Public housing moving out

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By Dionne Walker ASSOCIATED PRESS

ATLANTA

The nation's bulldozer attack on crime and poverty soon will make Atlanta - home of the first public housing development - the first major city to eliminate all of its large housing projects.

Cities from Boston to Los Angeles are following its lead. For more than 15 years, housing officials across the country have been razing the projects where about 1.2 million families live and replacing them with a mix of higher-rent and subsidized apartments and homes.

Alexandria, La., has taken down at least 247 units. Buffalo, N.Y., has demolished about 1,000 aging homes. Atlanta expects to finish tearing down the last of its sprawling projects in June.

Advocates for the poor worry that not enough subsidized homes remain and that thousands of families are being dumped onto the street. Fewer than half of the 92,000 units demolished by cities have been replaced with traditional public housing.

Most of the displaced residents have received vouchers to put them into privately owned housing, but the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) said it doesn't know what happened to thousands of families.

Some longtime residents feel like afterthoughts in an ambitious overhaul that is supposed to help them.

"I don't think it's fair," said Jeff Walker, who was forced out May 30 from Atlanta's Bankhead Courts project.

Even though drug violence there was once so brazen that mail carriers had police escorts, he said: "We didn't ask to be moved."

The housing projects in Atlanta date back to 1936, when the nation's first public housing community, Techwood Homes, was built.