Atlanta Housing

Atlanta Housing Authority Releases Audited Financial Statements for FY11

2012-01-21T04:39:00.000-08:00

The Atlanta Housing Authority (AHA) released its Audited Financial Statement for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2011 (click here to see WSB-TV report).

The audited financial statements indicate that AHA has continued to strengthen its financial position and is well-prepared to face the potential headwinds resulting from Federal budget deficits or the Congressional Appropriations process.

AHA has continued to operate as an innovator and problem solver. It has remained a nimble, efficient, and effective real estate enterprise serving low-income families. Through its various programs, AHA serves more than 20,000 very low-income families in metropolitan Atlanta.

Audited Financial Statement:

Highlight: The FY 2011 audit represents AHA’s 14th consecutive unqualified opinion on the annual audit report.

Highlight: As the result of innovative strategies and effective management and stewardship, AHA continues to maintain significant restricted cash reserves. In spite of the recent economic downturn, AHA retains approximately $100 million in cash balances. These cash balances are restricted and may only be used for affordable housing purposes consistent with AHA’s HUD-approved business plans.

• FY 11 $99,821,333
• FY 10 $99,409,155

AHA’s FY11 expenditures were $283.1 million.

Highlight: Since 1995, AHA and its private-sector development partners have leveraged well over $300 million in HOPE VI and other public housing development funds, producing more than $3 billion in new financial investments and economic impact in once-distressed and economically disinvested neighborhoods throughout the City of Atlanta.

Highlight: During FY 2011, AHA invested $21.2 million in renovations / improvements at the 13 AHA owned communities.

Highlight: During FY 2011, AHA invested $5.1 million on Human Development & Resident Services.
Background

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) requires that each local housing authority publish, within nine months of the close of its fiscal year, a complete set of financial statements prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), consistently applied, and audited by a firm of independent certified public accountants. The AHA audit report was presented to and approved by the AHA Board of Commissioners on January 5, 2012.

Metcalf Davis, engaged by AHA to audit its FY 2011 financial statements, issued an unqualified opinion on the financial statements of the Authority for the fiscal years ended June 30, 2011 and 2010, indicating that the Authority’s financial statements present fairly the financial position of the Authority in conformity with GAAP.

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Bipartisan Policy Center Appoints Commission Members for New Effort to Improve U.S. Housing Policy

2011-12-13T09:26:00.000-08:00

BPC Housing Commission, led by Secretaries Cisneros and Martinez and Senators Bond and Mitchell, also Announces Schedule for 2012 Regional Forums

Dec. 13, 2011

Washington, D.C. - The Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) today announced the full membership of its Housing Commission, which includes 17 business and civic leaders, key housing stakeholders, academics and former senior political figures from both parties. Former U.S. Secretaries of Housing and Urban Development Henry Cisneros and Mel Martinez, also a former U.S. Senator, former U.S. Senator Kit Bond and former U.S. Senate Majority Leader and BPC Founder George Mitchell were named to lead the Commission in October.

“We are honored that our fellow Commission members have committed to join us in developing recommendations to address the nation’s troubled housing sector,” said Commission Co-Chair George Mitchell. “Housing is a highly-complex issue and a critical component of our economy. It will take a truly bipartisan group to look at the challenges ahead and develop solutions.”

Over the course of the next year, the Commission will craft a package of realistic and actionable policy recommendations that will address the future housing needs of an increasingly diverse American society. The final recommendations will be released in 2013.

Recognizing the need for a new vision for federal housing policy, the Commission aims to bring new approaches and fresh thinking to today’s housing issues. The Commission will assess the appropriate role of the federal government in housing by reviewing the effectiveness of the full range of current federal housing supports. The Commission will meet for the first time later this week.

“As the U.S. population continues to grow and change, we face new challenges for which we need a thoughtful, well-reasoned plan that addresses the short-term problems and long-term consequences of our current policies,” said former Secretary Martinez.
“This group of commissioners is positioned to do just that.”

“The Commission and its members will strive to create a beacon of hope for those citizens that have seen their American Dreams come crashing down in the recent economic collapse,” said Secretary Cisneros. “Through robust, evidenced-based analysis and in-depth deliberations, the Commission will work to develop recommendations that can be considered by members of both parties.”

“These leaders have been on the front lines of the housing crisis. Consensus across this spectrum of stakeholders is critical to the bold, comprehensive reform needed to fix our broken system,” said Senator Bond.

The Commission will actively seek input and ideas from the public and thought leaders by hosting regional forums across the country in 2012. The first forum will be in San Antonio, TX on March 6, 2012; followed by Orlando, FL on April 17, 2012; St. Louis, MO on June 5, 2012; and Bangor, ME on July 25, 2012.

Members of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Housing Commission:

Co-Chairs:

• Former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Henry Cisneros
• Former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and former U.S. Senator Mel Martinez
• Former U.S. Senator Kit Bond
• Former U.S. Senate Majority Leader and BPC Founder George Mitchell

Commissioners:

• Carin M. Barth, Co-Founder and President, LB Capital, Inc.
• Ed Brady, President, Brady Homes
• Alfred DelliBovi, President and CEO, Federal Home Loan Bank of New York
• Robert M. Couch, Counsel, Bradley Arant Boult Cummings, L.L.P.
• Laurie Goodman, Senior Managing Director, Amherst Securities
• Renee Lewis Glover, President and CEO, Atlanta Housing Authority
• Frank Keating, President and CEO, American Bankers Association
• Bruce Morrison, former Congressman from Connecticut
• Janet Murguia, President and CEO, National Council of La Raza
• Nicolas P. Retsinas, Senior Lecturer of Business Administration, Harvard Business School
• Nan Roman, President and CEO, National Alliance to End Homelessness
• Ronald A. Rosenfeld, former Chairman, Federal Housing Finance Board
• Robert M. Rozen, Principal, Washington Council Ernst & Young
• Richard A. Smith, President and CEO, Realogy Corporation
• Marilyn Jordan Taylor, Dean of School of Design, University of Pennsylvania
• J. Ronald Terwilliger, Chairman Emeritus, Trammell Crow Residential
• Barry Zigas, Director of Housing Policy, Consumer Federation of America

Director:

In announcing the formation of the Commission in October, Secretaries Cisneros and Martinez, and Senators Bond and Mitchell participated in discussion on the current state of housing in the U.S. at BPC’s headquarters. Click here to watch the video. For more information about the Commission, please visit their website.

Former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros lavishes praise on AHA’s Renee Glover

2011-10-18T06:25:00.000-07:00

Posted in Latest Reports
Date: October 16th, 2011, 11:16 pm

By Maria Saporta

In 1994, the Atlanta Housing Authority was one of the worst in the country.

“It was basically managing substandard housing units in a substandard way,” recalled Henry Cisneros, who was secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development at the time. “It was one of those authorities that HUD was considering taking over under my watch.”
That’s when Renee Lewis Glover, who had been serving on the AHA board, agreed to quit her job as a corporate attorney to become CEO of the troubled authority.

“Renee brought excellence,” said Cisneros, who was in Atlanta on Oct. 7 to participate in a national conference. “She did what I would assert is the best job running a housing authority in the country.

“None started from as low a base as Atlanta did. And at the end of the day, Atlanta has gotten rid of every single one of its traditional deteriorating public housing units. Renee had a vision that it was not good enough to manage the units as they were. She developed a plan to transform communities and to make sure life got better for people.”

Glover announced in an Oct. 3 press release that she was in negotiations to leave AHA after 17 years as its CEO. The release went on to say that Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed and the new board members that he had appointed had made it clear that they wanted a change in leadership. The negotiations are ongoing.

Cisneros said he could not speak to the “local political decision-making” that was taking place in Atlanta.

But he did say that sometimes local communities do not appreciate what they have.

“It’s tempting for local citizens to overlook true greatness in their midst and take it for granted,” Cisneros said. “The work that Renee has done is true greatness.”

What about all of the criticisms that have been leveled against Glover and the AHA for tearing down traditional public housing communities and replacing them with mixed-income neighborhoods. Today, that’s known as HUD’s HOPE VI program, an initiative that took flight in Atlanta. The AHA also increased the use of Section 8 housing vouchers where residents can live in apartments with subsidized rents.

One of the most common criticisms has been that Atlanta’s poorest citizens have been displaced and that it’s harder to provide services to the poor when they have been dispersed.
Cisneros brushed off those criticisms.

“You can’t make omlettes without breaking eggs,” Cisneros said, acknowledging that “there was criticism.”

But he went on to say that most of the objective national studies on the HOPE VI program have concluded that residents were better off — that their children do better in schools, that family incomes rise and that employment becomes more stable.

Cisneros also was asked whether after 17 years with Glover at the helm, was it time for a change.
“There’s something to be said for the continuity and stability in public housing organizations, and she’s brought that,” he said. “The job is never finished, and as long as you can have people who can continue to stay on course, the progress continues.”

Cisneros said it “would be a tragedy” that pace of progress diminished with a change in leadership at the authority.

“I can only attest to what Renee has done on her watch,” Cisneros said. “Among public housing authorities in the country, Atlanta is the best.”

HOAX: IMPORTANT NOTICE REGARDING HOUSING VOUCHER HOAX

2011-08-25T13:56:00.000-07:00

A misguided rumor concerning Section 8 vouchers and the Atlanta Housing Authority (AHA) is being circulated via email. Several area social service providers appear to be the target of the email hoax.

The email directs Atlanta area service providers to, "…encourage and/or take (clients) to (AHA) and assist with the application process…."

NO VOUCHERS ARE AVAILABLE.

AHA is requesting that service provider NOT direct clients to AHA as NO VOUCHERS ARE AVAILABLE.

Attempts to reach the listed author of the email have been unsuccessful.
For future reference, any official announcement concerning housing vouchers would be made directly from AHA to service providers or would be available on AHA's web site.
If you have questions, please contact AHA's Housing Choice office at 404-892-8900.

Glover Staying in Atlanta

2011-08-02T11:48:00.000-07:00

The Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Tribune, and other news outlets have identified Renee Lewis Glover, CEO of the Atlanta Housing Authority, as one of the leading candidates to fill a vacancy in the Windy City. As rewarding and exciting as it would be to work with Mayor Emanuel and the people of Chicago, Atlanta is Glover's home and she has no desire or intention to leave.

In February the Atlanta-Journal Constitution published a story suggesting Glover was considering leaving the Atlanta Housing Authority (AHA) to become the new superintendent of the Atlanta Public School system.

Glover was neither desirous nor seeking to leave AHA earlier this year and that core fact remains true today.

Echoing her statement earlier this year, today Glover stated emphatically, "There is no basis to the assertion that I am or would be interested in leaving AHA. I have absolutely no reason or intention of leaving the important work of community building we have undertaken at AHA."

Glover is broadly lauded and recognized for her work in Atlanta. Her name has been routinely mentioned for visible positions in Washington, DC under both Democratic and Republican administrations.

Contact: Rick White (m) 404-210-9029 or (o) 404-577-8900 ext. 221

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This Week at AHA, July 25 to July 29

2011-07-29T10:51:00.000-07:00

It was a week of preparing for a series of important upcoming meetings and symposiums at the Atlanta Housing Authority.

Every other Wednesday, representatives from the housing authority meet with our partners to help shape the future of the neighborhood around the former University Homes. AHA is using the recently awarded Choice Neighborhoods Planning Grant as a springboard to breathe fresh life into this area adjacent to the Atlanta University Center. We next meet with our partners to discuss this crucial project on Wednesday, Aug. 3.

More details are here.

For years AHA has worked to create safe and healthy communities for our senior residents to live in and age in place. The upcoming NeighborWorks America symposium, “Ensuring Safe, Healthy Homes and Communities for Seniors,” which convenes in Atlanta on Aug. 10, is another chance for the authority to pass along the knowledge it has accumulated over the years. Marvin Nesbitt, AHA Vice of President, Human Development Services, will represent AHA at symposium by appearing on two panels.

Details on this symposium can be found here.

Since ARRA-funded improvements are nearly complete at the 13 AHA-owned highrises and family properties, it’s time for more improvements to increase their viability and improve the lives of our residents. AHA has an ambitious plan to conserve money and energy at these sites that could save millions of dollars in the coming years. The plan will be presented to the AHA Board of Commissioners at its August meeting.

Details on the plan can be read here.

AHA’s Catalyst Voucher Program got a mention this week in East Atlanta Patch’s article on Summit Trail. The story can be read in its entirety here.

A story about how the Olympic legacy lives on in Atlanta since the 1996 games appeared this week on Easier.com. You can read the story here. AHA has its own Olympic Legacy Program and you can read about it in detail here.

AHA President & CEO Renee Glover recently spoke at the Baton Rouge Community Development Symposium. You can view a video of her speech here. The video is about 20 minutes long. Glover’s talk begins at 5:20.

AHA’s Facebook page is a great way to follow AHA's progress in the community. You comments are welcome, so please go here to like it and stay current with all things AHA.

The Atlanta Housing Authority is the largest housing agency in Georgia and one of the largest in the nation, serving approximately 50,000 people. AHA is committed to delivering quality affordable housing and spurring community development.

Video: Renee Glover at the Baton Rouge Community Development Symposium

2011-07-29T08:33:00.000-07:00

AHA President & CEO Renee Glover spoke at the Baton Rouge Community Development Symposium in May.

You can watch her speech here.

The theme of her talk was "Facing the Third Wave of America's Civil Rights Movement."

This video is approximately 20 minutes long.

AHA to participate in upcoming symposium on seniors

2011-07-28T13:44:00.000-07:00

AHA has made it a point for years to create safe and healthy communities for our senior residents to live in and age in place.

The upcoming NeighborWorks America symposium, “Ensuring Safe, Healthy Homes and Communities for Seniors,” will be another chance for the authority to pass along the knowledge it has accumulated over the years on this crucial subject.

Marvin Nesbitt, AHA Vice of President, Human Development Services, will represent AHA at the Aug. 10 symposium by appearing on two panels:

* It Takes a Region: The Atlanta Model. This panel brings together representatives from area non-profits, service providers, and real estate developers to discuss how Atlanta became a leading light for serving seniors in need.

* Practical Issues for Engaging Seniors in Our Communities. This panel gathers subject matter experts to discuss how to keep seniors active and productive.

“I will talk about the reasons why we made the decision to go in direction we have regarding senior housing, developing new residence service strategies, and how to get the resources they need with examples such as Connected Living and referral processes and services like fitness programs,” Nesbitt says.

Connected Living provides seniors living in AHA’s highrises to learn computer and Internet skills so that they can reach out beyond the properties to their friends and families. There are more details here.

Nesbitt will also talk about the lifelong communities initiative, the Atlanta Regional Commission’s strategy for creating residences where seniors with disabilities will age in place, and AHA’s involvement with it. There are more details here.

The NeighborWorks American symposium is a followup to the recent “Summit on Aging in Place in Public Housing” that was held in Atlanta last March. Nesbitt also participated in that summit. He spoke about the upgrades to AHA’s 13 senior and family properties and how to build partnerships with service providers.

“Other agencies were very interested in what we are doing. They asked lots of questions, about the partnerships we’ve developed, the process we use for doing resident assessments, what made us decide to use ARRA funding to do this, and how we came up with a design for our community spaces in our highrises,” Nesbitt says.

Do other housing authorities do the kind of extensive aging-in-place work that AHA does?

“Everybody does partnerships, but I don’t know if there are any as extensive as ours though,” Nesbitt says. “No one is really going in the direction we’re going in, with the exception of the New York City Public Housing Authority.”

Shaping the future near Atlanta University Center

2011-07-28T09:46:00.000-07:00

Every other Wednesday, AHA meets with its partners to shape the future of the neighborhood around the former University Homes.

It’s a big job. Along with The Integral Group and Urban Collage, AHA will use the recently awarded Choice Neighborhoods Planning Grant as the springboard to breathe fresh life into this area adjacent to the Atlanta University Center.

The groups next meet on Wednesday, Aug. 3.

AHA anticipates a 12-month planning timetable that includes planning meetings with the Promise Executive team, neighborhood asset mapping, resident and community involvement workshops, and housing metric assessments.

Along with the Morehouse School of Medicine, which was awarded $500,000 through the Promise Neighborhoods Planning Grant from the Department of Education in September 2010, the plan is to improve educational and development outcomes for children and youth by building holistic, community-centered continuum serving children and families.

The ultimate vision for the community is still being developed, according to James Talley, AHA Senior Project Manager. However, components include high-performing schools from birth to college, a modernized infrastructure, improved public safety, vibrant and active park spaces, high-quality retail and commercial services, well thought-out transit-oriented development, access to quality healthcare options, mixed income, and high quality/high performing sustainable housing options.

Ultimately, Talley says, the goal is making the neighborhoods within the Choice Neighborhoods boundary places that people from any socioeconomic background would proudly choose to live.

AHA's immediate goals are making sure everyone is on the same page with respect to data gathering and sharing, Talley says, adding that cross-pollination between the working groups is not only essential but required.
“We also want to determine what model communities we want to invest time in investigating,” Talley says.

Is there a specific neighborhood model that the group likes?

“The neighborhood/community that immediately surrounds the University of Pennsylvania is a very strong candidate,” Talley says.

The site of the former University Homes is a mixed-use, mixed-income community from Integral, CollegeTown at West End.

Literacy Action: An AHA service provider that improves lives

2011-07-27T11:15:00.000-07:00

Of AHA’s many service providers, Literacy Action remains one of the most vital.

Literacy Action is where people who want to improve their reading and writing skills and get ahead in their lives can go for guidance. At its best it helps prepare people to take the General Educational Development. But it is also there for those who just want to hone these necessary skills.

“We work closely with them,” says Marvin Nesbitt, AHA’s Vice President of Human Development Services. “We refer many of our residents and have for some time now. It’s a basic literacy program, and they’re about to start administering our Good to Great literacy program, our intensive literacy program.”

The program is designed so that people sign up and go to it every day from 8 to 5, just like school. It’s deliberately intensive to get them from one literacy level to the next highest level. The length of time they are involved depends on each person’s goals as each person’s literacy level is different.

“It takes a while to get comfortable and to get ready for testing phase,” Nesbitt says. “We have participants who run the gamut of reading levels and interest. People have to express an interest in the program in order to become involved.”

Literacy Action Inc., which is located in downtown Atlanta, receives less than 20 percent of its funding from governmental agencies. AHA is one of them. The cost per student is about $2,000 with 27 part-time teachers that keep the program running.

At age 43, Literacy Action is the oldest and largest community-based adult literacy program in Georgia. It also provides life-skills training in the areas of computer training, health, finance, family, and civic engagement to AHA-assisted participants and serves 90 AHA-assisted participants at any given time throughout the year.

Literacy Action conducts afternoon classes at Atlanta Metropolitan College, evening classes at Atlanta Technical College, and offers a Learning Lab three times a week to assist students with homework. Volunteers assist teachers and support students.

Barney Simms, AHA’s Chief External Affairs Officer, serves on Literacy Action’s board.

The relationship between the two organizations is symbiotic. AHA recently held its fourth annual Senior Wellness & Resource Fair, which was dedicated to the well being of its senior residents during Healthy Older Americans Month. The fair was a success thanks to help from Literacy Action, one the fair’s sponsors.

For more information about Literacy Action, go to its website and learn more about this vital organization.

Energy savings in the future for AHA’s highrises and family properties

2011-07-27T07:48:00.000-07:00

Now that the ARRA-funded improvements are nearly complete at the 13 AHA-owned highrises and family properties, it’s time for more improvements to increase their viability and improve the lives of our residents.

These upgrades, which include devices that will help conserve electrical and water costs, are designed with the future and money savings in mind. They will cost about $11 million to implement, according to Tom Hoenstine, Program Manager for REM, but will save an estimated $17.9 million in costs over the next 20 years.

Here is a breakdown of some of the improvements AHA has in mind for the Juniper and Tenth, Cheshire Bridge, Peachtree Road, Cosby Spear, East Lake, Georgia Avenue, and Piedmont Road properties:

* New units that provide heating and cooling in the livings rooms of each apartment, with a transfer fan to increase airflow to the 1-bedroom apartaments;
* Energy-conserving compact fluorescent lights will be installed;
* Low-flow toilets will be installed, along with faucet aerators, which regulate the flow of water in the sinks, and low-flow showerheads.
* Bathrooms would be remodeled, with new mirrors and lighting fixtures.

The Barge Road, Hightower Manor, Marian Road, and Marietta Road properties would receive fan coil replacements and servicing in addition to the installation of compact fluorescent lights, low-flow toilets, faucet aerators, and low-flow showerheads.

The family properties, Martin Street Plaza and Westminster, would receive the energy-saving compact fluorescent lights, faucet aerators, and low-flow showerheads.

All the properties except for Martin Street would also be treated to new weatherization – increasing the amount of insulation in the building walls and caulking up gaps in the window units, where the majority of the energy loss is located.

All the major systems will also receive a tune up.

The plan for the implementation of these improvements in scheduled to be presented to the AHA Board of Commissioners at its August meeting.

AHA nears end of Discovery, Design & Planning for new Integrated ERP system

2011-07-21T12:00:00.000-07:00

AHA is on Week 15 of the Discovery, Design and Planning phase of implementing its new Integrated ERP system. There are five weeks remaining in this phase as it prepares to use Yardi Voyager as its new platform for managing property, assets, and financial performance.

Weeks 19 and 20 will be dedicated to the planning phase of the project.

The new system will help AHA streamline its efforts, said Samir Saini, AHA’s Chief Technology Officer.

Improvements include automating AHA’s business processes, introduce paperless processes, eliminate many processes that are now done manually, eliminate data-entry redundancies, create one source of the truth, and create 100% data accuracy and completeness.

It will also create automated data exchange with external partners, such as the property management companies that run AHA-owned properties. Data about those properties will, once the new system is operating, come directly from the property managers to AHA. This will reduce administrative effort and time it currently takes to transfer the data, creating “a level of transparency we’ve never had before,” Saini said.

This immediacy appeals to Suzi Reddekopp, AHA’s chief financial officer, who said the new system extends also to other communities.

“Our previous departmental silo approach made it very difficult to obtain real-time visibility of our entire portfolio of affordable housing units in mixed-income communities. We needed a much higher degree of integration of our critical business processes, along with better business intelligence tools to analyze our assets and performance,” she said “It will further professionalize our real estate business and enable AHA to better serve our assisted families.”

The new system is composed of a software suite specifically designed for affordable housing management and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development reporting.

The new Integrated ERP system will be implemented in a phased approach beginning in the current fiscal year with a payback period for the investment estimated at three to four years. The savings will be $3.5 million to $4.5 million annually into perpetuity.

This Week at AHA: July 18th to July 22nd

2011-07-21T10:48:00.000-07:00

AHA is completing Week 15 of the Discovery, Design and Planning phase of implementing its new Integrated ERP system. There are five weeks remaining in this phase as the authority prepares to implement Yardi Voyager as its new platform for managing property, assets, and financial performance.

Weeks 19 and 20 will be dedicated to the planning phase of the project.

The new system will help AHA streamline its administrative efforts, said Samir Saini, AHA’s Chief Technology Officer.

Improvements include automating AHA’s business processes, introducing paperless processes, eliminating many processes that are now done manually, eliminating data-entry redundancies, creating one source of the truth, creating 100% data accuracy and completeness, and creating automated data exchange with AHA’s external partners

The new Integrated ERP system will be implemented in a phased approach during the current fiscal year with a payback period for the investment estimated at three to four years. The savings will be $3.5 million to $4.5 million annually into perpetuity.

The announcement of AHA’s choice of Yardi Voyager as its new platform appeared on Business Wire. You can read the entire story here.

Connected Living, the company which oversees connecting AHA’s seniors living in highrises to the Internet, was featured in Mass High Tech, a publication that covers next-generation technologies in New England. AHA was mentioned in a story about Connected Living’s work with getting seniors in assisted living facilities linked with the Internet and friends and family.

“This is a huge deal for the families who feel disconnected,” said Sarah Hoit, Connected Living’s CEO.

You can read the entire story here.

An Associated Press story entitled “Aging boomers strain US cities built for the young” mentions AHA’s efforts to improve the lives of its senior residents appeared in the Delaware (OH) Gazette. The story highlight AHA’s work with the Atlanta Regional Commission’s Lifelong Communities Initiative to help seniors in Atlanta age in place.

“The Atlanta Housing Authority is working with the commission to retrofit high-rise apartments that house a lot of older residents, with the goal to improve access to the surrounding community. At one site under construction, changes include a ramp entrance, safer sidewalk to the bus stop and more time for pedestrians to cross the street,” the AP reported.

Read the entire story here.

AHA was mentioned in a recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution story about HUD funding. The Department of Housing and Urban Development gave Georgia $71.8 million to renovate and improve public housing, according to the AJC, which added that the largest recipients of the money are the Atlanta Housing Authority with $14 million, the Marietta Housing Authority with $1.2 million, the Housing Authority of Fulton County with $665,887, the Housing Authority of Decatur with $415,071, and the Newnan Housing Authority with $646,433.

You can read the entire story here.

AHA’s Facebook page is a great way to follow AHA's progress in the community. You comments are welcome, so please go here to like it and stay current with all things AHA.

The Atlanta Housing Authority is the largest housing agency in Georgia and one of the largest in the nation, serving approximately 50,000 people. AHA is committed to delivering quality affordable housing and spurring community development.

Economic Impact of AHA's Mixed Income Communities Revitalization Program

2011-06-14T12:38:00.000-07:00

AHA's demolition of obsolete housing projects and the construction of 16 new mixed-income, mixed-use communities has had a $1.67 billion economic impact on the city and has created more than 15,800 "person-years" of new jobs since demolition began about 12 years ago, according to a just-completed study by Georgia State University.

The complete report is available to read here.

This Week at AHA: June 6th to June 10th

2011-06-10T07:54:00.000-07:00

Wednesday’s groundbreaking at Atlanta’s Selena S. Butler Park was a great success and drew wide attention. Speakers included US Rep. John Lewis and AHA Vice President of Real Estate Development Trish O’Connell.

AHA played a critical role in revitalizing the park and received coverage this week in USA Today and East Atlanta Patch.

Selena Butler, according to teacherweb.com, “organized the first National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers and co-founded the National Congress of Parents and Teachers, which is now the National Parent Teacher Association. Butler also organized the Georgia Colored Congress of Parents and Teachers in 1919 and Georgia's first African American PTA in 1911 at Younge Street Elementary School in Atlanta. Selena Sloan Butler presided over the organizing meeting, which resulted in other local units being formed in the city of Atlanta, encouraging the formation of the Parent-Teacher Council of Atlanta.”

AHA President & CEO Renee Glover will speak at the Affordable Housing Investors Council’s Summer Meeting Luncheon this Tuesday, June 14. She will offer her perspective on public/private partnerships and the current regulatory environment surrounding affordable housing. The luncheon will be held at the Atlanta Marriott Marquis.

AHA continued to prepare for its Father’s Day 2011 Initiative, set for Saturday, June 18. AHA, with the Boys and Girls Clubs of Metro Atlanta. The event will be held at the Harland Boys and Girls Club of Metro Atlanta, 434 Peeples St. SW, from 11am to 3 pm. The day is designed to strengthen the bonds between fathers and their children and to make education, healthcare, and employment resources available to the fathers that may result in upward mobility for the entire family. The day will be filled with opportunities for fathers create stronger bonds with their children. There will be a service provider resource room for the fathers to connect with the services and resources that will address the issues and concerns acting as barriers to upward mobility and family success.

Renovations continued this week at the 13 AHA-owned communities receiving American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) Capital Fund Formula money. The renovations are being made at 11 high rises that house the elderly and young disabled residents; the two other communities are designated for families. Construction continued at Marian, Juniper, Peachtree, Cheshire Bridge, and Cosby. The other properties are either getting the finishing touches to the completed spaces or are now open to the residents for use. The outfitted fitness room at Marian is complete with treadmills, NuStep, and a variety of weights. At Barge, Hightower, and Marietta residents are using the new computer labs and community spaces. The new café and kitchens are popular gathering spots too. Residents are looking forward to the TV installations later this month; movie night events will definitely have a larger turnout with the new projectors, TVs and comfortable seating. Construction at the Peachtree, East Lake, Hightower, Barge highrises will be completed in June. There will be open houses for each of the properties later this summer when work is finished.

A briefing on the evaluation of the McDaniel Glenn HOPE IV Revitalization, conducted by Emory University's Office of University-Community Partnerships, is set Tuesday, June 14, from 6:30 to 8:30 pm. The evaluation, which can be reviewed here, is a look at the revitalization process and its impact on the former residents of McDaniel Glenn, local schools, and the surrounding neighborhoods. This briefing is an opportunity to review the major results of the report and entertain questions from the community about the research and will be at The Center for Working Families Inc., 477 Windsor St. SW, Suite 101, Atlanta. You may register here.

AHA’s Facebook page is open and updated frequently. Your comments are welcome, so please go here to like it and stay current with all things AHA.

The Atlanta Housing Authority is the largest housing agency in Georgia and one of the largest in the nation, serving approximately 50,000 people. AHA is committed to delivering quality affordable housing and spurring community development.

East Atlanta Patch: Selena S. Butler Park Gets $1.6 Million Renovation

2011-06-09T07:12:00.000-07:00

Read more coverage of Butler Park's renovation here.

USA Today: AHA helps breathe new life into Selena S. Butler Park

2011-06-06T08:35:00.000-07:00

When it opened in the mid-1960s, Selena S. Butler Park was a green jewel in a downtown community near the city's historic Auburn Avenue. Named for a community activist, the park is a short walk from Martin Luther King Jr.'s birth home and grave site.

Over the years, the park fell into disrepair. In 2005, the city demolished an adjacent housing project, displacing many of the park's core users.

In 2008, a tornado further devastated the park. It was closed and soon became a hangout for prostitutes and drug users.

Soon, though, Butler Park may shine again. The city plans to begin sprucing up the park in partnership with the National Recreation and Park Association, which had remarkable success with its first park revitalization in Washington, D.C.

Community involvement will be key in the restoration. Partners in the effort include the city; the Atlanta Housing Authority; Park Pride, a non-profit that works with communities to improve parks, and Friends of Butler Park.

Read the entire USA Today story here.

This Week at AHA: May 30th to June 3rd

2011-06-03T09:12:00.000-07:00

It was a busy week at Centennial Place Elementary School as graduates from its first class, 1998, prepared for broad, exciting new horizons. The school’s 13th Year Celebration held College 101 – How to Survive the Freshman Year, its fifth-grade awards ceremony, and its all-class reunion. Many of these grads will attend top-flight colleges and universities. AHA is proud of these grads and Centennial Place Elementary, which is a crucial part of Centennial Place, a mixed-income and mixed-use community in Midtown.

AHA prepared this week for its Father’s Day 2011 Initiative, set for Saturday, June 18. AHA, in partnership with the Boys and Girls Clubs of Metro Atlanta, will hold the event at the Harland Boys and Girls Club of Metro Atlanta, 434 Peeples St. SW, from 11am to 3 pm. The Fatherhood Initiative was developed by the New York City Housing Authority and adopted by HUD as a national model and shared with housing authorities. The day is designed to strengthen the bonds between fathers and their children and to make education, health care, and employment resources available to the fathers that may result in upward mobility for the entire family. AHA believes in these goals and has chosen to participate in the national Fatherhood Initiative. The day will be filled with many opportunities for the fathers in attendance to interact and create stronger bonds with their children. Additionally, there will be a service provider resource room available to the fathers in attendance. The purpose of the service provider resource room is to provide opportunities for the fathers to get connected with the services and resources that will address the issues and concerns acting as barriers to upward mobility and family success.

Renovations continued apace this week at the 13 AHA-owned communities receiving American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) Capital Fund Formula money. The renovations are being made at 11 high rises that house the elderly and young disabled residents; the two other communities are designated for families. This week many of the community spaces were revealed, allowing the residents to use the new areas for the first time. At Georgia Avenue and Piedmont Road highrises, residents enjoyed gathering in the newly furnished lobby. The open floor plans allows for seating while residents wait for transportation services. The new outdoor courtyard at Piedmont was completed with furniture, lighting, and a flowing landscape plan that connects with the new community room. After a few computer training courses East Lake’s computer lab was revealed and quickly hummed with activity. At Cosby Spear, residents began using the completed outdoor patio, which overlooks the new vehicle entrance. Construction and landscaping will continue for a few more weeks. At each of these properties residents played cards in the new community rooms, a few matches at the billiards table, or a took leisurely walk through a fresh landscaped path to the patio seating area. Construction at the Peachtree, East Lake, Hightower, Barge highrises will be completed in June. There will be open houses for each of the properties later this summer when work is finished.

There will be a briefing on the evaluation of the McDaniel Glenn HOPE IV Revitalization, conducted by Emory University's Office of University-Community Partnerships on June 14 from 6:30 to 8:30 pm. The evaluation is a look at the revitalization process and its impact on the former residents of McDaniel Glenn, local schools, and the surrounding neighborhoods. The briefing will review the major results of the report and entertain questions from the community about the research and will be at The Center for Working Families Inc., 477 Windsor St. SW, Suite 101, Atlanta. You can register here.

AHA's demolition of obsolete housing projects and the construction of 16 new mixed-income, mixed-use communities has had a $1.67 billion economic impact on the city and has created more than 15,800 "person-years" of new jobs since demolition began about 12 years ago, according to a just-completed study by Georgia State University economist Bruce Seaman. MSG picked up the story this week.

AHA’s Facebook page is open and updated frequently. Your comments are welcome, so please go here to like it and stay current with all things AHA.

The Atlanta Housing Authority is the largest housing agency in Georgia and one of the largest in the nation, serving approximately 50,000 people. AHA is committed to delivering quality affordable housing and spurring community development.

Report: Atlanta Sees $1.7 Billion in Economic Impact

2011-05-31T11:49:00.000-07:00

ATLANTA (May 30, 2011) – The Atlanta Housing Authority's (AHA) demolition of obsolete housing projects and the construction of 16 new mixed-income, mixed-use communities has had a $1.67 billion economic impact on the city and has created more than 15,800 "person-years" of new jobs since demolition began about 12 years ago , according to a just-completed study by Georgia State University economist Bruce Seaman.

Moreover, the City of Atlanta has directly benefited from $14.7 million in sales tax revenue generated by AHA's revitalization projects, Seaman reported.

Click here to receive a copy of the full report.

Seaman's study focuses on the household spending and construction impacts of the underlying economic transformation in Atlanta that has resulted from AHA's community revitalization work. AHA on Feb. 27 demolished Roosevelt House and started demolition on Palmer House, the final two housing projects slated for razing. Atlanta in the 1930s was the first city to build federally financed public housing, and in recent months it has become the first major city to eliminate all of its large family housing projects.

A number of studies have documented the impacts on families leaving projects (see here). And there is evidence that removing the projects and the blight surrounding them has reduced crime in Atlanta and spurred economic development. However, an attempt to calculate specific aspects of the aggregate economic impact across multiple revitalized communities had not been made until the Seaman study. A fuller analysis of the complex "spillover" benefits throughout the city has not yet been completed.

Among the major findings by Seaman:

*Aggregate household spending in Atlanta increased by almost $166 million over a 12-year period as a result of the redevelopments.

*The construction investment impact on the city was more than $1.5 billion.
The combined household spending and construction investment impact was close to $1.7 billion.

*The wage and salary earnings of families attracted to the mixed-income communities, as well as the incomes generated during the construction of the new communities, was almost $774 million.

*Household relocation into Atlanta because of the revitalized communities plus construction employment created 15,840 "person-years" of jobs over a 12-year period, or an average of 1,320 "person-years" of jobs held for each of 12 years.

Seaman is a recognized expert in this field, having published widely cited and reprinted papers and book chapters on the methodology of economic and fiscal impact studies. He has conducted studies on a variety of topics, including the Georgia Aquarium, the New World of Coca-Cola Museum, the Atlanta Beltline Project, the Georgia World Congress Center, runway expansions of Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, terminal expansions linked to the Port of Savannah, Lake Lanier, the National Endowment for the Arts, and has developed widely used models on behalf of the Georgia Department of Economic Development and the Georgia Council for the Arts. He is currently working on a project for the Atlanta Braves.

This Week at AHA: May 21st to May 27th

2011-05-27T13:05:00.000-07:00

There will be a briefing on the evaluation of the McDaniel Glenn HOPE IV Revitalization, conducted by Emory University's Office of University-Community Partnerships on June 14 from 6:30 to 8:30 pm. The evaluation is a look at the revitalization process and its impact on the former residents of McDaniel Glenn, local schools, and the surrounding neighborhoods. The briefing will review the major results of the report and entertain questions from the community about the research and will be at The Center for Working Families Inc., 477 Windsor St. SW, Suite 101, Atlanta. You can register here and read the entire evaluation here.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Veterans Affairs Supported Housing Program (VASH) hosted a Landlord Fair on Friday, May 20, at the DeKalb County Maloof Auditorium with more than 50 representatives and owners of private real estate development and prooperties in the City of Atlanta, Fulton and DeKalb counties. The meeting was designed to assist veterans with Housing Choice rental vouchers identify available properties and speak directly with property owners, management and key staff from Public Housing Authorities. HUD and VASH has joined to form a partnership betweeen federal, state and local housing agencies to address the needs of the most vulnerable homeless veterans. The event included a robust opening session that included speakers such as DeKalb County CEO Burrell Ellis, Congressman Hank Johnson, and HUD SE Regional Administrator Ed Jennings Jr. Other representatives and staff were also on hand from the Atlanta Housing Authority, VA Medical Center, Georgia Department of Community Affairs, DeKalb Housing Authority and HUD Office of Fair Housing. Ajiah Brown represented the Atlanta Housing Authority and there were several AHA landlords present at the event as well.

AHA was featured in Parks & Recreation magazine’s story about rebuilding Atlanta's Selena Butler Park. “Our philosophy in developing mixed-use, mixed-income housing is, we must be able to attract market-driven residents,” says Trish O’Connell, AHA vice president of real estate development. “People who have lots of choices about where to live…. And the No. 1 amenity that people look for when they have choices is a park.” Read the entire article here.

AHA continued its celebration of Older Americans Month with more recognition of its oldest residents at each of its senior highrises. There was a party Friday for the oldest resident, age 95, in our Peachtree Road highrise. There will be parties Tuesday for the oldest residents, ages 94 and 97, in our Cheshire Bridge and Hightower Manor highrises.

Older Americans Month festivities continued on Saturday, May 21, as AHA hosted a farmer’s market for its senior residents, who came to the housing authority building on John Wesley Dobbs Avenue Northeast for a day of fresh fruit, vegetables, and friendship.

Renovations continued this week at the 13 AHA-owned communities receiving American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) Capital Fund Formula money. The renovations are being made at 11 high rises that house the elderly and young disabled residents; the two other communities are designated for families. Peachtree Highrise is putting the finishing touches on the new accessible patio. The landscaped area will offer outdoor lighting and seating. Construction at the Peachtree, East Lake, Hightower, Barge highrises will be completed in June. There will be open houses for each of the properties later this summer when work is finished.

AHA’s Facebook page is open and updated frequently. Your comments are welcome, so please go here to like it and stay current with all things AHA.

The Atlanta Housing Authority is the largest housing agency in Georgia and one of the largest in the nation, serving approximately 50,000 people. AHA is committed to delivering quality affordable housing and spurring community development.

Atlanta's Selena Butler Park represents the hope of a community in transition

2011-05-27T11:27:00.000-07:00

“Our philosophy in developing mixed-use, mixed-income housing is, we must be able to attract market-driven residents,” says Trish O’Connell, AHA vice president of real estate development. “People who have lots of choices about where to live…. And the No. 1 amenity that people look for when they have choices is a park.”

Read the entire story here.

Public Briefing of the Evaluation of McDaniel Glenn HOPE VI Revitalization Project

2011-05-27T07:01:00.000-07:00

You are invited to a briefing on the evaluation of the McDaniel Glenn HOPE IV Revitalization, conducted by Emory University's Office of University-Community Partnerships. The evaluation discusses the revitalization process and its impact on the former residents of McDaniel Glenn, local schools, and the surrounding neighborhoods. The briefing will review the major results of the report and entertain questions from the community about the research.

More details are here.

This Week at AHA: May 14th to May 20th

2011-05-20T11:37:00.000-07:00

As fresh census figures show, there’s a migration of black families leaving the city of Atlanta for the suburbs. WXIA-TV’s story this week on the population shift shed light on the myth that as public housing projects were demolished the residents moved to Cobb, Clayton and Gwinnett counties.

It’s just not so, says Georgia State University sociology professor Deirdre Oakley: “Eighty to 85 percent of the people in our study moved within the city limits. And typically they moved within three miles. That's the average moving distance from their public housing homes. So we didn't find very many at all that moved outside the city of Atlanta.”

The entire story, "ATL black population shift not from razed projects," is here.

The first volume of AHA’s updated landlord guidelines was released this week. The Housing Choice Voucher Program Landlord Guidelines is a comprehensive set of program guidelines for current and prospective property owners and landlords participating in AHA’s Housing Choice Voucher Program. The HCVP (formerly Section 8) provides rental assistance to low-income families to lease apartments or single family homes in the private rental market. AHA works with families, property owners / landlords and investors throughout the City of Atlanta to provide choice-based, quality affordable housing. The guidelines are designed to provide up-to-date information to further landlord success in the HCVP. As AHA continues to simplify and enhance the HCVP, we will update this brochure accordingly.

To read the guidelines, go here.

AHA President & CEO Renee Glover was on the road again this week with a speaking engagement. Last week she visited nearby Clayton County to speak at its regional housing summit and she also flew to Baton Rouge, LA, to speak at its community development symposium. This week Glover was in Phoenix for the Urban Land Institute’s Real Estate Summit at the Spring Council Forum. She highlighted AHA’s guiding principles, which include deconcentrating poverty and working closely with private-sector partners in addition to outlining AHA’s legal, regulatory and financial model.

AHA was recently featured in the Urban Land Institute’s magazine Urban Land. The article is entitled "From Public Housing to Private Enterprise” and it centers on the Authority’s drive to eliminate the old model of warehousing the poor to the new concept of creating market-rate, high-quality housing with a seamless affordable component. Read the article in its entirety here.

AHA continued its celebration of Older Americans Month with more recognition of the oldest residents at each of its senior highrises. There was a party Tuesday for the oldest resident, age 95, in our Piedmont Road highrise. The celebrations continue next week for the oldest residents in AHA’s Hightower Manor and Juniper & 10th highrises.

Older Americans Month festivities continue on Saturday, May 21, as AHA hosts a farmer’s market for its senior residents. Find the details here.

Renovations continued this week at the 13 AHA-owned communities receiving American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) Capital Fund Formula money. The renovations are being made at 11 high-rises that house the elderly and young disabled residents; the two other communities are designated for families. Construction at the Peachtree, East Lake, Hightower, Barge highrises will be completed in June. The new vehicle entrance at Cosby Spear is significantly changing the exterior portion of the property. This week the majority of asphalt, sidewalk, and landscaping was installed to complement Cosby’s ARRA facelift. There will be open houses for each of the properties later this summer when work is finished.

Stepp Stewart, the fitness guru who lives in Atlanta and conducts workouts for residents in our senior highrises, burned it up on Good Morning America this week. You can watch his appearance here.

AHA’s Facebook page is open and updated frequently. Your comments are welcome, so please go here to like it and stay current with all things AHA.

The Atlanta Housing Authority is the largest housing agency in Georgia and one of the largest in the nation, serving approximately 50,000 people. AHA is committed to delivering quality affordable housing and spurring community development.

New Housing Choice landlord guidelines are now available

2011-05-19T10:43:00.000-07:00

New Housing Choice landlord guidelines are available here.

myATLtv.com: "ATL black population shift not from razed projects"

2011-05-19T08:01:00.000-07:00

"During the last decade, the city's urban landscape underwent a profound metamorphosis, as the public housing projects were demolished one-by-one. In many cases, new upscale developments replaced what were basically dangerous crime factories," says myATLtv.com. "The conventional wisdom was that they left the city and went to suburban communities like Clayton, Cobb, and Gwinnett counties, all of which saw large population spikes among African-American residents. But researchers say that's a myth, quite literally an urban legend. Because most of the former public housing tenants stayed in Atlanta."

"'80 to 85 percent of the people in our study moved within the city limits,' said Georgia State University sociology professor Deirdre Oakley."

The entire story is here.

This Week at AHA: May 7th to May 13th

2011-05-13T12:42:00.000-07:00

AHA President and CEO Renee Glover extolled the value that public and private partnerships bring to revitalizing neighborhoods this week.

“What we’re talking about is creating great communities,” she said Tuesday as keynote speaker at the Baton Rouge Community Development Symposium in Louisiana. “And we all know what great communities look like.”

One of the keys to creating this transformation, she said, is to “end the concentration of poverty in public housing. If you concentrate the poverty, all the predators of the world are going to come and set up shop.” The symposium was organized by the Urban Restoration Enhancement Corp., a not-for-profit community development group with an emphasis on affordable housing,
small-business training, and youth development.

Her speech received coverage here from The Advocate of Baton Rouge.

Glover also carried the same message of breaking the cycle of poverty to the Clayton County Regional Housing Summit in Georgia on Thursday, May 12. The summit gathered problem solvers and concerned citizens who discussed strategies for addressing housing needs like foreclosures, senior housing, veterans housing, faith-based initiatives, and workforce housing. Other speakers that day included US Sen. Johnny Isakson, HUD Deputy Secretary Ron Sims, White House Advisor Michael Blake, and HUD Region IV Administrator Ed Jennings.

As part of its celebration of Older Americans Month, AHA continued its recognition of the oldest resident at each of its senior highrises. There was a party Monday for the two oldest Cosby Spear residents, each age 90. Also on Monday there was a party for the oldest resident at the Georgia Avenue highrise. That resident, age 99, is the oldest in any AHA highrise. A party was held Thursday for the two oldest residents at the Barge Road highrise. Each is age 90. The celebrations continue next week for AHA’s seniors.

Older Americans Month festivities continue on Saturday, May 21, as AHA hosts a farmer’s market for its senior residents. Details are here.

Renovations continued this week at the 13 AHA-owned communities receiving American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) Capital Fund Formula money. At the Peachtree Road highrise, the newly renovated management offices, fitness and wellness rooms, and concierge desk opened this week. At Barge Road, the newly renovated elevator lobby and concierge desk opened as well. Installation also continued this week on new computer stations for residents in the Cosby Spear highrise. The renovations are being made at 11 high-rises that house the elderly and young disabled residents; the two other communities are designated for families. There will be open houses for each of the properties later this summer when work is completed.

AHA’s Facebook page is open and updated frequently. Your comments are welcome, so please go here to like it and stay current with all things AHA.

The Atlanta Housing Authority is the largest housing agency in Georgia and one of the largest in the nation, serving approximately 50,000 people. AHA is committed to delivering quality affordable housing and spurring community development.

Farmer's market for AHA's senior residents

2011-05-12T11:47:00.000-07:00

AHA is hosting a farmer's market for its senior residents on Saturday, May 21.

Details are here.

AHA President & CEO Renee Glover spoke to the Baton Rouge Community Development Symposium on Tuesday.

2011-05-12T10:32:00.000-07:00

President & CEO Renee Glover was the keynote speaker at the Baton Rouge Community Development Symposium on Tuesday, May 10. She spoke about the value that public and private partnerships bring to revitalizing neighborhoods.

Read the story here.

AHA President & CEO Renee Glover has two speaking engagements this week.

2011-05-10T06:54:00.000-07:00

President and CEO Renee Glover is the keynote speaker at the Baton Rouge Community Development Symposium today, May 10. She will speak about the value public and private partnerships bring to revitalizing neighborhoods. Full details are here.

She speaks to the Clayton County Regional Housing Summit on Thursday, May 12. The summit gathers problem solvers and concerned citizens to discuss strategies for addressing housing needs like foreclosures, senior housing, veterans housing, faith-based initiatives, and workforce housing. Other speakers include US Sen. Johnny Isakson, HUD Deputy Secretary Ron Sims, White House Advisor Michael Blake, and HUD Region IV Administrator Ed Jennings. More information is here.

This Week at AHA: April 30th to May 6th

2011-05-06T11:58:00.000-07:00

This week AHA held its fourth annual Senior Wellness & Resource Fair, which was dedicated to the well being of its senior residents during Healthy Older Americans Month. The fair was a success thanks to help from Quality Living Services, health services providers, resource vendors, and Atlanta City Council members. Seniors participated in a variety of activities, including service provider information booths, healthy cooking demonstrations, blood pressure and glucose screenings, line dancing and exercise instruction, and a raffle prize. Sponsors for this year’s fair included AARP, Grady Health System, Kaiser Permanente, Literacy Action, the Atlanta Food Bank, and the Foster Grandparents Program.

Continuing its celebration of Older Americans Month, AHA began its recognition of the oldest resident at each of its senior highrises. The first was a party and cake for Thelma Hall, age 94, on Wednesday at the Marietta Road highrise. There will be another party Monday for the oldest Cosby Spear resident, two more on Tuesday for the oldest resident each at Georgia Avenue and Marian Road, and two more on Thursday for the two oldest residents at East Lake and Peachtree Road.

Renovations continued this week at the 13 AHA-owned communities receiving American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) Capital Fund Formula money. The renovations are being made at 11 high-rises that house our elderly and young disabled residents; the two other communities are designated for families. Installation continued this week on new computer stations for residents in the Cosby Spear highrise and will continue into next week. Signage is expected to be completed before near the end of May for Georgia Avenue, Piedmont Road, Cosby Spear, East Lake, Hightower, Barge Road Marietta Road, Marian Road, and Juniper & 10th. There will be open houses for each of the properties later this summer when work is completed.

AHA President & CEO Renee Glover is the keynote speaker at the Baton Rouge Community Development Symposium on Tuesday, May 10. She will speak about the value that public and private partnerships bring to revitalizing neighborhoods. Full details are here and here.

The 5-part serialization of Hope, an in-depth look at the past 15 years of progress by the Atlanta Housing Authority, concluded this week with the final installment, which can be read here. The chapter is entitled "What the Future Holds." The entire 15-year report can be found here.

After 10 years, the Lead Hazard Management Program, developed and implemented by AHA’s Real Estate Management (REM) department, is coming to a successful completion. At the inception of the program in 2000, AHA owned 17 multi-family communities constructed prior to 1978 when the federal government banned the use of lead-based paint. These communities had been previously tested for the presence of lead-based paint, but a comprehensive management program had not been instituted for these “targeted” properties.

REM began reviewing applicable federal, state and local regulations pertaining to lead-based paint in public housing, evaluating existing AHA testing data, and researching past renovation projects that included partial abatement of lead-based paint. Once the initial research had been completed, REM developed a strategic plan and contracted various environmental consulting firms to help implement a comprehensive Lead Hazard Management Program for AHA.

During the past 10 years, AHA / REM have completed the following tasks required by regulations:

• Re-evaluation testing of potential lead hazards every 2 years
• Interim control or partial abatement of any occurrence of lead hazards
• Yearly training for property maintenance staff on lead-safe work practices
• Training for property management staff to review requirements for managing lead hazards and to review AHA’s Lead Hazard Management Program
• Issuing EPA pamphlets and property specific lead-based paint disclosure notification forms to residents during leasing and renewal

This program has played a significant role in AHA’s Quality of Life Initiative to provide safe, decent and sanitary living environments.

AHA has a Facebook page. Go here to like it and stay current with all things AHA.

The Atlanta Housing Authority is the largest housing agency in Georgia and one of the largest in the nation, serving approximately 50,000 people. AHA is committed to delivering quality affordable housing and spurring community development.

AHA has a Facebook page

2011-05-06T11:15:00.000-07:00

Go here to like it and stay current with all things AHA.

Glover to speak in Baton Rouge

2011-05-06T10:11:00.000-07:00

President and CEO Renee Glover is the keynote speaker at the Baton Rouge Community Development Symposium on Tuesday, May 10. She will speak about the value that public and private partnerships bring to revitalizing neighborhoods.

Full details are here.

What The Future Holds

2011-05-02T06:06:00.000-07:00

Creating Better, Healthier Cities

This article is extracted from the Atlanta Housing Authority's 15-Year Progress Report. The complete report can be found here. "What The Future Holds" is the final installment of a 5-part series.
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In 1996, Renee 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 master-planned 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 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.

So, Glover's work is done, right? Well, no. "In many ways, we are at the mid-point," AHA's CEO says.

The AHA CEO 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 revitalization work at the recently demolished public housing sites; and (2) pushing

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 in 2004, blacks 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 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 overtime became populated predominantly by African-Americans."

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 self-improvement.'"

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 employment and educational success among families who had left Atlanta's housing projects, as well has 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 urban-oriented 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, mixed-income communities we've sponsored to mature. At Centennial Place, for example, we've been successful in 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 mixed-income 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 re-invent 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 at least three years of professional family-centered coaching to families leaving public housing.

"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 them of their humanity, 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 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."

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This Week at AHA: April 23rd to April 29th

2011-04-29T12:47:00.000-07:00

The 5-part serialization of Hope, an in-depth look at the past 15 years of progress by the Atlanta Housing Authority, continued this week with Part Four, which can be read here. The installment is entitled "What We Learned." The entire 15-year report can be found here. Toledo’s Glass City Jungle picked up the installment and posted it here.

AHA prepared this week for our upcoming fourth annual Senior Wellness & Resource Fair, which will be held this Thursday, May 5. The fair is dedicated to the health and well being of AHA’s senior residents in recognition of Healthy Older Americans Month. The program includes words of appreciation from AHA, Quality Living Services, health services providers, resource vendors, and Atlanta City Council members. Throughout the day, seniors can participate in a variety of activities, including service provider information booths, healthy cooking demonstrations, blood pressure and glucose screenings, line dancing and exercise instruction, and raffle prize drawings. Vendors for the 2011 Senior Resource & Wellness Fair include AARP, Grady Health System, Kaiser Permanente, Literacy Action, Atlanta Food Bank, and the Foster Grandparents Program.

Latest issue of A-HA!, the newsletter for AHA’s families, came out this week. You can read it here.

Renovations continued this week at the 13 AHA-owned communities receiving American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) Capital Fund Formula money. The renovations are being made at 11 high-rises that house the elderly and young disabled residents; the two other communities are designated for families. Installation continued this week on new computer stations for residents in the Cosby Spear highrise. The installations continue into next week. There will be open houses for each of the properties later this summer when work is completed.

AHA now has a Facebook page. Go here to like it and stay current with all things AHA.

The Atlanta Housing Authority is the largest housing agency in Georgia and one of the largest in the nation, serving approximately 50,000 people. AHA is committed to delivering quality affordable housing and spurring community development.

Read the spring issue of A-HA!

2011-04-29T09:45:00.000-07:00

The spring issue of A-HA!, the newsletter for AHA's families, just came out and can be read here.

What Powered Our Mission:

2011-04-25T10:00:00.000-07:00

We Realized We Could Save the Children

Editor's note: This article is extracted from the Atlanta Housing Authority's 15-Year Progress Report. The complete report can be found here. "What Powered Our Mission" is the fourth installment of a five-part series. Follow AHA on Facebook.
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Soon after Renee 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, that 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 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."

Dr. Norman Johnson, a former professor at Georgia Tech, Carnegie Mellon and Florida A&M, and a former Atlanta Board of Education president, says: "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."

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.

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 Renee Glover, AHA's president and 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 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. Johnson. "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 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. "That 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. 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.

Next in the series: "What the future holds…"

This Week at AHA: April 16th to April 22nd

2011-04-22T13:25:00.000-07:00

AHA's MTW Annual Implementation Plan for the fiscal year beginning July 1, 2011, is now available. Go here to read the report in its entirety.

The 5-part serialization of Hope, an in-depth look at the past 15 years of progress by the Atlanta Housing Authority, continued this week with Part Three, which can be read here. The installment is entitled What We Learned. The entire 15-year report can be found here.

Construction continued this week at the 13 AHA-owned communities receiving renovations courtesy of HUD's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) Capital Fund Formula grant. The renovations are being made at 11 high-rises that house the elderly and young disabled residents; the two other communities are designated for families. Installation began this week on new computer stations for residents in the Cosby Spear highrise’s building B. Installation begins in Building A next week. New furniture for the public areas began to be delivered to building B this week. All the new furniture for public areas in building A has been delivered. There will be open houses for each of the properties later this summer when work is completed.

AHA development partner Egbert Perry, chairman & CEO of The Integral Group, spoke recently at the recent CEOs for Cities gathering that brought 65 area business and civic leaders together to discuss how create a vibrant future. In a panel discussion, Perry spoke about regional competitiveness and the potential of high speed rail. SaportaReport covered the gathering here.

AHA now has a Facebook page. Go here to like it and stay current with all things AHA.

The Atlanta Housing Authority is the largest housing agency in Georgia and one of the largest in the nation, serving approximately 50,000 people. AHA is committed to delivering quality affordable housing and spurring community development.

What We Learned

2011-04-19T11:31:00.000-07:00

This article is extracted from the Atlanta Housing Authority's 15-Year Progress Report. The complete report can be found here. "What We Learned" is the third installment of a 5-part series.
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Scattered across Atlanta, 16 healthy mixed-use, mixed-income neighborhoods are bustling with successful residents, high-performing or substantially improving 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.

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 self-sufficiency 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, and chaos, 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, personal accountability and responsibility, 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 Renee Lewis Glover, AHA president and CEO. "As families using a housing voucher find a new and approved, amenity-rich living environment, 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 live in the newly revitalized mixed-use communities. Many did not want to come back because the memories of the former housing project were so harsh, some people had seen their children killed on that plot of ground. A great degree of sensitivity, care and thoughtfulness is undertaken in working with families in finding a great location as they are relocating from distressed housing projects. 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 and life 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 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 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 self-empowerment for residents who had very little of either.

To achieve that goal, AHA provides from two and a half to five 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 to more engagement into mainstream life, says she is constantly amazed how much residents accomplish with just a little help. Boldon has worked at making the Youth and Family Project successful for the past 12 years. A representative from the Youth and Family Project visits each family two or three times a month for three to five 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 Renee'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 employment 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 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;

Self-sufficiency – facilitate opportunities for families and individuals to build wealth, reduce their dependency on subsidies, and ultimately become financially independent; and

Economic viability – maximize AHA's economic viability and sustainability;
AHA's vision is to promote "Healthy Mixed-Income Communities", "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 mixed-use, mixed-income (children-centered) communities using a holistic and comprehensive approach to assure long-term market competitiveness and sustainability of the community and to support excellent outcomes for families especially the children, with emphasis on excellent, high performing neighborhood schools and excellent quality of life amenities, such as first class retail and green space.

Create mixed-use, mixed-income communities with the goal of creating market rate communities with a seamlessly integrated affordable residential component.

Develop communities through public/private partnerships, leveraging private sector know-how and using public and private sources of funding and private sector real estate market principles.

Residents should be supported with adequate resources to assist them to achieve their life goals, focusing on self-sufficiency and educational advancement of the children. Expectations and standards for personal responsibility should be benchmarked for success.

Next in the series: "What Powered Our Mission."

AHA's FY 2012 MTW Annual Implementation Plan

2011-04-18T07:15:00.000-07:00

AHA's MTW Annual Implementation Plan for the fiscal year beginning July 1, 2011, is now available.

Go here to read the plan in its entirety.

AHA now has a Facebook page

2011-04-15T15:50:00.000-07:00

Go here to like it and stay current with all things AHA.

This Week at AHA: April 9th to April 15th

2011-04-15T13:56:00.000-07:00

Renee Glover, AHA’s President & CEO, received the Founding Chair’s Award last Sunday in Chicago from the National Public Housing Museum, which has been described as the first cultural institution dedicated to interpreting the American experience in public housing.

She is shown here receiving the award.

The Council of Large Public Housing Authorities recognized her achievement by posting a notice on its site. Chicago’s WLS-TV also posted a story on its site about the award, as well as detailing other award recipients of the day.

The museum is slated to open in 2012 and will be located in the last remaining building of the Jane Addams Homes, a 1937 WPA building that was home to hundreds of public housing families until 2002, according to WLS.

The 5-part serialization of Hope, an in-depth look at the past 15 years of progress by the Atlanta Housing Authority, continued this week with Part Two, which can be read here. The installment is entitled How We Made Things Work. The entire 15-year report can be found here.

Construction continued this week at the 13 AHA-owned communities receiving renovations courtesy of HUD's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) Capital Fund Formula grant. The renovations are being made at 11 high-rises that house the elderly and young disabled residents; the two other communities are designated for families. New furniture and computer stations were installed at the Piedmont Road highrise and are slated for installation next week at the Cosby Spear highrise. There will be open houses for each property later this summer when work is completed.

The Obama administration awarded two grants to Atlanta University Center community, pointing the way to a new urban strategy. The Saporta Report provided an overview of AHA’s Promise Neighborhoods grant and the story can be read in its entirety here.

AHA now has a Facebook page. Go here to like it and stay current with all things AHA.

The Atlanta Housing Authority is the largest housing agency in Georgia and one of the largest in the nation, serving approximately 50,000 people. AHA is committed to delivering quality affordable housing and spurring community development.

Obama administration awards two grants to Atlanta community, pointing to a new urban strategy.

2011-04-11T07:00:00.000-07:00

Friday, April 1, 2011, might be characterized as a déjà vu moment. For the second time in less than 12 months, a federal agency awarded the area surrounding the Atlanta University Center campuses a development grant.

Read the entire story here.

How We Made Things Work

2011-04-11T05:41:00.000-07:00

Flexibility and Ingenuity

Editor's note: This article is extracted from the Atlanta Housing Authority's 15-Year Progress Report. The complete report can be found here. "How We Made Things Work" is the second installment of a five-part series.

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There was no question two decades ago that something had to change with Atlanta'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.

"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 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 Renee 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 were part of the system," says Carol Naughton, who joined Glover's staff as legal counsel. The law firm Naughton had left had no ties to public housing. CEO Glover had been a corporate 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 non-financeable cost of the developments and created a platform for dramatically reshaping approaches that no longer worked. It was uncharted territory.

"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 more than five years of coaching to assist relocating public housing residents 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 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 Renee Glover's leadership," says developer Herman Russell of Atlanta-based HJ Russell & Company, one of the nation's largest minority owned 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, 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 and Atlanta-based Integral and St. Louis-based McCormack Baron Salazar were the private developers, bringing both know-how 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 was so novel that tenants at the old projects adopted a "show me" attitude. Meeting after meeting were face-offs between the tenants and AHA CEO Glover and 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 income was 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 mixed-use, 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.

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. 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, which agreed to rent a percentage of its apartments to persons who earned minimum wage up to 60% 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 by being designated a MTW Agency. Typically, HUD pegs voucher rent subsidies based on a metropolitan-wide average of apartment rents. This ignores the wide disparities in neighborhoods 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 and, in most cases, don't fit into more rigid federal guidelines.

AHA's MTW Agreement allows for single block grant funding, which takes in operating funds for low-income housing, authority over Section 8 voucher budgeting, and capital funds. In this way, the money can be used for eligible MTW activities as set forth in AHA's HUD-approved MTW Plan.

AHA upped the ante for personal responsibility when, in 2004, as part of MTW, imposed work 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. Only three years later, more than 80 percent of households met the requirement. 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 primarily 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 Renee 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."

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."

Next: "What We Learned."

This Week at AHA: April 2nd to April 8th

2011-04-08T10:22:00.000-07:00

Coverage continued this week on the Choice and Promise Neighborhood Planning Grants awarded to improve life in the Atlanta University Center area.

AHA’s $250,000 Choice Neighborhood Planning Grant is for the revitalization of the University Homes site and the surrounding neighborhood.

Atlanta’s WABE Radio aired an in-depth story on the grants this week and you can listen to it here.

The announcement was written up by the Associated Press and picked up during the week around the region by The Examiner of Washington, DC, The Republic of Columbus, IN, WRCB-TV of Chattanooga, and Atlanta's WSB Radio.

AHA is also partnering with Morehouse School of Medicine, Morehouse College, Spelman College and Clark/Atlanta University for this revitalization project. The Morehouse School of Medicine, on behalf of a larger group of stakeholders, received a Promise Neighborhood Planning Grant of $500,000. AHA’s James Talley and Trish O’Connell are part of the economic development and housing development teams that met this week to carry out the plan. Planning efforts are distributed among several working groups, including housing, economic development, and data gathering.

Promise Neighborhoods is designed to significantly improve the educational and developmental outcomes of children and youth in severely distressed communities. The planning grant supports MSM and partnering stakeholders in developing a sound Promise Neighborhoods strategy spanning seven ZIP codes into a feasible plan. The specific area MSM has targeted feeds into Booker T. Washington High School.

A higher-altitude view of AHA’s mission and vision can be found in Hope, a look at the past 15 years’ progress in Atlanta. The entire report can be read here. The first installation of a serialized version of AHA’s 15-year progress report went out this week and can be found here. The serialization was also picked up here and here.

AHA President & CEO Renee Glover prepared this week to receive the Founding Chair’s Award from the National Public Housing Museum on Sunday. The ceremony will be at the Chicago Cultural Center’s Sidney Yates Gallery, 78 E. Washington St., in Chicago. More details can be found here.

Work continued apace this week at the 13 AHA-owned communities receiving renovations across the city. AHA received funding through HUD's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) Capital Fund Formula grant to renovate 11 high-rises that house the elderly and young disabled residents; the two other communities are designated for families. Furniture, fixtures and computer stations are being readied for installation in the coming weeks, and there will be open houses for each property later this summer when work is completed.

The Atlanta Housing Authority is the largest housing agency in Georgia and one of the largest in the nation, serving approximately 50,000 people. AHA is committed to delivering quality affordable housing and spurring community development.

Why We Did This.

2011-04-04T02:58:00.000-07:00

The Opportunity to Turn Failure Into Transformational Success

Editor's note: This article is extracted from the Atlanta Housing Authority's 15-Year Progress Report. The complete report can be found here. "Why We Did This" is the first installment of a five-part series.

____________________________________________

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 crime-infested 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.

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 rightly felt they were labeled and marginalized;
- 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 the 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, 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 Renee 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 '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 late '80s early '90s. Something needed to be done."

All of the indicators flashed an alarm. 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 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."

Next: "How we made things work."

AHA, HUD & AUC = Progress

2011-04-01T16:15:00.000-07:00

WABE Radio reports on the Choice Neighborhood Planning Grant that AHA received to improve the Atlanta University Center area.

Hear the broadcast here.

This Week at AHA: March 26th to April 1st

2011-04-01T14:04:00.000-07:00

AHA President and CEO Renee Glover joined other area partners Friday to celebrate the Choice and Promise Neighborhood Planning Grants awarded to improve life in the Atlanta University Center area.

“This is a wonderful, incredible opportunity,” Glover said. “This is for those locked out of the American dream, so that our kids can become world-class players.”

AHA’s $250,000 Choice Neighborhood Planning Grant is for the revitalization of the University Homes site and the surrounding neighborhood. AHA’s development partner for this revitalization is a venture composed of The Integral Group and Urban Realty.

AHA is also partnering with Morehouse School of Medicine, Morehouse College, Spelman College and Clark/Atlanta University for this revitalization project. The Morehouse School of Medicine, on behalf of a larger group of stakeholders, received a Promise Neighborhood Planning Grant of $500,000.

Others joining in the conversation were Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, HUD Southeast Regional Administrator Ed Jennings, Jr., HHS Southeast Regional Director Anton Gunn,and Morehouse School of Medicine President Dr. John Maupin.

AHA is profiled in the most recent issue of Urban Land, a publication of the Urban Land Institute. “From Public Housing to Private Enterprise” details how public/private partnerships can create healthy, vibrant neighborhoods and break with the past of isolating those needing affordable housing from the mainstream of American life.

Read the entire article here.

AHA has spent the past 15 years improving the lives of its residents and upgrading the city of Atlanta’s quality of life. This inspiring story is told in Hope, a beautifully illustrated guide to AHA’s pioneering efforts in affordable housing. To read Hope in its entirety, click here.

As part of its systems upgrade, the ERP contract with YARDI Systems Inc. has been executed. The agreement between YARDI and AHA is for an integrated and real estate-oriented information technology solution to support our operations, public housing programs, human development services, and administrative support functions. The term of the agreement is five years.

The Atlanta Housing Authority is the largest housing agency in Georgia and one of the largest in the nation, serving approximately 50,000 people. AHA is committed to delivering quality affordable housing and spurring community development.

Hope: a 15-year progress report

2011-04-01T14:02:00.000-07:00

AHA has spent the past 15 years improving the lives of its residents and upgrading the city of Atlanta’s quality of life. This inspiring story is told in Hope, a beautifully illustrated guide to AHA’s pioneering efforts in affordable housing.

To read Hope in its entirety, click here.

AHA featured in Urban Land Institute's magazine

2011-03-29T10:54:00.000-07:00

The latest issue of Urban Land features a deep look at AHA, "From Public Housing to Private Enterprise."

"To be successful, the private developer has to maximize its investment, especially in the context of a changing paradigm, from the old model of warehousing the poor to the new concept of creating market-rate, high-quality housing with a seamless affordable component. This is the transformation of Atlanta and the emergence of a new flavor of public/private partnership, sponsored by the Atlanta Housing Authority."

Read the article in its entirety here.

This Week at AHA: March 19th to March 25th

2011-03-25T11:32:00.000-07:00

Last week’s awarding of a Choice Neighborhood Planning Grant to AHA gained momentum this week as an op-ed written by HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan and Education Secretary Arne Duncan appeared in Thursday’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

”We believe Atlanta represents one powerful example of how the administration’s Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative is helping government invest smarter and more effectively — so we do more of what works and stop doing what doesn’t," Donovan and Duncan wrote. "This approach recognizes that all of us — government, businesses, schools and communities — are responsible for preparing students in every neighborhood to compete in the 21st century.”

Read the entire story here.

The story got national and international play as USA Today picked up the story, as did Florida Today, the Dallas Morning News, and the Times of India.

Affordable Housing Finance magazine elaborated on the Choice Neighborhoods grant with this insight: “HUD leaders say the new program extends the scope of HOPE VI by linking affordable housing with quality education, public transportation, and job opportunities.” You can read the entire article here.

In 2004, the AHA received a $20 million federal HOPE VI grant to tear down the obsolete McDaniel Glenn public housing project, and replace it with a mixed-income community. Emory University's Office of University-Community Partnerships recently completed an assessment of the revitalization on the affected families, the surrounding neighborhoods, and the city. That study was posted onto the Emory site this week and you can read it here.

Work continues at 13 AHA-owned communities that are receiving renovations across the city. AHA received funding through HUD's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) Capital Fund Formula grant to renovate 11 high-rises that house the elderly and young disabled residents; the two other communities are designated for families. To see work in progress, click here for an update on the Barge Road Highrise and here for work at the Peachtree Road Highrise.

Longtime AHA business partner Egbert Perry, CEO of The Integral Group, was named Central Atlanta Progress leader. Details are here. This comes on the heels of Integral being named to a team that will build a transit hub in downtown Atlanta. Cousins Properties will lead the team that, in addition to The Integral Group, also includes Forest City Enterprises, FC Asset Services, Cooper Carry, Urban Collage, FXFOWLE, Kimley-Horn & Associates, and Parsons Brinckerhoff.

The Atlanta Housing Authority is the largest housing agency in Georgia and one of the largest in the nation, serving approximately 50,000 people. AHA is committed to delivering quality affordable housing and spurring community development.

Partnership aims to revitalize decaying U.S. neighborhoods

2011-03-24T11:23:00.000-07:00

By Shaun Donovan and Arne Duncan 

President Barack Obama has made clear that there is no greater economic policy than one that invests in our children's future and helps America out-educate the world. We believe that's not possible if we leave a whole generation of children behind in our poorest neighborhoods.

Today, more than 10 million people live in neighborhoods surrounded by disinvestment, failing schools, troubled housing and little opportunity. Research shows that one of the most important factors in determining if children will do better financially than their parents is whether or not they grow up in a high-poverty neighborhood. The fact that we can predict health, economic and educational outcomes of children based on their ZIP codes is a tragedy.

That is why the Obama administration has been pursuing an interagency Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative that supports leaders from the public and private sectors working to transform distressed neighborhoods into sustainable, mixed-income neighborhoods with the affordable housing, safe streets and good schools that every family needs.

At the center of the administration's initiative is a comprehensive neighborhood revitalization tool called Choice Neighborhoods.

First funded by Congress in 2010, Choice Neighborhoods builds on the HOPE VI public housing revitalization program. With strong bipartisan support, HOPE VI has created nearly 86,000 homes in healthy, mixed-income communities that were once troubled by distressed public housing — leveraging twice the federal investment in additional private development capital and raising the average income of residents by 75 percent or more.

Last week, the Obama administration awarded Choice Neighborhoods planning grants to 17 communities across the country, including Atlanta. With these funds, communities will be able to use proven mixed-use, mixed-finance tools available to transform not just public housing, but all kinds of federally supported housing in poor neighborhoods.

Where Choice Neighborhoods' focus is on troubled housing, Promise Neighborhoods, a Department of Education initiative, works to ensure there are good schools and quality learning opportunities at the center of these neighborhoods, from cradle to career.

In Atlanta, you'll see our partnership in action. As the city's Choice Neighborhoods planning grant helps the city revitalize its University Homes public housing development, its Promise Neighborhoods grant will harness the talents of Atlanta's historically black colleges and universities to provide educational opportunities to children living in the University Center neighborhood.

We believe Atlanta represents one powerful example of how the administration's Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative is helping government invest smarter and more effectively — so we do more of what works and stop doing what doesn't. This approach recognizes that all of us — government, businesses, schools and communities — are responsible for preparing students in every neighborhood to compete in the 21st century.

As Obama has said, "If poverty is a disease that infects an entire community in the form of unemployment and violence, failing schools and broken homes, then we can't just treat those symptoms in isolation. We have to heal that entire community."
To out-educate the rest of the world and win the future, we believe we must — and with these tools, we will.

Shaun Donovan is the U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
Arne Duncan is the U.S. Secretary of Education.

Emory University Assessment of Atlanta Revitalization

2011-03-18T16:35:00.000-07:00

In 2004, the Atlanta Housing Authority received a $20 million federal HOPE VI grant to tear down the obsolete McDaniel Glenn public housing project, and replace it with a mixed-income community.

Emory University's Office of University-Community Partnerships recently completed an assessment of the revitalization on the affected families, the surrounding neighborhoods, and the city.

The findings of that study, headed by Associate Professor of Political Science Michael Rich, are available here.

Background:

The revitalization stands as an example of a city determined to do better than allow thousands of its citizens to be isolated in public housing projects. As the study concludes: "For most former residents of McDaniel Glenn the revitalization experience yielded positive outcomes as manifest in better quality housing, better neighborhoods, and overall improvements in their quality of life."

AHA's paramount concern has been to break the cycle of poverty, and allow people who have been trapped in the economic prisons of public housing to get on the up escalator to the mainstream. As the report details, 90% of affected families self-identify themselves as "satisfied" with the relocation out of the housing project.
The study shows that indicators that point to problems in neighborhoods were greatly reduced in the families' new homes – for example, the report states that "the number of violent crimes in their new immediate neighborhood was 69% lower."
To ensure success for the families, AHA provides more than two years of counseling on life, job and educational skills. About 93% of the affected families reported that they were satisfied with the counseling. The impact of that counseling is evident by the growth of respondents reporting an improvement in their quality of life from 47% in 2006 to 57% in 2009.
The study points to work that remains to be done. For example, the mix of economic backgrounds of students in schools near McDaniel Glenn did not substantially change with the revitalization, and, thus, there has been little change in academic achievement.
AHA has pioneered efforts to de-concentrate the intense poverty in schools – and at other revitalized communities such as Centennial Place, the positive impact on education has been significant. The Emory study underscores the importance of AHA continuing its long-term work.
McDaniel Glenn had 588 housing units, which were replaced in the revitalization with 907 housing units that had a mix of homes reserved for former housing project residents, rental and ownership homes priced at levels affordable to low-income families, and market-rate rental and ownership units.

AHA receives Choice Neighborhood Planning Grant

2011-03-18T15:10:00.000-07:00

This Week at AHA: March 12-18

2011-03-18T12:25:00.000-07:00

HUD announced today that AHA has been awarded a $250,000 Choice Neighborhood Planning Grant for the revitalization of the University Homes site and the surrounding neighborhood. AHA’s development partner for this revitalization is a venture composed of The Integral Group and Urban Realty. AHA is also partnering with Morehouse School of Medicine, Morehouse College, Spelman College and Clark/Atlanta University for this revitalization project. The Morehouse School of Medicine, on behalf of a larger group of stakeholders, received a Promise Neighborhood Planning Grant last fall. As AHA elevates and re-invigorates its revitalization program, the Choice Neighborhood and Promise Neighborhood Planning Grants will allow all of the stakeholders to plan together in a comprehensive, holistic and coordinated fashion for the benefit of the impacted neighborhoods, the families who reside there and the City of Atlanta. The official announcement from HUD is here.

AHA concluded its meetings this week with more than 15 stakeholder groups to review the authority's FY 2012 CATALYST Implementation Plan. The groups included government officials, advocates, and residents. The comment period on the draft plan ended last Monday, March 14.

AHA President & CEO Renee Glover will receive the Founding Chair’s Award from the National Public Housing Museum in Chicago on April 10. The award is given by the museum’s board of directors. The ceremony will be at the Chicago Cultural Center’s Sidney Yates Gallery, 78 E. Washington St., in Chicago.

AHA has partnered with the Emory’s Fuqua Center for Late Life Depression over the past year to help ensure that residents with mental health issues living in AHA’s highrises are connected to the services and resources they need. GA State Representative Pat Gardner submitted a resolution touting this work. AHA representatives go to the state capitol on March 24th to be recognized for the work being doing through this partnership.

Members of the National Recreation and Park Association (NRPA) were in Atlanta recently to collaborate with city officials, local partner organizations and project contributors regarding the revitalization of Atlanta’s historic Selena S. Butler Park. NRPA, in partnership with America’s Backyard and the City of Atlanta, and with contributions from PlayCore and Superior International Industries, will soon reconstruct and renovate the space through NRPA’s Parks Build Community project. In attendance at the meeting were representatives from AHA, plus representatives from the City of Atlanta; the Atlanta Department of Parks, Recreation and Cultural Affairs (DPRCA); the; Park Pride; Friends of Butler Park; Fourth Ward Neighbors; PlayCore; and Superior International Industries.

A team that includes AHA partner The Integral Group has been selected to build a transit hub in downtown Atlanta.

A small, diverse group of innovative housing authorities, their residents, and service provider partners recently joined a summit at AHA to share best practices on helping our older residents live better, longer and more fulfilling lives. Approximately 45 people attended the Aging in Place Public Housing Summit including staff and residents from seven public housing authorities -- Atlanta, New York City, Milwaukee, Brattleboro, Denver, Oklahoma City, Chicago, as well as representatives from service providers from each region. Participants spent time learning about the variety of services each housing authority currently provides to their older residents. The residents in attendance were current and former Resident Association Presidents, who provided insight on both the types of services they receive from staff and the activities coordinated by the residents themselves. AHA Vice President of Human Development Services Marvin Nesbitt shared AHA’s journey of program development to support residents through the Aging Well Program, which promotes activities and services that encompass the seven dimensions of whole person wellness (Environmental Wellness, Occupational Wellness, Emotional Wellness, Spiritual Wellness, Social Wellness, Physical Wellness, and Intellectual Wellness).

The Atlanta Housing Authority is the largest housing agency in Georgia and one of the largest in the nation, serving approximately 50,000 people. AHA is committed to delivering quality affordable housing and spurring community development.

Recognition for the AHA/Emory contribution to residents' mental health

2011-03-17T12:25:00.000-07:00

AHA has partnered with the Emory’s Fuqua Center for Late Life Depression over the past year to help ensure that residents with mental health issues living in AHA’s highrises are connected to the services and resources they need.

GA State Representative Pat Gardner has submitted a resolution touting this work.

AHA representatives go to the state capitol on March 24th to be recognized for the work being done through this partnership.

Renee Glover to receive National Public Housing Museum award

2011-03-16T13:03:00.000-07:00

AHA President & CEO Renee Glover will receive the Founding Chair’s Award from the National Public Housing Museum in Chicago on April 10.

The award is given by the museum’s board of directors. The ceremony will be at the Chicago Cultural Center’s Sidney Yates Gallery, 78 E. Washington St., in Chicago.

More details can be found here.

An AHA partner will help build Atlanta's transit hub

2011-03-16T11:43:00.000-07:00

A team that includes AHA partner The Integral Group has been selected to build a transit hub in downtown Atlanta.

Cousins Properties will lead the team that, in addition to The Integral Group, also includes Forest City Enterprises, FC Asset Services, Cooper Carry, Urban Collage, FXFOWLE, Kimley-Horn & Associates, and Parsons Brinckerhoff.

Read the entire story here.

This Week at AHA: March 7-11

2011-03-11T14:13:00.000-08:00

AHA continued its meetings this week with more than 15 stakeholder groups to review its FY 2012 CATALYST Implementation Plan. The groups include government officials, advocates, and residents. You can review the plan here.

The comment period on the plan goes until Monday, March 14. You may provide comments via email to strategy@atlantahousing.org, call the Annual Plan message line at 404-817-7458 (24 hours/day), schedule an appointment at AHA’s Corporate Office via the message line, or mail comments to AHA’s Corporate Office, Attention: Strategy & Innovation, 230 John Wesley Dobbs Avenue, NE., Atlanta, Georgia 30303.

The Frontier Centre for Public Policy picked up the Toronto Globe & Mail’s recent editorial about public housing that cites the virtues of The Atlanta Model. "In Atlanta, …(the) housing authority doesn't believe in owning buildings or playing landlord – although it still does some of both. Its long-term aim is to move people out of poverty and render itself obsolete. 'Concentrating families in poverty is very destructive,' Atlanta Housing Authority CEO Renée Glover told The New York Times. Over the past decade, the city has demolished a dozen developments, and relocated thousands of residents to private market rental housing with the help of voucher subsidies. The idea is to reduce poverty by decentralizing it, and to gentrify poor neighbourhoods by working with private developers."

The article is reprinted in its entirety and you can read it here.

Multi-Housing News conducted an interview with an AHA partner, The Habitat Company’s Mark Segal, this week. Habitat manages properties and performs construction management work for AHA. Read the interview in its entirety here.

Dr. Deirdre Oakley of Georgia State University provided an eloquent ode to Roosevelt House on Social Shutter this week. “Roosevelt was coming down simply because it was old. In 2009 it was deemed beyond repair by the housing authority and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. ‘It needed to come down, I got tired of all those cockroaches coming over for dinner every night, but I still miss it,’ one former resident told me.”

Read the complete story here.

The Atlanta Housing Authority is the largest housing agency in Georgia and one of the largest in the nation, serving approximately 50,000 people. AHA is committed to delivering quality affordable housing and spurring community development.

An AHA partner talks about mixed-income housing

2011-03-09T06:09:00.000-08:00

Mark Segal, President and CEO of The Habitat Company: "The Habitat Company is the largest manager of public housing for the Chicago Housing Authority and for the Atlanta Housing Authority. We also do construction management work for the Atlanta Housing Authority. We are now going through a transformative renovation of the public housing communities that we manage for the Atlanta Housing Authority using American Reinvestment and Recovery Act funds. The common areas are going to be absolutely spectacular. We’re going to take some of these legacy communities and transform them into what [looks like] a traditional market-rate community."

Click here to read the entire story.

As the Audience Continued to Cheer Loudly I Quietly Cried

2011-03-06T06:25:00.000-08:00

Dr. Deirdre Oakley of Georgia State University provides an eloquent ode to Roosevelt House on Social Shutter.

Roosevelt was coming down simply because it was old. In 2009 it was deemed beyond repair by the housing authority and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). “It needed to come down, I got tired of all those cockroaches coming over for dinner every night, but I still miss it,” one former resident told me.

Click here to read the full article.

This Week at AHA: Feb. 28 to March 4

2011-03-04T06:29:00.000-08:00

Sunday morning’s spectacular implosion of the obsolete and distressed Roosevelt House in Midtown drew a big crowd and lots of media attention.

"That's the end of the era of large, dysfunctional public housing in our city," Renee Lewis Glover, President & CEO of the Atlanta Housing Authority, told 11 Alive news moments after Roosevelt House came down Sunday morning.

The station got it right when it reported that the demolition was part of an ongoing effort by the Atlanta Housing Authority to replace run-down, outdated projects with new communities for low-income families,.

Here is a sampling of the wide range of reporting on the implosion:

WABE Radio aired a report, One of Atlanta's Last 'Project' Buildings Imploded, which includes an interview with AHA President & CEO Renee Glover. She said the city is at the forefront of building a different type of housing: "It's not about warehousing families. It's about mainstreaming the families, still meeting their affordable housing needs but in much healthier living environments."

CNN: Roosevelt Housing Implosion and a CNN iReport from aspiring photojournalist Sandy Hooper. "I'm pleased that the Atlanta Housing Authority has recognized that public housing projects didn't work out as planned as they further fueled poverty and despair," she said.

WATL-TV: Atlanta High Rise Project Implodes. "It needed to come down," said Robert Miles, who moved out of Roosevelt House in 2008. "I'm glad to be here to see it."

Demolition News posted a story with video. “When it’s down, it’s wonderful,” said Barry Roberts of Atlanta Demolition. “You never get used to the countdown. But it went down right where we wanted it to fall.”

Chattanooga's WRCB-TV posted this story on its site: "Atlanta Housing Authority CEO Renee Lewis Glover said the demolition marked the end of an era in which governments built large, dysfunctional public housing complexes."

CBS Atlanta: End Of An Era: Atlanta Housing Project Imploded.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Atlanta Building -- and Old Public Housing Model -- Demolished and a photo essay.

WSB-TV: Downtown Atlanta Building Imploded

11 Alive: Atlanta High-Rise Project Implodes and video, Implosion goes off with a hitch as public housing ight rise comes tumbling down.

Midtown Patch.com: Roosevelt House Comes Crashing Down

Breitbart: Building Demolished

Creative Loafing: Watch Roosevelt House — one of the final traces of Atlanta's public housing program — go 'boom.' The posting includes multiple-angle videos of the implosion.

As part of the development of its Fiscal Year 2012 Moving to Work (MTW) Annual Plan, AHA held a public hearing on Thursday, March 3, to discuss the plan in detail and to allow anyone who wished to ask questions and offer input. The plan, which outlines AHA's path in the coming year, can be read here. All comments must be received by AHA no later than March 14, 2011. You may provide comments or review the draft plan via AHA’s website, www.atlantahousing.org, submit comments by email to strategy@atlantahousing.org, calling the Annual Plan message line: 404-817-7458 (24 hours/day), scheduling an appointment at AHA’s Corporate Office via the message line or mailing comments to AHA’s Corporate Office, Attention: Strategy & Innovation, 230 John Wesley Dobbs Ave. NE., Atlanta, Georgia 30303.

AHA's influence was be felt beyond the borders not just of the city but the borders of the country this week. On Thursday, the Toronto Globe & Mail, with a readership of more than 2 million people, ran a column about the Toronto's failing housing efforts and how AHA does it right. "In Atlanta, …(the) housing authority doesn't believe in owning buildings or playing landlord – although it still does some of both. Its long-term aim is to move people out of poverty and render itself obsolete," writes columnist Margaret Wente.

The latest AHA newsletter for its families, A-HA!, has just been released. Click here to read it in its entirety.

The Atlanta Housing Authority is the largest housing agency in Georgia and one of the largest in the nation, serving approximately 50,000 people. AHA is committed to delivering quality affordable housing and spurring community development.

MTW public hearing is tonight, Thursday, March 3

2011-03-03T07:03:00.000-08:00

The Housing Authority of the City of Atlanta, Georgia (AHA) is developing its Fiscal Year 2012 Moving to Work (MTW) Annual Plan (CATALYST Implementation Plan.

The public hearing is tonight, Thursday, March 3, 2011, from 6 to 8 pm at The Loudermilk Conference Center, 40 Courtland St. NE, Atlanta, Georgia 30303.

For more details on the hearing, click here.

To review the draft MTW Annual Plan, click here.

The "Atlanta Model" Lauded in Toronto's Globe and Mail Newspaper

2011-03-03T05:27:00.000-08:00

Like most large urban cities, Toronto is facing affordable housing challenges. Like many domestic cities, Canadian leaders are looking to Atlanta for guidance and inspiration.

In Atlanta, …(the) housing authority doesn't believe in owning buildings or playing landlord – although it still does some of both. Its long-term aim is to move people out of poverty and render itself obsolete.
"Concentrating families in poverty is very destructive," Atlanta Housing Authority CEO Renée Glover told The New York Times. Over the past decade, the city has demolished a dozen developments, and relocated thousands of residents to private market rental housing with the help of voucher subsidies. The idea is to reduce poverty by decentralizing it, and to gentrify poor neighbourhoods by working with private developers.

Click to read full story

The latest A-HA! newsletter is hot off the presses.

2011-03-02T12:46:00.000-08:00

The latest AHA newsletter for its famlies, A-HA!, has just been released.

Atlanta building -- and old public housing model -- demolished

2011-02-27T09:50:00.000-08:00

By Ariel Hart
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
11:49 a.m. Sunday, February 27, 2011
In downtown Atlanta, a building came down Sunday, and with it three-quarters of a century of public housing policy came to an end.
The Atlanta Housing Authority on Sunday imploded Roosevelt House, former public housing for senior citizens and disabled residents. With that and another building, the nation's first city to try public housing projects is making a final end to them.
Carefully timed explosions on Sunday imploded Roosevelt House, which contained 150 apartments, on Centennial Olympic Park Dr. Demolition crews used about 150 pounds of explosives to bring down the structure in about 15 seconds, the Associated Press reported.
The building was named after Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the American president who with an Atlanta developer founded the national public housing policy.
Palmer House, another building named after the developer, Charles Foster Palmer, will be taken apart more slowly starting this week, according to Rick White, a spokesman for the authority. Imploding Palmer House like Roosevelt House would be too dangerous to the other buildings around it, White said.
The two are Atlanta's last project buildings to be demolished, he added. Eleven senior high-rise buildings remain but are not slated for destruction.
The last residents left Roosevelt House about two years ago, he said. It was built in 1973.
According to the authority, Atlanta was the first city to start building housing projects for the poor -- big uniform buildings or complexes to replace slums full of ramshackle houses. Roosevelt and Palmer pioneered the policy in the mid-1930s, according to AHA.
But the projects became breeding grounds for even more poverty and despair, and in 1994, Atlanta set about eliminating them, opting instead for mixed-income developments.
"Ultimately, the more than 40 housing projects across Atlanta severely damaged the city's economy, livability and schools," the authority wrote in a statement. AHA says studies show its new approach is working better to deliver the goal of Roosevelt and Palmer: "They wanted low-income Americans to have opportunity and the means to move up in society."
Find this article

AHA President & CEO Renee Glover speaks about the Roosevelt House implosion

2011-02-27T06:54:00.000-08:00

"That's the end of the era of large, dysfunctional public housing in our city," said Renee Lewis Glover, CEO of the Atlanta Housing Authority told 11 Alive news moments after the building came down.

The demolition was part of an ongoing effort by the Atlanta Housing Authority to replace run-down, outdated projects with new communities for low-income families, the station reported.

Glover was one of hundreds of people who turned out at dawn to see the distressed and obsolete building's implosion early Sunday morning.

More coverage of Sunday morning's implosion of Roosevelt House

2011-02-27T06:50:00.000-08:00

Here is more coverage of Sunday's early morning implosion of the distressed and obsolete Roosevelt House in Midtown Atlanta from 11 Alive and WSB-TV.

Sunday morning's Roosevelt House implosion

2011-02-27T06:38:00.000-08:00

Within moments, CBS Atlanta television and the AJC had coverage of this morning's implosion of the distressed and obsolete Roosevelt House in Midtown Atlanta.

This Week at AHA: Feb. 21-25

2011-02-25T13:22:00.000-08:00

Preparations for Sunday morning’s implosion of the distressed and obsolete Roosevelt House dominated end-of-the-week activities at the Atlanta Housing Authority.

Nearby Centennial Place Elementary School, which opened in 1999, was part of the comprehensive and holistic revitalization of the neighborhood where two of Atlanta's most infamous housing projects, Techwood and Clark Howell Homes, had hunkered for six decades. Among the spectators for Sunday’s implosion will be several students, all of whom either once attended or are now attending the school.

CBS Atlanta had a preview of the implosion Friday and other media outlets were preparing for coverage of the event.

While Roosevelt House will soon be part of the past, AHA is using federal stimulus funding to improve the quality of life for residents and increase the sustainability of its properties for decades to come. Here are videos detailing the upgrades for the Barge Road, Georgia Avenue, and Peachtree Road highrises.

The subject of AHA President and CEO Renee Glover leaving the authority to join the Atlanta Public Schools came up again this week and she yet again affirmed that she has no intention of leaving her current job. The speculation and the denial were picked up by Creative Loafing.

And, finally, a resolution commending, among others, AHA for its partnership with the Fuqua Center for Late-Life Depression at Emory University was introduced into the Georgia Legislature this week.

The Atlanta Housing Authority is the largest housing agency in Georgia and one of the largest in the nation, serving approximately 50,000 people. AHA is committed to delivering quality affordable housing and spurring community development.

CBS Atlanta: Crews Prepare For Roosevelt House Demolition

2011-02-25T12:27:00.000-08:00

Crews from Atlanta Demolition worked hard Friday to prepare the Roosevelt House, a former Atlanta Housing Authority project, for demolition.

Demolitions of 'The Projects' Cure Failed Education and Housing Policies

2011-02-24T17:58:00.000-08:00

By John F. Sugg

When on Feb. 27 explosions bring down Roosevelt House and wrecking balls go to work on Palmer House, among the spectators will be some graduating high school seniors. Although they're now attending several different high schools, they all have one thing in common: they began their academic careers at Centennial Place Elementary during the year the school opened.

"I wanted my son, Khamal, to go to a challenging school," says Kevin Brown, a records manager at Georgia Institute of Techology. "He was my first child, and I was nervous about him getting the very best education. So I stood in a long line, I camped out to get him into Centennial Place Elementary."

The payoff? "Khamal just got the word," his dad beams. "He's going to Princeton University." A scholar and an athlete, Khamal is in the National Honor Society and he'll be playing football at Princeton.

Centennial Place Elementary opened in 1999, part of the comprehensive and holistic revitalization of the neighborhood where two of Atlanta's most infamous housing projects, Techwood and Clark Howell Homes, had hunkered for six decades.

Centennial Place Elementary replaced Fowler Elementary, an obsolete and failing school that was embedded in the Techwood/Clark Howell housing projects. More than 90 percent of the Fowler students received free and reduced lunches – the metric of poverty in schools. Test scores also attested to the concentrated poverty of the area. Fowler consistently scored lower, often much lower, than the average for Atlanta elementary schools. Indeed, Fowler was near the bottom in performance of all elementary schools in Georgia.

The problems at Fowler were more than test scores. Brown's grandmother had lived in Roosevelt House, which was a senior high-rise owned and operated by the Atlanta Housing Authority. And, Brown's mother was a teacher who during her career had taught at Fowler. "Oh, yes, I knew the neighborhood," Brown recalls. "Right where the school was, there was a basketball court. During crack cocaine's heyday, that's where people did crack and did business. You couldn't have education in a situation like that. It was terrible."

In 1994, AHA decided that "terrible" – in education as well as housing – was no longer acceptable. Under a new CEO, Renee Lewis Glover, AHA began a program of revitalizing communities and rebuilding the lives of families by relocating families and demolishing the housing projects, which had deteriorated both as buildings and as public policy. Atlanta had built the first federally funded public housing in the late 1930s as a means of clearing slums and providing places for working class families to live temporarily in safe neighborhoods with good schools – until they moved up the ladder of American society. As policies changed in the middle of the 20^th Century, the projects became concentration camps of poverty and hopelessness, where successive generations of families had no escape from crime, social chaos and joblessness – and where children's futures were stunted by the academic failure of the embedded public schools.

Techwood and Clark Howell Homes were the first projects demolished by AHA. The nearby housing for the elderly and young disabled persons at Roosevelt House and Palmer House complete AHA's demolition program that razed all of the large distressed and sociologically dysfunctional family projects and the obsolete-beyond-repair senior high-rises. (Eleven high-quality senior facilities and two small family projects remain.) Replacing the projects are 16 mixed-use, mixed-income communities developed in partnership with private developers, such as Centennial Place, with more such communities underway or in the planning stages.

Part of that seismic shift in policies – a shift that has become a national model – has also helped to retool the thinking on education. Concentrating poverty is devastatingly bad public policy in both housing and education. Ending concentrated poverty is a "necessary and essential" step to creating healthy communities and healthy high-performing schools, according to Glover. The results are obvious.

AHA’s private sector partner in developing the Centennial Place community, The Integral Group, wholeheartedly embraced both the housing and education components of the plan. “We made Centennial Place Elementary the linchpin of our entire business plan,” says Integral CEO Egbert Perry. “We knew that a first-rate school was essential for the success of Centennial Place.”

That first-rate school remains the heart of the community. "Centennial Place Elementary is a great, great community of scholars," says Alison Shelton, principal of the elementary school. "They will achieve, they must achieve. When you're a Centennial Place Elementary citizen, you're someone."

Maria Scott, administrative assistant at the school adds: "Centennial Place Elementary dispels the myth that African-American students can't compete. Even our most struggling student has the confidence that he has the competence to compete."

The parents join the chorus:

"Khamal learned a lot," says Brown. "Centennial Place Elementary was instrumental in his educational and social development." Brown now has a second child, Amber, beginning her academic career at the school. "She was just named 'Student of the Month,'" Brown says.
Aaron Peek, another member of the inaugural class of Centennial Place Elementary, will be on his way to Georgia Tech in the fall – he was also accepted at Emory Universtiy. "Centennial Place Elementary was great and had just about everything to do with Aaron's getting the most out of his education," says proud mom Sarah Peek. "Centennial Place Elementary was absolutely critical to his success."
Asha Haki-Tyler is one of several Centennial Place Elementary alums who is also a Posse Scholar, which provides full tuition scholarships at leading colleges around the nation. Asha will be attending Boston University. "More than 750 students applied in Atlanta," says mother Darlyne Dandridge, "and 41 were selected, so, yes, I'm proud. Centennial Place Elementary was exceptionally important. So many of the children who started there have done so well.

As with most of the parents, Dandridge lauds Dr. Cynthia Kuhlman, the founding principal of Centennial Place Elementary, and the staff. "They made the difference," Dandridge says. "Dr. Kuhlman was a good giver, a catalyst. But it was also the whole community. The success wouldn't have happened if there wasn't buy-in from students, parents and teachers."

How did the failure of Fowler morph into the success of Centennial Place Elementary? "We had to change everything," says AHA CEO Glover. "When you get the environment right, you see lives transformed."

The guiding spirit behind Centennial Place Elementary was a former Georgia Tech professor and Atlanta Board of Education member, Norman Johnson. He articulated a concept that researchers have long known, but that school systems have long ignored. "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."

Educators, sociologists and economists who have studied education issues have concluded that concentrating low-income children in schools is a recipe for low achievement. 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." His 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. Policies that favor concentrating families in public housing projects only exacerbate the problem of poverty-dominated schools. Academic failure under these conditions is almost a certainty.

That was the cycle of failure AHA set out to break when it demolished Techwood/Clark Howell Homes, and replaced them with the new mixed-use, mixed-income Centennial Place community, and when the Atlanta Public Schools demolished Fowler Elementary and replaced it with Centennial Place Elementary. The dual strategies were part of a comprehensive and holistic revitalization of the entire community. The goal was to have a mix of incomes in both the new community – and in the school. Test scores and other academic indicators have soared at Centennial Place Elementary because every student has benefitted.

That echoed Rusk's studies. He found:

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.

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 low-income school.

"When there are significant socio-economic 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 schoolchildren's families on academic outcomes was first documented in 1966 by renowned sociologist James S. Coleman in "Equality of Educational Opportunity." Coleman found:

"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 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 middle-class classmates."

In Atlanta, similar studies 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 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."

When AHA began reshaping Atlanta's housing policies 15 years ago, the agency knew that if it 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 Fowler Elementary, Boston found that in 1995 just 10 percent of the students passed a basic writing skills test. By 2002, at 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.

So, along with demolishing the last of a failed public housing policy, AHA is also illuminating a successful and proven alternative to cure a failed education policy. No longer will Atlantans of modest means be condemned to crime-ridden housing projects, and no longer need their children be relegated to schools that produce only failure. That is one of the true messages behind the razing of Palmer House and Roosevelt House. Centennial Place Elementary is proof that it is possible to do better, much better, for Atlanta's children.

John F. Sugg, a veteran Atlanta journalist, is now a consultant to AHA. His work includes co-writing a history of public housing in Atlanta and the nation, and in overseeing the creation of archive of historic AHA documents for use by academics, journalists and other researchers.

"Not Leaving AHA," Glover Reaffirms

2011-02-22T19:53:00.000-08:00

Last month a rumor was circulating that Renee Lewis Glover, CEO of the Atlanta Housing Authority, was "angling" to become the new superintendent of the Atlanta Public School system. The speculation has resurfaced in a story published this evening on the web site of the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

The original tale was manufactured and distributed by a local web site. The rumor was not true in January and remains untrue today.

The person most knowledgeable about Glover's plans is Renee Lewis Glover. Last month Glover stated emphatically, "I have absolutely no reason or intention to leave the important work of community building we have undertaken at the Atlanta Housing Authority (AHA)," Glover says. "There is no truth to the assertion that I am or would be interested in leaving AHA or about me becoming school superintendent."

Glover writes a blog, Lessons Learned, and education reform is a frequent subject.

"However," Glover concluded last month's statement, "supporting education reform in no way means I am interested in becoming a school superintendent. I am not."

Contact: Rick White 404-210-9029 (m) or 404-577-8900 (o)

-end-

Saying Goodbye to the Past While Creating a Better Future

2011-02-19T11:34:00.001-08:00

While the obsolete Roosevelt House will be imploded February 27, 2011, the Atlanta Housing Authority is using federal stimulus funding to improve the quality of life for residents and increase the sustainability of its properties for decades to come.

AHA was awarded $26.5 million for capital improvements at 13 communities through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in March 2009 and will complete the work by Aug. 30, 2011.

Receiving upgrades are 11 high-rises for senior and young disabled residents. Click on the highlighted properties for complete details about improvements at these sites:

Barge Road Highrise : 2240 Barge Road
Cheshire Bridge Road Highrise: 2170 Cheshire Bridge Road
Cosby Spear Highrise: 355 North Ave.
East Lake Highrise: 380 East Lake Blvd.
Georgia Avenue Highrise: 174 Georgia Ave. SE
Hightower Manor Highrise: 2610 Martin Luther King Jr. Drive
Juniper & Tenth Highrise: 150 10^th St.
Marian Road Highrise: 760 Sidney Marcus Blvd. NE
Marietta Road Highrise: 2295 Marietta Road NW
Peachtree Road Highrise: 2240 Peachtree Road
Piedmont Road Highrise: 3601 Piedmont Road NE

AHA's two affordable family communities receiving upgrades:

Martin Street Plaza: 600 Martin St.
Westminster: 1422 Piedmont Road

The improvements open up community spaces, add elbow room for innovative programming, increase accessibility in and around the property, and, most importantly, allow residents to age in place.

Specific site improvements include enhanced indoor/outdoor connections with exterior gardens and terraces; areas for mixed-generation interaction; building canopies at two properties to assist transportation access; improving site lighting and access control systems; and improved site circulation and parking.

Improvements to common areas in the high rises include deinstitutionalized layout, colors and architectural finishes; new furniture and equipment; renovated community rooms and kitchens; enhanced TV/media rooms that include Wii systems; wi-fi access; and more open space at concierge desk and management offices. Other upgrades include improvements to the lobbies and entrances and the creation of Internet cafes that include computers and wireless access supplied by AHA, which is also helping train seniors to go online to stay connected with friends, family and community.

Also receiving makeovers are laundry rooms, community kitchens, fitness rooms, mail rooms, and building management offices.

All of the high-rise communities are receiving newly created wellness offices for AHA's collaboration with local schools of nursing, which include Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing at Emory University, Birdine F. Lewis School of Nursing at Georgia State University, and Georgia Baptist College of Nursing at Mercer University.

AHA used the 7 Dimensions of Whole Person Wellness to guide many design decisions for common area renovations:

Physical Wellness: the ability to maintain a healthy quality of life that allows residents to get through daily activities without undue fatigue or physical stress.
Social Wellness: the ability to establish and create positive relationships with family and friends.
Spiritual Wellness: the ability to establish peace and harmony in residents' lives.
Emotional Wellness: the ability to understand and cope with life's challenges.
Intellectual Wellness: the ability to open up to new ideas and experiences so that residents make better personal decisions and improve their interactions with groups.
Environmental Wellness: the ability to recognize responsibility for the quality of the air, water, and land.
Occupational Wellness: the ability to get personal fulfillment from jobs and careers.

The Atlanta Housing Authority is the largest housing agency in Georgia and one of the largest in the nation, serving approximately 50,000 people. AHA is committed to delivering quality affordable housing and spurring community development.

This Week at AHA: Feb. 14-18

2011-02-18T07:34:00.000-08:00

This week the Atlanta Housing Authority prepared for its upcoming Fiscal Year 2012 Moving To Work (MTW) Annual Plan (CATALYST Implementation Plan) Availability and Public Hearing. The public hearing will be Thursday, March 3, 2011, from 6 to 8 pm at The Loudermilk Conference Center, 40 Courtland St. NE in Atlanta.

Details about the hearing are here.

Read the plan here.

AHA recently held its quarterly all-employee meeting and reinforced to staff its mission and vision for the upcoming year. Featured speakers included President and CEO Renee Glover and Chief Human Resources Officer Charlene Crusoe-Ingram. Chief Information Officer Samir Saini unveiled the name of AHA’s new Integrated ERP Solution initiative and system, which was christened iCARE by an AHA staffer. The Integrated Community & Real-Estate System (iCARE) will replace AHA’s current Oracle business systems and the host of MS Excel & Access solutions that manage core operations. iCARE will vastly improve individual and overall business productivity and save millions of dollars annually for the agency.

To view photos of the all-employee meeting, see AHA’s Facebook page.

One of AHA's development partners, Integral Group CEO Egbert Perry, was recently inducted into REIAC's Hall of Distinction.

The Atlanta Housing Authority is the largest housing agency in Georgia and one of the largest in the nation, serving approximately 50,000 people. AHA is committed to delivering quality affordable housing and spurring community development.

Notice of Fiscal Year 2012 Moving To Work Annual Plan Availability and Public Hearing

2011-02-14T17:12:00.000-08:00

The Housing Authority of the City of Atlanta, Georgia (AHA) is developing its Fiscal Year 2012 Moving to Work (MTW) Annual Plan (CATALYST Implementation Plan). From February 14, 2011 through March 14, 2011, the draft CATALYST Implementation Plan will be available for public review. The Plan includes a summary of proposed initiatives and activities for AHA-Owned Communities, the Housing Choice program, and AHA-sponsored mixed-income communities.

For more details on the public review, go here.

To review the draft MTW Annual Plan, go here.

iCARE: Integrated Community & Real-Estate System

2011-02-14T11:35:00.001-08:00

AHA’s new Integrated ERP Solution initiative and system has been christened iCARE.

The Integrated Community & Real-Estate System (iCARE) will replace AHA’s current Oracle business systems and the host of MS Excel & Access solutions that manage core operations. iCARE will vastly improve individual and overall business productivity and save millions of dollars annually for the agency.

iCARE will automate AHA’s business processes, introduce paperless processes, eliminate many processes that are now done manually, eliminate data-entry redundancies, create one source of the truth, create 100% data accuracy and completeness, and create automated data exchange with AHA’s external partners.

iCARE will be implemented in a phased approach beginning in fiscal year 2012 with a payback period for the investment estimated at three to four years. The savings will be $3.5 million to $4.5 million annually into perpetuity.

This Week at AHA: Feb. 7-11

2011-02-11T13:15:00.000-08:00

Here are the highlights of another productive week at the Atlanta Housing Authority:

When explosives detonate in Roosevelt House on Sunday morning, Feb. 27, and the demolition crews take apart Palmer House, it's not the end of an era – but the midpoint in a revitalization that began in 1996: http://atlantahousingauthority.blogspot.com/2011/02/roosevelt-house-implosion.html

AHA is one of the reasons the Atlanta Police Department no longer needs the Red Dog Unit: "According to [Atlanta Police Department Chief George] Turner, since the Unit's creation … the demolition of the projects over the past decade-and-a-half has decentralized drug activity." Read the full story here: http://clatl.com/freshloaf/archives/2011/02/07/chief-turner-dissolves-the-red-dog-unit

AHA now has a Facebook page. Please go to http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/pages/Atlanta-Housing-Authority/160139064038465?v=wall and ‘Like’ our new page. Check in frequently to stay up to date on all things AHA.

Two items about AHA were picked up by other sites as Renee Glover’s most recent posting was posted to the Atlanta Regional Commission site http://landmatters.wordpress.com/2011/02/07/when-is-community-not-community/ and Charlene Crusoe-Ingram’s appointment as our new chief human resources officer appeared in the Atlanta Daily World: http://www.atlantadailyworld.com/articles/2011/02/06/opportunity/doc4d41d06f22863866306019.txt

The Atlanta Housing Authority is the largest housing agency in Georgia and one of the largest in the nation, serving approximately 50,000 people. AHA is committed to delivering quality affordable housing and spurring community development.

It's the Midpoint of Atlanta's Revitalization

2011-02-11T12:09:00.000-08:00

By John F. Sugg

When the explosives detonate in Roosevelt House on Feb. 27, and the demolition crews take apart Palmer House, it's not the end of an era – but the midpoint in a revitalization that began in 1996 (click for details about the implosion).

The demolition of the two buildings marks a historic milestone in Atlanta – the culmination of 16 years of labor that has transformed the city into a model for the nation. It's a history that began three-quarters of a century ago – when Atlanta also pioneered housing programs that were emulated across America. The buildings, public housing for senior and disabled citizens, were named after men with storied histories – Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Charles Foster Palmer – but the structures themselves have become obsolete to the point where demolition was the only option. Moreover, not only were the physical facilities beyond repair, so too were the public policies that had allowed a marvelous idea to degenerate into a system that stymied human development and success.

In the mid-1930s, Roosevelt and Palmer crafted a revolution in housing policy that helped end the awful slums that blighted Atlanta and other American cities. They made reality out of a dream of public housing, homes where low-income working Americans could get a start at achieving the American Dream.

We remember Roosevelt well, one of America's greatest presidents. Palmer is less distinct in our nation's memory. He was an Atlanta developer who not only felt compassion for a third of nation that lived in slums, but also realized that America could not ready itself for the onrushing World War if its citizens did not have decent housing.

Palmer's urging convinced Roosevelt of the need for public housing, and Atlanta became the first city to build "projects." Roosevelt House and Palmer House memorialized that achievement. But public policies changed, and the projects declined from neighborhoods of hope and achievement into prisons of despair, failure and grinding poverty. Ultimately, the more than 40 housing projects across Atlanta severely damaged the city's economy, livability and schools. The honor bestowed on Roosevelt and Palmer by naming projects after the visionary leaders began to tarnish. The two men had been motivated by a desire to give Americans a chance and a square deal; public housing became the opposite, condemning successive generations to poverty, dysfunction, joblessness and poor education.

The Atlanta Housing Authority in 1994 under a new CEO, Renee Lewis Glover, began an aggressive program to replace the blighted projects with healthy neighborhoods. Glover took over an agency besieged with problems and turned it into a national model for civic revitalization. Her bywords that have governed AHA over the last 16 years are: integrity, vision and business strategy. Indeed, AHA embodies those concepts in its work, and Atlanta has been the beneficiary.

On Feb. 27, AHA's last two demolitions will take place – Roosevelt House and Palmer House. That those last two demolitions should be of buildings named for the architects of public housing is fitting – if understood in the context that AHA is still true to the men's dream.

One of Palmer's driving ambitions, for example, was to ensure good educations for children who once had lived in slums. Commemorating that vision, special guests at the Feb. 27 demolitions will be students who have attended Centennial Place Elementary, a high-performing school that replaced a low-performing school embedded in one of Atlanta's worst housing projects, the now-demolished Techwood/Clark Howell Homes.

The demolitions bring us back to the original vision of Roosevelt and Palmer. They wanted low-income Americans to have opportunity and the means to move up in society. That is what AHA is doing today, assisting 6,000 more families with housing than the agency was able to do when all of its funds were consumed maintaining the obsolete housing projects. Academic studies, such as "Environment Matters," by Georgia Tech Professor Thomas D. Boston, attest to the fact that families receiving assistance today – living in revitalized communities or in voucher-assisted housing of their choice – enjoy better lives. Their children, once denied good access to good schools, have the same educational opportunities as all young people. Housing-assisted families are employed in about the same percentages as the general population. Neighborhoods surrounding the revitalized communities flourish, and crime rates that once skyrocketed around the projects now are much lower and typical of the city as a whole.

"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."

Glover remarks that the demolitions are neither a beginning nor an end – but a midpoint in an ongoing process that must be seen to completion. Fourteen years ago, as the first demolitions of housing projects commenced, she predicted that AHA's work would "seamlessly knit 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, and the programs AHA pioneered are emulated in many other American cities. All of the major family housing projects have been demolished. Many have been replaced by mixed-income, mixed-use communities. Redevelopment work is underway on the sites of other former projects. At the same time, AHA has greatly expanded its work in aiding low-income families, assisting thousands more people with housing than when all of the projects were operating, as well as providing supportive services for families leaving the projects and for elderly and disabled citizens living in dramatically modernized senior towers. 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 growing.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Jim Wooten has called Glover's eradication of the projects' blight and her strategic attack on the root causes of poverty a "major life achievement." Glover has a different assessment: "In many ways, we've just begun."

The AHA CEO sees her future work focused on two areas: Community building and an ambition to push what Glover calls the "Third Wave of the Civil Rights movement."

"Many would say that things have improved, but have they really?" Glover asks. "Yes, we're proud of our achievements at AHA, in housing, employment, education, with seniors and in other areas. But poverty, especially among people of color, is still a disease that cripples all of society. Our real mission is overcoming that disease." She notes that in 2004, blacks 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 fighting against Jim Crow segregation. People need to understand that public housing 50 years ago in the South was an aspect of Jim Crow, as 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."

The "Third Wave," providing structural access to opportunity through economically integrated living environments and globally competitive public education opportunities, will ensure that poor people, especially African-Americans, finally gain economic equity in America.

"Our work at AHA only starts with housing," Glover observes. "The measure of our work is how we unlock the God-given unlimited human potential of the many people who were 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, and low expectations and standards. We now have the means, beginning with creating healthy mixed-income communities, to encourage family development. 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 self-improvement.'"

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-income, mixed-use communities, with more on the drawing boards. Glover accurately predicted that when given a chance, housing project residents wanted out – and subsequent polls of the residents vindicated Glover's forecast with more than 90 percent of the tenants saying they wanted to move into mainstream housing.

"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 still very exciting: creating better, healthier cities."

With that record, we can understand Glover's emphasis for "community building."

"It takes time," she says, "for the mixed-income communities we've already built to mature. At Centennial Place, for example, we've been successful in building a community where there is plenty of disposable income. Now, we need to finish the job there by attracting quality retail development."

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 mixed-income 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 AHA's encouragement of early childhood learning – often neglected in housing projects – through programs the agency has fostered such as "Better Beginnings."

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 enlarge on its already established role as a national model.

"In effect, we will refresh, refine and re-invigorate the model." Glover says. "And we will 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 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 provides almost three years of coaching and counseling by professional firms to families leaving public housing.

"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 substituted a never-ending and inescapable cycle of poverty for barbed wire and walls, but the effect was the same. People were trapped, cut off from society. They became impoverished not only in terms of money but also spiritually. The projects stripped the families of their humanity, 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. Building 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."

Thus, the vision first articulated by Franklin Roosevelt and Charles Palmer is carried on by new programs that combat the causes of concentrated poverty. That new stage is symbolized, somewhat ironically, by the demolition of buildings that are Roosevelt's and Palmer's namesakes.

John F. Sugg, a veteran Atlanta journalist, is now a consultant to AHA. His work includes co-authoring a history of public housing in Atlanta and the nation, and overseeing the creation of an archive of historic AHA documents for use by academics, journalists and other researchers.

Roosevelt House Implosion

2011-02-11T11:56:00.000-08:00

Time	Sunday, February 27 · 7:00am - 10:00am

Location	South of GA Tech and North of Centennial Olympic Park Atlanta, GA

Early in the morning on Feb. 27, there will be several “booms!” south of the Georgia Institute of Technology campus. A high-rise building will cave in on itself, and after a few minutes, all that will remain will be a pile of rubble. A few blocks away, a similar tower is also being demolished – although in a less dramatic manner.

The demolition of the two buildings marks a historic milestone in Atlanta – the culmination of 16 years of labor that has transformed the city into a model for the nation. It’s a history that began three-quarters of a century ago – when Atlanta also pioneered housing programs that were emulated across America. The buildings, public housing for senior and disabled citizens, were named after men with storied histories – Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Charles Foster Palmer – but the buildings themselves have become obsolete to the point where demolition was the only option. Moreover, not only were the physical facilities beyond repair, so too were the public policies that had allowed a marvelous idea to degenerate into a system that guaranteed human failure.

In the mid-1930s, Roosevelt and Palmer crafted a revolution in housing policy that helped end the awful slums that blighted Atlanta and other American cities. They made reality out of a dream of public housing, homes where low-income working Americans could get a start at achieving the American Dream.

We remember Roosevelt well as one of America’s greatest presidents. Palmer is less distinct in our nation’s memory. He was an Atlanta developer who not only felt compassion for a third of the nation that lived in slums, but also realized that America could not ready itself for the imminent World War if its citizens did not have decent housing.

Palmer’s urging convinced Roosevelt of the need for public housing, and Atlanta became the first city to build “projects.” Roosevelt House and Palmer House memorialized that achievement. But public policies changed, and the projects declined from neighborhoods of hope and achievement into prisons of despair and grinding poverty. Ultimately, the more than 40 housing projects across Atlanta severely damaged the city’s economy, livability and schools. The honor bestowed on Roosevelt and Palmer by naming projects after these visionary leaders began to tarnish. They had been motivated by a desire to give Americans a chance and a square deal. Over time, public housing became the opposite, condemning successive generations to poverty, dysfunction, joblessness and poor education.

The Atlanta Housing Authority in 1994 under a new CEO, Renee Lewis Glover, began an aggressive program to replace the blighted projects with healthy neighborhoods. Glover took over an agency besieged with problems and turned it into a national model for civic revitalization. Her bywords that have governed AHA over the last 16 years are: integrity, vision and business strategy. Indeed, AHA embodies those concepts in its work, and Atlanta has been the beneficiary.

On Feb. 27, AHA’s last two demolitions will take place – Roosevelt House and Palmer House. That those last two demolitions should be of buildings named for the architects of public housing is fitting – if understood in the context that AHA is still true to the men’s dream.

The demolitions bring us back to the original vision of Roosevelt and Palmer. They wanted low-income Americans to have opportunity and the means to move up in society. That is what AHA is doing today, assisting 6,000 more families with housing than the agency was able to do when all of its funds were consumed maintaining the obsolete housing projects. Academic studies attest to the fact that families receiving assistance today – living in revitalized communities or in voucher-assisted housing of their choice – enjoy better lives. Their children, once denied good access to good schools, have the same educational opportunities as all young people. Housing-assisted families are employed in about the same percentages as the general population. Other academic studies underscore that AHA’s programs have energized much of the resurgence in Atlanta over the last decade and a half.

The ceremony on Feb. 27 commemorates that history – from hope to despair and now back to hope.

AHA is on Facebook

2011-02-10T13:35:00.000-08:00

Please go to http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/pages/Atlanta-Housing-Authority/160139064038465?v=wall and ‘Like’ our new page.

Check in frequently to stay up to date on all things AHA.

AHA & the Red Dog Unit

2011-02-10T11:24:00.000-08:00

The Atlanta Housing Authority was recently cited by Creative Loafing as one of the reasons the Atlanta Police Department no longer needs the Red Dog Unit:

"According to [APD Chief George] Turner, since the Unit's creation homicides have dropped dramatically (there were 207 murders in 1987 compared with 93 in 2010) and the demolition of the projects over the past decade-and-a-half has decentralized drug activity."

Read the full story here

The Next Step in Community Building

2011-02-10T07:34:00.000-08:00

Early in the morning on Feb. 27, there will be several "booms!" south of the Georgia Institute of Technology campus. A high-rise building will cave in on itself, and after a few minutes, all that will remain will be a pile of rubble. A few blocks away, a similar tower is also being demolished – although in a less dramatic manner.

The demolition of the two buildings marks a historic milestone in Atlanta – the culmination of 16 years of labor that has transformed the city into a model for the nation. It's a history that began three-quarters of a century ago – when Atlanta also pioneered housing programs that were emulated across America. The buildings, public housing for senior and disabled citizens, were named after men with storied histories – Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Charles Foster Palmer – but the buildings themselves have become obsolete to the point where demolition was the only option. Moreover, not only were the physical facilities beyond repair, so too were the public policies that had allowed a marvelous idea to degenerate into a system that guaranteed human failure.

We remember Roosevelt well as one of America's greatest presidents. Palmer is less distinct in our nation's memory. He was an Atlanta developer who not only felt compassion for a third of the nation that lived in slums, but also realized that America could not ready itself for the imminent World War if its citizens did not have decent housing.

Palmer's urging convinced Roosevelt of the need for public housing, and Atlanta became the first city to build "projects." Roosevelt House and Palmer House memorialized that achievement. But public policies changed, and the projects declined from neighborhoods of hope and achievement into prisons of despair and grinding poverty. Ultimately, the more than 40 housing projects across Atlanta severely damaged the city's economy, livability and schools. The honor bestowed on Roosevelt and Palmer by naming projects after these visionary leaders began to tarnish. They had been motivated by a desire to give Americans a chance and a square deal. Over time, public housing became the opposite, condemning successive generations to poverty, dysfunction, joblessness and poor education.

The Atlanta Housing Authority in 1994 under a new CEO, Renee Lewis Glover, began an aggressive program to replace the blighted projects with healthy neighborhoods. Glover took over an agency besieged with problems and turned it into a national model for civic revitalization. Her bywords that have governed AHA over the last 16 years are: integrity, vision and business strategy. Indeed, AHA embodies those concepts in its work, and Atlanta has been the beneficiary.

The demolitions bring us back to the original vision of Roosevelt and Palmer. They wanted low-income Americans to have opportunity and the means to move up in society. That is what AHA is doing today, assisting 6,000 more families with housing than the agency was able to do when all of its funds were consumed maintaining the obsolete housing projects. Academic studies attest to the fact that families receiving assistance today – living in revitalized communities or in voucher-assisted housing of their choice – enjoy better lives. Their children, once denied good access to good schools, have the same educational opportunities as all young people. Housing-assisted families are employed in about the same percentages as the general population. Other academic studies underscore that AHA's programs have energized much of the resurgence in Atlanta over the last decade and a half.

The ceremony on Feb. 27 commemorates that history – from hope to despair and now back to hope.

This Week at AHA: Jan. 31 to Feb. 4

2011-02-04T12:29:00.000-08:00

It’s been a week of voicing the good works and accomplishments of the Atlanta Housing Authority, as well as continuing the stimulus-financed improvements to our 13 high-rises throughout the city.

Here are the highlights:

AHA President & CEO Renee Glover recently spoke with the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta about the mission, vision, and many successes the housing authority has experienced. These successes have not only benefited our residents but the city of Atlanta too. A transcript of her interview is here, as is an audio stream of the talk: http://www.frbatlanta.org/podcasts/transcripts/perspectivesonrealestate/11jan27_glover.cfm

In the second of a three-part series, Renee Glover offers her thoughts on the many barriers confronting the so-called Hard to House. "…[T]he hard to house often suffer from some form of social stigma – whether caused by disability or behavior. Also, they often have physical needs and specific service needs that require specialized housing…" The full essay is here: http://ahalessonslearned.blogspot.com/2011/01/so-called-hard-to-house-face-multiple.html

ARRA-funded renovations at Hightower Manor at 2610 MLK Drive in Atlanta are nearing completion. New furniture, art, and fitness equipment should be installed by the first week of March, says Frank Covington, project manager. A grand opening celebration will be held in the spring. AHA received $26.5 million in stimulus funds to improve the lives of residents at our 13 high-rises through improvements to the properties.

Renee Glover at the Fed: "We need to stop the practice of concentrating families in poverty."

2011-01-30T09:34:00.000-08:00

Atlanta Housing Authority President & CEO Renee Glover recently spoke to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.

The transcript of her interview is below.

Listen to the interview here:

http://www.frbatlanta.org/podcasts/transcripts/perspectivesonrealestate/11jan27_glover.cfm

Atlanta's Mixed-Income Communities:

Planning with the End in Mind

Jessica Dill: Welcome to the Federal Center for Real Estate Analytics podcast series. I'm Jessica Dill with the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Today we're talking with Renée Glover, president and CEO of the Atlanta Housing Authority, to find out more about trends in public housing.

Ms. Glover, thank you for joining us.

Renée Glover: Well, thank you. I'm honored to participate.

Dill: What is the current trend in public housing, and more specifically, what is the Atlanta model and how did you arrive at that model?

Glover: Well, let me start with your first question. I believe that there is a national trend toward community building. What I mean by that is I think we need to stop the practice of concentrating families in poverty, and we've got to holistically build community around things that will strengthen society at its core.

In terms of the Atlanta model, there's an old saying: "You have to plan with the end in mind." The end that we have in mind is economically integrated communities where families can thrive and can be successful. So, we came up with some guiding principles:

First, we wanted to end the practice of concentrating poor families in distressed communities because we knew that type of approach does not yield healthy, self-sufficient families or healthy children focused on their future and their education.

Second, we needed to engage private partners.

[Third, we needed] to create great market-rate communities with opportunities for low-income families.

That then means, what kind of financial engineering would we have to do in order to make those opportunities available and affordable to those families?

The fourth guiding principle is to look at all of the elements needed for a healthy community to thrive. The first element is always making sure that the neighborhood public schools are the very best so that the kids are being prepared to be competitive in a global world. The second is looking at the quality of the green space and other infrastructure in the community in terms of retail, restaurants, recreational facilities that really make for a good community and a desirable destination.

The fifth guiding principle has everything to do with developing the human capital and setting the standards and expectations as high as possible.

That, in effect, describes the model, but in simpler terms what we are doing is mainstreaming the families, mainstreaming the real estate, and, as a consequence, mainstreaming the Atlanta Housing Authority to be a community builder as opposed to an organization that is just focused on running programs that don't pay attention to the outcome.

Dill: Does the Atlanta Housing Authority track its former tenants? How have they fared, and where have they gone?

Glover: We absolutely track the residents who were living in the former housing projects. The good news is that, once they are out of these very dysfunctional projects that concentrated poverty, the families have moved on to do all kinds of wonderful things. We actually have enlisted various academic institutions to do studies to look at how the families are faring when they move, and, without exception, the reports established that the families are living in much better communities, in terms of better school zones, better amenities, better jobs, and lesser impacts of poverty.

Dill: Given the unprecedented unemployment rates, have you witnessed a change in the demographic of those who come to the Housing Authority looking for help?

Glover: Well, you know, it's interesting. In 2004, we decided that in order to help break the vicious cycle of poverty, we had to raise standards and expectations. One of our requirements is that families are engaged in the workforce, job training, or education in order to be eligible for the subsidy that is provided. As a consequence, we have not seen any dramatic change in the demographics because with the families understanding what the standards are, we typically see families who are either engaged in job training, education, or the workforce.

Dill: Do the existing housing policies and housing infrastructure have the capacity to meet the new need and greater demand caused by the economic crisis?

Glover: Inevitably, there is always going to be more demand than we will ever have in terms of infrastructure. Once you rule out the elderly, who are at the end of their careers and certainly need great quality, affordable housing—and I think that our infrastructure is really being built up to meet that need—and then you take out the disabled persons who, either through illness or birth, have disabilities such that they need support to live—that's something our infrastructure is seeking to develop itself more to meet that need—then we come to families who need to be sure that we are providing the kind of educational training and support to be competitive in a global society. If we can do that, I think we can cut down on just the sheer numbers of persons who are needing the kind of support that I think this program was originally envisioned and created to meet.

Dill: What policy changes would be most helpful for addressing the housing needs of low-income families in the future, and what types of housing models are being considered?

Glover: We actually are in an era of good discussion around the right level of regulation that's needed in the housing arena. Oftentimes, the thought is [that] the more something is regulated, the more effective that program may be, but sometimes you can go too far with the regulatory scheme and it then causes unintended consequences. So the models that we're seeing are moving more towards mixed-income communities.

I think there is a great move toward making sure that when buildings are developed and built, and even when they are rehabilitated or modernized, there is a big emphasis on environmental considerations. This will have two benefits. One, it will lower the cost to families who pay the utilities, but it will also create a much healthier environmental condition where families are living. If we are truly able to strike the right balance and create economically integrated communities with greater density and mixed uses, communities will be sustainable and desirable places to live.

Dill: Ms. Glover, thanks again for joining us.

Glover: Well, thank you.

This Week at AHA: January 24-28, 2011

2011-01-28T12:31:00.000-08:00

It’s been another busy, rewarding week at the Atlanta Housing Authority.

Here are the highlights:

On Monday, our new chief human resources director began her first day at the agency. Charlene Crusoe-Ingram was a key former executive of Atlanta's signature corporation, Coca-Cola, and she brings deep experience in human resources, diversity, and in developing and executing people strategies that support business plans to AHA.
Story: http://atlantahousingauthority.blogspot.com/2011/01/aha-names-former-coca-cola-exec-as.html

AHA President and Chief Executive Officer Renee Lewis Glover has posted the newest entry to her blog, Lessons Learned. Entitled “When Is ‘Community’ Not ‘Community’?” her thoughtful essay highlights many of the key questions touching the work of the Atlanta Housing Authority.
Story: http://ahalessonslearned.blogspot.com/2011/01/when-is-community-not-community.html

An item this week in the Galveston (TX) Daily News recommended that its local housing authority take a tip from the Atlanta Model and specifically cited the success of the Villages of East Lake. This item received wide play, including postings on the National Public Radio website and in The India Times.
Story: http://galvestondailynews.com/story/206434

On Wednesday, AHA took a long stride deeply into the 21st century as its board of commissioners unanimously approved buying new computer software that will vastly improve productivity and save the agency millions of dollars.
Story: http://atlantahousingauthority.blogspot.com/2011/01/ahas-board-approves-new-software.html

The Atlanta Housing Authority is the largest housing agency in Georgia and one of the largest in the nation, serving approximately 50,000 people. AHA is committed to delivering quality affordable housing and spurring community development.

AHA's board approves new software

2011-01-26T12:54:00.000-08:00

The Atlanta Housing Authority took a long stride deeply into the 21st century on Wednesday, Jan. 26, as its Board of Commissioners unanimously approved buying a new Integrated ERP System to replace the current Oracle business systems and the host of MS Excel & Access solutions being used to manage core operations.

This solution will vastly improve individual and overall business productivity and save millions of dollars annually for the agency.

“The effect will be transformational,” said Samir Saini, AHA’s Chief Technology Officer. “This investment will deliver much needed productivity for AHA and our employees, ultimately improving the way we service our participants and the community at large.”

The board approved not to exceed $10 million to procure an Integrated ERP solution to:

· Automate AHA’s business processes
· Introduce paperless processes
· Eliminate many processes that are now done manually
· Eliminate data-entry redundancies
· Create one source of the truth
· Create 100% data accuracy and completeness
· Create automated data exchange with AHA’s external partners

The new Integrated ERP system will be implemented in a phased approach beginning in fiscal year 2012 with a payback period for the investment estimated at three to four years. The savings will be $3.5 million to $4.5 million annually into perpetuity.

AHA’s current software needs replacement because employees now lose significant productivity by manually entering and validating the same set of data multiple times in multiple systems, because manual data is entered that already resides in partner's computerized systems, leading to errors and rework, and because business critical data is stored in numerous disparate systems.
It is difficult now to analyze data and obtain an enterprise-wide view of information. The new systems will change that. AHA’s current disparate systems result in data security vulnerabilities, specifically the potential exposure of personal identifying information outside the organization. This issue will also change with the new system.

The new software will greatly help AHA in its evolution from a traditional public housing agency to a diversified real-estate company with a public mission.

The Atlanta Model in Texas

2011-01-25T11:01:00.000-08:00

Having the Galveston Housing Authority use public/private partnerships to develop some of the city's vacant land for residents with a variety of incomes was floated in this item from The Daily News.

"The idea is based on the East Lake model in Atlanta," the paper says.

The entire piece is here: http://galvestondailynews.com/story/206434

Glover: "Not Leaving AHA"

2011-01-24T16:25:00.000-08:00

A rumor is circulating that Renee Lewis Glover, CEO of the Atlanta Housing Authority, is "angling" to become the new superintendent of the Atlanta Public School system. The rumor is not true. The tale was manufactured and distributed on a local web site.

The person most knowledgeable about Glover's plans is Renee Lewis Glover herself.

"I have absolutely no reason or intention to leave the important work of community building we have undertaken at the Atlanta Housing Authority (AHA)," Glover says. "There is no truth to the assertion that I am or would be interested in leaving AHA or about me becoming school superintendent."

Glover writes a blog, Lessons Learned, and education reform is a frequent subject.

"However," Glover concluded, "supporting education reform in no way means I am interested in becoming a school superintendent. I am not."

Contact: Rick White 404-210-9029 (m) or 404-577-8900 (o)

-end-

AHA names former Coca-Cola exec as chief human resources officer

2011-01-24T11:34:00.000-08:00

A key former executive of Atlanta's signature corporation, Coca-Cola, has joined the Atlanta Housing Authority as its new Chief Human Resources Officer.

Charlene Crusoe-Ingram brings deep experience in human resources, diversity, and in developing and executing people strategies that support business plans.

She served at The Coca-Cola Company’s world headquarters here in Atlanta for 16 years as Director of Human Resources, Coca-Cola USA Fountain; Vice President, Client Services, Coca-Cola USA; Senior Vice President, Organization & People Strategy, Coca-Cola North America; and Corporate Vice President, Diversity.

Most recently Crusoe-Ingram was Executive Vice President of Human Resources at NDC Health Corporation in Atlanta.

After Crusoe-Ingram’s work at NDC Healthcare she became a private consultant. She has also been Vice President of Human Resources at Enterprise Systems Inc.; Divisional Personnel Manager at Abbott Laboratories; and Compensation Manager at American Hospital Supply Corporation.

She holds a bachelor's degree in sociology and a master's degree in human resources services from Bradley University in Illinois.

Crusoe-Ingram will report directly to AHA President and Chief Executive Officer Renee Lewis Glover.

The Atlanta Housing Authority is the largest housing agency in Georgia and one of the largest in the nation, serving approximately 50,000 people. AHA is committed to delivering quality affordable housing and spurring community development.

New Orleans Advocates Embrace "The Atlanta Model"

2011-01-19T02:39:00.000-08:00

The Pelican Post weighs in on housing issues in New Orleans and offers a strong endorsement of The Atlanta Model.

As the proposed redevelopment of the Iberville housing projects moves forward incrementally, nascent opposition to transforming the last of New Orleans remaining "Big 4" pre-Katrina projects has begun to swell, as evinced in the piece by Elizabeth Cook of NewOrleansindymedia.org. It's a shame that many self-labeled progressives do not seem to recognize actual progress, because if they objectively considered the Atlanta Housing Authority's transformation, they just might change their opinions....
At the beginning of Renee Glover's tenure as leader of the AHA, Atlanta had the highest murder rate in the nation, and in the housing projects, the crime rate was 6 times higher than in the rest of the city. Using a combination of HUD grants and private financing, the AHA demolished 14,000 units and preserved 2,000, mostly for elderly residents. Glover then leased the newly cleared land to private developers with the assurance that 40% of the new units would be reserved for tenants who met residency qualifications. 40% of the AHA's previous residents then relocated to these new mixed-income units, while the remaining 60% received housing vouchers dispersed throughout the city.

Read article

AHA's PMCOs kept properties and residents safe during last week's weather emergency

2011-01-18T08:08:00.000-08:00

AHA's PMCOs kept properties and residents safe during last week's weather emergency

By Lee Landenberger

The Sunday before Atlanta went into a four-day deep freeze was a day of planning and preparation for AHA's property managers. By week's end it was very clear that AHA's high-rise properties and its residents were safe, warm and well tended thanks to the efforts of employees who put in plenty of extra effort.

The Habitat Co. moved key maintenance personnel to its properties on Sunday before the storm hit.

"One of our maintenance staff has spent three nights at the Hotel Midtown across the street from Juniper in order to provide services to the residents of Juniper and Westminster," Habitat's Joyce Gardner said. "O'Quinn Montgomery, maintenance tech, came to Marietta with his sleeping bag and has been there since Sunday evening keeping walkways and driveways clear as well as turning units and clearing work orders."

Two Hightower residents were successfully ferried to their dialysis appointments thanks to Habitat's Mark Kyles, who also de-iced the front gate and, with maintenance staff, de-iced the hill at the entrance to the property on Tuesday morning allowing the Grady Hospital medical van to get to the front entrance.

Ken Evans, of Integral Property Management, said that, all things considered, everything went well at Peachtree Road as valets took great care of residents.

"They have assisted the residents whenever needed," Evans said, "everything from going to the grocery store to carrying their groceries up to their apartments."

The staff cleared all accessible routes with the help of the valets, Evans reported, and residents were advised to stay in whenever possible during the inclement weather and that staff would assist with meeting their needs.

Cheshire Bridge had the snow shoveled from all its community sidewalks and salted them. Residents were updated on conditions at least three times a day and were encouraged to stay inside. Security was on-site throughout the weather emergency.

The efforts of Lane Management provided excellent care to its residents during the severe weather.

Brenda Ford, Cosby's Property Manager, said team member Jeff Walker who lives near the property, walked to work every day to ensure all was well. He wasn't asked to do it, but acted on his own. He checked the status of residents listed on Non-Ambulatory Log and de-iced the property, including walkways.

Cosby's Concierge was on site every day during the bad weather checking on all Non-Ambulatory Residents along with Jeff Walker. Lathan Woods, Resident Director, stayed in contact daily with resident and floor leaders to ensure all residents were doing well. Adren Mathna, Choate Construction Supervisor, in charge of Cosby renovation, graciously assigned staff along with their heavy equipment to clear the community's parking lot. Brenda Ford and her entire maintenance team were on property Wednesday and Thursday to remove ice and check on residents.

At East Lake, Lane's Clarice Snell, Property Manager, called every resident in her community to make sure they were fine. Also community leaders and association members were in constant contact with her.

The Concierge and Herb Glenn, of the Service Staff, were on site daily to check on everyone. All residents listed on the Non-Ambulatory log were visited daily by the Concierge.

Belinda Farrington, Resident Services Director, called floor monitors and resident leaders daily.

"Several residents, Gloria Brown, Mary Mitchell, Roberta Hudson, and Ann Reese, have been true neighbors by making contact with each resident and making sure they have sufficient food and other necessities," Clarice Snell added.

Several East Lake residents require regular dialysis treatments. Transportation is provided by different carriers and could not pick up their patients due to poor conditions. One resident could not get to his treatments, so resident Minnie Neal personally took him for his treatment and picked him up afterward.

Althea Weston, Property Manager at Georgia Avenue/Martin Street, said the Concierge was on site daily last week and that he checked on the residents on the Non-Ambulatory log every hour to make sure they were well.

The property purchased cell phones for all residents without home phone service.

Lee McCall, Service Manager, and the entire service team were on site daily to ensure every residents heat was operating properly.

Trash chutes and dumpsters were monitored and cleared daily due to no trash pickup.

Rick Jones, Resident Services Director, called resident leaders and floor captains daily to ensure residents were doing well.

De-icer was put down on both properties.

Barbara Walker, Piedmont's Property Manager, residents were well tended during the storm. Pamela McBride, the essential service person, that lives on-site made coffee twice daily. She also ensured doughnuts and other breakfast snacks and tea were available for residents daily in lobby. She also removed ice from the parking lots and walkways out to the bus stop and, with the Concierge, checked on all the Non-Ambulatory residents.

Deloris Westmoreland, Resident Services Director, made phone contact with floor captains and resident leaders daily.

Renee Glover has torn down blighted projects, required tenants to work, and transformed lives.

2010-12-21T09:29:00.000-08:00

"No one can doubt that the 1996 reform of public assistance really did “end welfare as we know it,” as President Clinton said—reducing the welfare rolls from more than 5 million to fewer than 2 million households. Its signature five-year time limit on assistance drew millions of the poor back into the world of work, making the reform of cash welfare the greatest social-policy success of a generation."

Read full story

The affordable housing crisis

2010-12-06T07:11:00.000-08:00

Today's editorial page of the Atlanta Journal Constitution includes an op-ed authored by Ray Christman, executive director of the Livable Communities Coalition and Bruce Gunter, president of Progressive Redevelopment Inc.

The foreclosure crisis has had a devastating impact on metro Atlanta. While precise statistics are elusive, experts agree that there are in excess of 100,000 foreclosed properties on the market today, with another 60,000-plus coming on stream annually.

Read entire piece

The Weekly Standard magazine reviews Atlanta

2010-12-03T05:45:00.000-08:00

The Weekly Standard summarizes as follows:

For the city that once experienced the horrors of Techwood Homes, the nation's first public housing community, and a hotbed of gang violence and crime from the 1970s until its 1996 demolition, any improvement on the government housing front is welcome. And in light of the David Brooks-Paul Ryan- Arthur Brooks debate about size of government, the reforms Glover is pushing in Atlanta seem to reflect a marriage of pro-market values and limited government with an energetic governmental response to a societal problem.

See entire post here: http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/city-journal-fixing-public-housing_520606.html

HUSOCK: Reinventing public housing

2010-11-08T18:32:00.000-08:00

It is easy to despair over the persistence of black poverty. The social problem that just won't go away has resisted even the election of our first black president. The depth and complexity of its causes leads, understandably, to indifference born of frustration. That makes what's going on under the aegis of the Atlanta Housing Authority (AHA) and its reformist leader, Renee Glover, so unusual - and so hopeful. Not only has Ms. Glover demolished virtually all of the city's poverty- and crime-ridden public-housing projects, but she also has initiated large-scale individual interventions in the lives of the black poor that hold the promise of actually reducing the ranks of the underclass. The immodest but appropriate name for her work: "human transformation." -- Read More