improvements, make sure that gains we’ve made fighting poverty aren’t set back.” Through the past 15 years, the plan has adapted as AHA learned from its work. In the area where Grady Homes once stood, for example, a new urbanoriented community is being built by one of AHA’s long-time private sector partners, The Integral Group. Some of the stunning attributes of what is now called Auburn Pointe are advanced “green” technologies, ranging from geo-thermal climate control to solar panels. The population is “mixed” in many ways – by income and age. Some of the finest facilities for seniors are essential elements of Auburn Pointe. AHA is using the autonomy it has gained from the federal government to invite supportive services providers to offer a host of programs in the senior communities. Other phases of Auburn Pointe are built for university students, professionals in the Grady medical complex, and others who want to live in a community linked to transit – a place where a car isn’t essential. “People talk a lot nowadays about sustainability,” Glover says. “We’ve incorporated that thinking into the heart of our plans for future communities. It takes time for the mixed-use, mixedincome communities we’ve sponsored to mature. At Centennial Place, for example, we’ve been successful in 44

building a community where there is plenty of disposable income. Now, we need to finish the job there by attracting quality retail development.” Also part of the plan for the future is the continued encouragement of the mixed-income concept providing the foundation for true improvement in Atlanta’s schools. “For a half century studies have shown that school populations that are overwhelmingly poor doom students to academic failure,” Glover says. “Our building of mixedincome neighborhoods changes the dynamic of failure in schools. With a healthy mix of all income groups, all students have a chance to excel.” Glover also points to the encouragement of early childhood learning.” AHA’s philosophy has evolved from one that emphasized the physical structures to one where it was creating neighborhoods with children and families as the focus. Glover says: “When your priority is children, all of the rest of the equation falls into place. That is something we will expand greatly in the next years.” Beyond that, Glover sees AHA as taking greater national prominence as other cities wrestle with what to do with their own obsolete public housing. In broad terms, Atlanta will become a national model. “In effect, we’ll refine, refresh and reinvigorate the model,” Glover says. “And we’ll be able to improve what we do so that other cities don’t have to go through the same learning process that we did. In the beginning, we had inefficiencies. We didn’t know where the crisis would hit, but we knew that something would go awry. We didn’t know what to be afraid of, and now we do and can share our experience with other communities.”

An example of what AHA has learned, Glover says, is the investment in “human capital.” In the early days of closing the projects and providing housing assistance vouchers to families moving into the mainstream, AHA found that many of the people weren’t prepared to deal with the larger society. Now AHA sponsors and funds almost three years of professional familycentered coaching to families leaving public housing.

WHAT POWERED OUR MISSION

“When you tell the truth about what public housing became,” Glover says, “what’s clear is that these awful projects were dead-end reservations. They were a never-ending and inescapable cycle of poverty. People were trapped, cut off from society. They became impoverished not only in terms of money but also spiritually. The projects stripped families of their hope and humanity, and removed values and expectations from their lives. That is

what we will continue to change, building better communities and providing the opportunities and expectations every American should enjoy. That building of economic equity in America for poor people was Dr. King’s emphasis during his last years, and it remains a cause well worth fighting for today.”

Columbia Crest at West Highlands

Appendix 15 YEAR PROGRESS REPORT

MIXED-INCOME FAMILY COMMUNITIES WITH PROJECT-BASED RENTAL ASSISTANCE

COMMUNITIES

TOTAL UNITS

PBRA PARTNERS

Arcadia at Parkway Village

116

Auburn Glenn

108

Avalon Park Family

Centerline Capital Group

Avalon Ridge Family

Columbia Residential

Capitol Gateway II

Cortland Partners

Columbia Mechanicsville Apartments

Constitution Avenue Apartments

Crogman School Apartments

Gateway at Northside Village

GE Towers

Hampton Oaks

Heritage Green

Heritage Station I

Highbury Terraces

Mechanicsville Crossing

Mechanicsville Station

The Park at Scottâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Crossing

The Peaks at MLK

Total

1,038

Ambling Companies Atlanta Development Authority

Progressive Redevelopment Incorporated Resource Real Estate RHA Housing The Integral Group

MASTER-PLANNED, MIXED-USE MIXED-INCOME FAMILY COMMUNITIES: COMMUNITY BUILDING RENTAL UNIT MIX (#)

PARTNERS TAX

MARCOMMUNITIES

KET RATE

Brock Built

TAX

CREDIT

WITH

TAX

WITH

PUBLIC

CREDIT

ACC

HOUS-

WITH

ASSIS-

ING

PBRA**

TANCE*

ASSIS-

Columbia Residential Creative Choice Homes East Lake Redevelopment/ East Lake Foundation H.J Russell & Company McCormack Baron Mercy Housing

TANCE Ashley Collegetown

Ashley Courts at Cascade

113

116

Ashley Terrace at West End

Atrium at Collegetown

114

Capitol Gateway

167

100

138

Centennial Place

311

126

301

Columbia Commons

Columbia Creste

Columbia Estate

Columbia Grove

Columbia Mechanicsville Apartments

Former site of University Homes***

TBD

Mechanicsville Crossing

Mechanicsville Station

Columbia ParkCiti

Columbia Senior Residences at Mechanicsville

Columbia Village

The Gardens at CollegeTown

Magnolia Park

160

Veranda at Auburn Pointe

Villages at Carver

183

110

329

Village at Castleberry Hill

177

180

Villages of East Lake

271

Totals

1,996

932

2,300

400

RHA Housing, Inc The Integral Group

* ACC Assistance refers to the public housing operating subsidy that supports a portion of the communityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s operating expenses. * * PBRA is Project Based Rental Assistance * * * The new community is in pre-development and has yet to be named.

Appendix 15 YEAR PROGRESS REPORT

AHA-OWNED PORTFOLIO: 11 SENIOR HIGH-RISE COMMUNITIES AND 2 SMALL FAMILY COMMUNITIES

COMMUNITIES

TOTAL UNITS

Barge Road Highrise

130

Cheshire Bridge Highrise

162

Cosby Spear Memorial Tower

282

East Lake Tower Highrise

150

Georgia Avenue Highrise

Hightower Manor

130

Juniper & Tenth Highrise

150

Marian Road Highrise

240

Marietta Road Highrise

130

Peachtree Road Highrise

197

Piedmont Road Highrise

209

Westminster

Martin Street Plaza

Total

1,953

PROPERTY MANAGEMENT PARTNERS Habitat Company Integral Property Management The Lane Company

MIXED-INCOME SENIOR COMMUNITY WITH PROJECT-BASED RENTAL ASSISTANCE COMMUNITIES

TOTAL UNITS

SENIOR/ HIGHRISE

PBRA PARTNERS Ambling Companies

Atrium at Collegetown

114

Avalon Park Senior

Campbell Stone

201

Columbia Residential

Columbia Colony Senior

Cortland Partners

Columbia Heritage

124

Columbia High Point Senior

RHA Housing

Columbia Senior Residences at Blackshear

The Integral Group

Columbia Senior Residences at Edgewood

135

Columbia Senior Residences at MLK

122

Columbia Senior Residences at Mechanicsville

Columbia at Sylvan Hills

Columbia Tower at MLK Village

Heritage Station II

150

The Renaissance at Park Place South Senior

Veranda at Auburn Pointe

Veranda at Carver Senior

Veranda at Collegetown

Total

1,655

Atlanta Development Authority

KDTA Development, Inc Mercy Housing

OLDER PERSONS 55 + Ashton at Browns Mill

The Legacy at Walton Lakes

Park Commons/ Gates Park (HFOP)

130

Park Commons/ Gates Park (HFS)

110

Total

338