BUT THAT IF THE THIRD WAY LIBERATES THEM FROM THE VISION OF THE ANNOINTED?:

Atlanta rethinks housing projects: Officials are to vote on razing the remaining low-income units for more revitalization. Some express doubts. (Los Angeles Times Staff Writer, January 21, 2008)

The City Council's intervention could present an embarrassing setback for the Atlanta Housing Authority, which pioneered the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's HOPE VI program more than a decade ago. The agency has torn down more than 10,000 public housing units and plans to eliminate all of the city's public housing by 2010.

The housing authority has long maintained that warehousing the poor in vast complexes is a failed social experiment.

Yet now, with 10 nationally acclaimed mixed-income projects under its belt, the agency faces the prospect of lengthy public forums with worried Atlanta residents, and legal disputes about how much authority the City Council has over the razing of public housing.

Though there is little doubt that the sites of Atlanta's former projects have undergone dramatic revitalization -- property values have gone up and crime rates have gone down -- the issue is that few former public-housing residents actually live there.

So far, about 17% of Atlanta's former public-housing residents have returned to the mixed-income communities, which are funded primarily by private investors. The vast majority are scattered across the region and use Section 8 housing vouchers to help pay their rent.

For Atlanta housing officials, this is a measure of success: The strategy of the program is to fight the "cycle of poverty" by breaking the concentration of poverty, said spokesman Rick White. Profoundly poor, unemployed public-housing tenants can improve their lives, the theory goes, if they are given the means to live in better neighborhoods.

During the first phase of the program, former housing-project residents were given the right to return to the mixed- income communities.

The majority of residents chose to take the vouchers, White said.

Dang them...you try to do something nice for people and they use their freedom any old whichway....

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 21, 2008 8:28 AM