Tuesday, February 9, 2010

2011 Moving to Work (MTW) Annual Plan

The draft of Atlanta Housing Authority's Fiscal Year (FY) 2011 Moving to Work (MTW) Annual Plan is available for public review and comment from February 9, 2010 through March 10, 2010. Included in the Plan is a summary of proposed policy changes related to occupancy and rent policies for AHA assisted apartments and the Housing Choice program. If you wish to comment on the Plan, you can do so through AHA's website, or you can mail to AHA's Corporate Office at 230 John Wesley Dobbs Avenue, NE., Atlanta, Georgia 30303 to the attention of Adrienne Walker, Corporate Planning. All comments must be received by AHA no later than March 10, 2010.

AHA will hold its Annual Plan Public Hearing on Thursday, February 25, 2010 from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. at the Loudermilk Conference Center, Ballroom, 40 Courtland Street, NE., Atlanta, 30303. During the hearing, AHA will present the FY 2011 MTW Annual Plan and receive questions and comments from the public.

If you require special assistance or reasonable accommodations to review the Annual Plan or attend the Public Hearing due to (1) a disability (e.g. vision, hearing or mobility impairment), or (2) limited English proficiency, please contact Regina Evans at 404-817-7440 or leave a message on the Annual Plan message line at 404-817-7458 by February 18, 2010.

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Atlanta Homicides Lowest In 48-Years

Crime was the number one campaign issue in the Atlanta Mayor's race. The perception was that violent crime was up in the city. But statistics say otherwise. (SEE VIDEO)

The number of homicides in the City of Atlanta dropped 24% in 2009. You have to go back 48-years to 1961 to see numbers as low as they were in 2009. There were 80-homicides. That figure is down from 2008 when there were 105-homicides.

The numbers in Atlanta defy past trends. Typically when an economy is down, crime goes up. That's what makes the 2009 numbers surprising. But a Georgia State University Associate Professor of Criminal Justice says there are other factors that may have contributed to the decline.

Dr. Dean Dabney says one of the biggest factors is Atlanta's efforts to demolish city housing projects, a national trend the city is ahead of the curve on. "Taking that whole criminal environment and opportunity structure from the market if you will, out of the equation means that you're going to have a period of instability in the crime rate," Dr. Dabney said.

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

NHC 2009 "Pioneering Housing Strategies" Award Finalist the Atlanta Housing Authority

The Atlanta Housing Authority (AHA) was a National Housing Conference (NHC) 2009 "Pioneering Housing Strategies" Award finalist.

According to the NHC, the award was given to AHA because of "...(AHA's) outstanding work in public housing in Atlanta, which has undergone a remarkable transformation over the past fourteen years. And, along with it, so have many once-broken urban neighborhoods and the often marginalized families living in them. Changes of such significance were possible only through a radical rethinking of how to improve housing and housing options for families living below the poverty line—a rethinking enabled in great part by HOPE VI. Specifically, AHA was determined to use HOPE VI to reverse the cycle of low expectations and poor outcomes."

Read more

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

NHC "Pioneering Housing Strategies" Award

Today The National Housing Conference announced that Atlanta Housing Authority is among the finalists for this year's "Pioneering Housing Strategies" Award.

Other finalists included Atlanta Neighborhood Development Partnership, Bank of America, Enterprise Community Partners, Inc., Fairfax County Department of Housing and Community Development, Mercy Housing Chicago, Mercy Housing Idaho, Metropolitan Planning Council, NeighborWorks® America, Ohio Finance Housing Agency, Preservation of Affordable Housing, Inc., San Diego Housing Commission, and Stewards of Affordable Housing for the Future.

Click here to read the announcement about this year's winner.

Monday, December 14, 2009

Tiffany's Road To A Scholarship

Recently WSB-TV took a look at Tiffany Dudley's life journey. Tiffany's road to a scholarship at Georgia State University began with a health crisis that could have killed her. She looks back at the heart attack she had in 2001 as "a blessing" because it set her on the path to better health, a better life, and a higher education that came in the guise of a scholarship from Atlanta Housing Authority."

When she was 20, Tiffany had a massive heart attack, caused by undiagnosed juvenile diabetes. When she recovered, she heard about the Atlanta Community Scholarship award, available to AHA residents, and it turned her life around. Now she's studying law, in part, because of the good will of AHA employees.

"We've had the scholarship award now for about six years and we've raised well over $300,000," says Barney Simms, AHA senior vice president. "The bulk of the money comes from AHA's employee contributions. They are employees who believe in education as a great equalizer."

Students apply for the scholarship each spring and the winners are announced during the summer. The awards range from $500 to $5,000, depending upon the individual needs of the student.

AHA is also working to help improve the health of its residents so they don't ever find themselves in a hospital, fighting for their lives, as Tiffany did. This spring AHA will become the nation's first housing authority to destroy its large housing projects and replace them with a healthier environment.

"There is an easily observed link between poverty and poor health," according to in a recent post of Lessons Learned by Renee Lewis Glover, Atlanta Housing Authority president and CEO.

Giving residents hope and the opportunity to grow their natural talents is a large part of AHA's vision and it gave Tiffany Dudley hope.

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

An Introduction of Renee Glover

(December 8, 2009) The following is Howard Husack's introduction of Renee Glover during Tuesday morning's Urban Innovator Award ceremony in New York City.


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Good morning. I'm Howard Husock, vice-president for research at the Manhattan Institute. Welcome to the presentation of the Institute's Center for Civic Innovation 2009 Urban Innovator award. This bipartisan award has been presented annually for the past decade. Past recipients have included Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, New Orleans school superintendent Paul Vallas and Florida Governor Jeb Bush.

Our award this morning goes to someone who has brought innovation—and clear improvement—to a big city public housing system. That combined description is so seldom applied to public housing that it bears repeating. Innovation and improvement.

Of course, long ago and far away, it was thought that public housing was, by definition, a great innovation—an improvement over the slum housing it was replacing, a system that would provide safe and sanitary housing to working families, and a system whose rents would pay for its maintenance. Today, public housing has a much different meaning for most Americans—as "projects" known for high crime and concentrations of our very poorest households.

New Yorkers can be proud that Sonia Sotomayor has moved from public housing in the Bronx to the U.S Supreme Court—but that story of upward mobility from public housing has more often than not been the exception. Not always but far too frequently, public housing projects can be bleak, isolated places, where the law-abiding are cowed by the criminal, where intact families are few and children see few role models for success.

When she left behind her career as a successful corporate finance attorney—she practiced both in Atlanta and here in New York-- to become chief executive officer of the Atlanta Housing Authority, Renee Glover did not try to gloss over the failings of that system of 14,000 apartment units. Public housing, conceived as reform, had become, she dared to say, a toxic environment. And she embarked on a program of what can only be called radical change. So dramatic has that change been that today, virtually none—that's zero-- of the Atlanta public housing projects the Atlanta Authority owned and operated 20 years ago are still standing.

It is important to understand, what's more, that Renee Glover deserves this award not just for having the courage to demolish aging public housing—but for the courage and imagination to envision and implement an alternative. Too often we think of management as something that is important in the private sector—and policy as what's important in the public sector. But, as the political scientist Aaron Wildavsky once observed, implementation is 90 percent of public policy. In Atlanta, Renee Glover has really implemented-- And she's done it while running the Atlanta Housing Authority very much as a business, contracting out for management services while reducing the Authority's own payroll from 1400 to 300. So resourceful has the Authority been under her leadership that it's not only demolished public housing—it's charged Hollywood producers for the right to shoot the demolition She is the leading example, but not the only one, of a new generation of public housing authority managers not just waiting for new money from Washington but willing to experiment—replacing apartments with housing vouchers, attaching work requirements or time limits to those vouchers, replacing poorhouse public housing with privately-owned and managed mixed-income apartment complexes, even selling land for non-housing purposes and using the proceeds to further their housing mission.

In Atlanta, during Ms. Glover's tenure, the employment rate among public housing tenants, as low as 13 percent of in some projects, has risen above 60. And her success in implementation is influencing policy. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, New York's own Shaun Donovan, has signaled his desire to give dozens of America's thousands of public housing authorities the same flexibility to experiment in the ways Atlanta has. He can do so credibly because of the courage—and success—of Renee Lewis Glover, chief executive officer of the Atlanta Housing Authority and our 2009 Urban Innovator, Renee Lewis Glover.

Glover Named “Urban Innovator”

(New York, NY, December 8, 2009) This morning Renee Lewis Glover, president and CEO of the Atlanta Housing Authority, was honored with the 2009 Urban Innovator Award from the Manhattan Institute Center for Civic Innovation in New York City.

The award recognizes Glover's work of the past 15 years as an urban policy thought leader who changed the face of urban policies and failed public housing in Atlanta.


Research found that under Glover's guidance the living conditions of thousands of people have improved, crime has dropped dramatically, the educational prospects of children have been enhanced greatly, and employment among Atlantans who receive rental assistance has increased.

"There is a big difference between being broke and being institutionalized into a culture of poverty," Glover said. "Because of failed public policy, public housing in Atlanta and in many other cities had become a system that institutionalizes persons who are temporarily down on their luck into a culture of poverty. The old public housing program suffered from two fatal flaws—a failed social design of concentrated poverty and very low expectations and standards and no requirements for personal responsibility."

Glover made it a mission to remove fatally flawed policies and replace them with policies empowering residents to live fuller and more productive lives.

"The Atlanta Model" has been successfully adopted in many cities across the nation, including Chicago, Baltimore, Seattle, Denver, and others.

Atlanta has long been the nation's pioneer in publicly assisted housing. The city pioneered public housing projects during the 1930s, and by 1994 had a greater percentage of its citizens living in public housing than any other major American city. Now, under Glover, Atlanta will be the first city to eliminate all of its large public housing projects. In early 2010 the last of the Atlanta's large family public housing projects will be razed and the property will be redeveloped into mixed-use/mixed-income developments created with public and private funding.

"When AHA adopted a work requirement in 2004, only 16 percent of those who lived in AHA-owned developments were working," Glover said. "Today that number exceeds 60 percent."

Glover's innovative strides have not gone unnoticed by those who are dedicated to the improvement of urban life in the United States.


"Renee Glover stands as a courageous role model for public housing reformers across the country," says Howard Husock, vice president for policy research at the Manhattan Institute. "She understood that government just should not be in the business of operating dilapidated, high-crime housing projects and she put a stop to it."

The Urban Innovator award has been awarded annually since 2000. Previous winners include Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, Miami Mayor Manuel Diaz and New Orleans school superintendent Paul Vallas.

Contact: Rick White
Rick.White@alisias.com
404-577-8900 x221
404-210-9029 – mobile


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