Atlanta was the first city to erect public housing in the United States. It started with Techwood Homes, an all-white development that went up in 1936. Sixty years later it would be torn down, along with others of the now-neglected developments that were the promise of FDR's New Deal. Akira Drake Rodriguez leads us through the story of how residents of public housing in Atlanta worked with, against and despite housing policy in their city.
Transcript
Hannah McCarthy: Hi there. This is part two of a two parter on federal housing in the United States. And while you can listen to it all by its lonesome, I do recommend that you hit pause. Go back and listen to part one on housing policy in the US. The federal government has not always been involved in housing, but once it got involved, the policies that it adopted shaped housing and home ownership in drastic ways. Listen to that one to help you better understand what we're about to talk about in part two, Housing and Atlanta, Georgia.
Nick Capodice: Because Atlanta had the first public housing, right.
Hannah McCarthy: The very first 1936 Techwood Homes. The federal government's answer to both houselessness and what it saw as insufficient housing, what it would call slums in the United States. And just in case you do skip part one, I'll go ahead and not bury the lead. Techwood Homes was an all white housing development. Atlanta [00:01:00] also built all black housing developments, but public housing was segregated as a matter of policy. So keep that in mind. Let's get into it. This is civics one on one. I'm Hannah McCarthy.
Nick Capodice: I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy: And to talk about public housing in general is nearly impossible. There are so many stories, so many different approaches and shifts across the country. I am choosing Atlanta because of the story that public housing residents created in that city. It's a story that Akira Drake Rodriguez, who we met in part one.
Akira Drake Rodriguez: I'm assistant professor of city and regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania's Weitzman School of Design.
Hannah McCarthy: Describes in her book Diverging Space for Deviance.
Akira Drake Rodriguez: So in terms of piloting public housing policies, administration and programs, and sort of distributing them out across the country, certainly Atlanta has a very sort of dominating role.
Hannah McCarthy: So before we can dive into the housing itself, it's important to know what Atlanta looked [00:02:00] like as public housing first went up in that city and not just housing wise, but politically.
Akira Drake Rodriguez: So after Reconstruction, Atlanta did elect some black representatives to city council, to the board. However, that was immediately repealed with the implementation of this white primary in the 1890s, where effectively the Democratic Party as a private institution was allowed to engage in race based discrimination. So this was not protected under any sort of constitutional amendment. This was simply the way of life. And this was a very sort of popular play of Southern states post reconstruction. So you see it in Texas and Louisiana and Georgia. And this way, primary existed until 1946 when it was repealed by the Georgia Supreme Court. And you start to see this like increase in black descriptive representation as a result. However, until that point, this sort of like geography [00:03:00] of black Atlanta was a very constrained.
Hannah McCarthy: Now black Atlantans made up around 32% of the population of Atlanta, but resided on only about 16% of the land.
Akira Drake Rodriguez: And so they were unable to get, you know, sidewalks, landfills, trash service, bus service, really any sort of public goods and services because they were effectively barred from voting.
Nick Capodice: Okay. I don't think I even knew about the white primary as an even if black Atlantans can technically vote in the general election, they weren't allowed to decide who they would ultimately be voting for.
Hannah McCarthy: Right. Because it isn't the government who is in charge of the primary, it's the parties. So when a whole demographic is prevented from selecting their choice candidate, when a whole group is not allowed to say we want this politician because we believe that this politician will take care of us, a couple of things happen. One, politicians are simply not courting that demographics vote. That [00:04:00] demographic is seen as less politically consequential to that means that that demographic is actually less likely to be taken care of as and have city resources like trash collection and street maintenance in the areas that they occupy. And that is exactly what happened in Atlanta with the all white primary when it came to what the black community actually received.
Nick Capodice: So you had neighborhoods that the city was not actually taking care of, full of people who did not have much political power. And of course, that lack of political power is part of the reason that the neighborhoods weren't well taken care of.
Hannah McCarthy: And at the beginning of the episode, I told you that Akira wrote a book. Its title is Diverging Space for Deviance, and I want to come back to that.
Nick Capodice: I did wonder about that title. Hana Deviant usually has sort of a negative connotation.
Hannah McCarthy: In this case. It's a term that Akira found in this political science article from the 1980s. Akira is specifically talking about political deviance [00:05:00] here, which is a term I had never heard before. By that she means people who deviate, who don't fit a certain standard of political behavior, who maybe don't vote as often, whose demographic is passed over in the political sphere, whose lives politicians don't feel like they need to represent.
Akira Drake Rodriguez: The deviant category, which was, you know, unemployed people who deal with substance abuse, people who are, you know, single mothers, for example. Those are considered deviants. Especially because they do not participate politically in the same way. So these are not the most engaged voters. These are not the targets of political ads and campaigns. And so they are both marginalized in public policy, but also severely underrepresented.
Hannah McCarthy: We're going to come back to this idea of the political deviant [00:06:00] right after a quick break. But before we do, just a reminder that civics one on one also has a newsletter, because let me tell you, we cannot fit everything into these episodes. We need somewhere else for all of the information to go. If you were a fan of trivia and ephemera, I highly recommend that you subscribe to that newsletter at civics101podcast.org. It's free, it's fun. It never has any ads, and we're not there to clog your inbox up. We're just there to talk. Again, you can subscribe at civics101podcast.org. We're back. This is civics one on one. And we're talking about public housing in Atlanta, Georgia. Right before the break, Akira was describing to us this notion of political deviance. And here's why. Atlanta is such an interesting city to look at when it comes to public housing and its segregationist roots. Because Akira noticed something about a, quote, deviant population in the all black housing developments in Atlanta.
Akira Drake Rodriguez: I sort of dug deeper [00:07:00] into the history of tenant organizations and the role they played in sort of taking the politically deviant public housing resident into a more sort of politically active and knowledgeable person. And so this was the idea was to kind of understand how the politics of public housing changed over the course of the 20th century. And so what I was really more interested in was the sort of political activism and organizing of tenants over time and how that changed based on public housing policy.
Nick Capodice: Tenant organizations like when tenants come together to complain to the landlord about leaky pipes or what have you.
Hannah McCarthy: That's not how it started in Atlanta, though. That is where it ended up, just not where it started. Like Akira said, tenant organizing changed as housing policy changed. So, for example, the first all black public housing in Atlanta went up around the [00:08:00] same time as the first all white public housing in Atlanta. It was called university Homes and the relationship between the tenant organizations and the people managing these homes started out like this.
Akira Drake Rodriguez: They were allies out of the managers. And so because the managers depended on the tenants and vice versa to make public housing a viable program and policy in the United States, they did a lot of work together. They did a lot of programs, a lot of classes, a lot of political education, a lot of, you know, gendered activities like, you know, ROTC and and small domestic classes for women, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, etc.. To me, it was really important to study this history of public housing in Atlanta, because the first black public housing development opened in 1937 before the white primary had ended. And so they weren't able [00:09:00] to get streetlights, they weren't able to get sidewalks, they were able to get like good housing. They were able to get housing that was actually managed by black people. So there was no white landlord. There were only black housing managers and staff.
Nick Capodice: So before the white primary had ended, meaning that black voters still could not select their choice candidates, they could not get proper representation. But inside of this all black public housing, there was this kind of microcosm of power.
Hannah McCarthy: But there's a limit here, and that limit is about who is actually allowed into these public housing communities.
Nick Capodice: There were rules about who was and was not allowed to live in public housing.
Akira Drake Rodriguez: Yeah. So again, in the beginning, the New Deal policies for public housing were very conservative. And so you needed a minimum income, you needed a maximum income, you needed to have your employment verified. Someone would come to your house and conduct an interview. They were checking [00:10:00] references. And so it was it was quite difficult actually, to get access in to public housing. And once you're kind of family situation changed, whether you lost your job or you were even widowed or divorced, you were evicted from the from the housing development.
Nick Capodice: I just have to ask, what is with this widowed and divorced thing? Wouldn't people who are potentially losing the income of a partner need assistance all the more?
Hannah McCarthy: All right. Here is what you've got to understand about public housing. It is not actually for all members of the public, and the qualifiers are not as straightforward as a certain level of income. Some limitations that continue to exist to this day are based on whether or not you've been arrested or if you have a criminal conviction. I should also clarify that while it is overseen and funded by the federal government, public housing is run by local housing authority. So there are variations in how things are [00:11:00] done. But when things first got started in Atlanta, there were these bi racial advisory committees for public housing made up of the city's elites, and they had certain ideas about certain populations.
Akira Drake Rodriguez: They were all sort of subscribing to the same sorts of politics, namely what we call racial uplift politics. We kind of look at the minutes of these local advisory committees. There was a lot of discussion about, you know, we should set rents lower for the black developments because even though there are two adults working, that's still less than the wages of a white male earner in the white public housing developments, they were allowing for higher maximum incomes because they realized that because of the racialization of the kind of emerging mortgage industry, there actually wasn't a lot of financing, a lot of land available [00:12:00] for black private homeownership. And so they kind of made these exceptions for black families.
Nick Capodice: So the committee recognized that because of racist and segregationist policies in the workplace and in the housing market. That it would be reasonable to have lower rents in all black public housing, both because of lower income and because even families who should be able to buy a home couldn't obtain mortgages.
Hannah McCarthy: And it wasn't just about being reasonable. It was about uplifting black families. And this, by the way, was a specific motivation on the part of some educated, prosperous, influential black Americans in this era. There was a sense of responsibility for the well-being and civil and social elevation of black Americans generally. But what will being actually looked like could be limited. So lower rents for black families. Agreed.
Akira Drake Rodriguez: But then when it came time for [00:13:00] the sort of allowances around the number of individuals in the unit.
Hannah McCarthy: Meaning how many people can live in an apartment and in what situations.
Akira Drake Rodriguez: The woman named Florence Reed kind of makes this point like, Hey, what about teachers? They're single. They have to be single. That's sort of the law at the time. They should be allowed to you know, they should be the exception. That shouldn't just be about full families. It should be about these single women. Or at least allow for a single woman to reside with the family, as is often the case with people who take on caretaking duties in order to get room and board.
Nick Capodice: And we definitely need to talk about compulsory singledom for teachers in a future episode. But back to this woman, Florence Reed. She's basically saying that we should figure out an exception for single low wage earning women as well.
Akira Drake Rodriguez: And this was struck down. This was going to be according to a lot of the black men on the advisory committee. That would be the [00:14:00] end of the black family. That would create too much disorganization and chaos in the black family. So although they were advocating for a lot of the unique sort of economic and labor and class issues, they were not always so forgiving when it came to gender or other forms of deviance.
Nick Capodice: There's that word deviance again. So single women are a politically deviant population at this time.
Akira Drake Rodriguez: Even when public housing was fully funded was really just for like people who couldn't afford to buy a house. And you had to be working. It had to be, you know, like literally you get sick and you lose your job and they evict you from public housing back in the day. So it was always just like really kind of like morality was like, was it? And it wasn't about like, caring compassion. It was about, like, judgment. Right? Like you're not deserving enough of this benefit. You're not contributing to the economy, so you're not going to get any money [00:15:00] in the end. You're not going to be able to benefit.
Nick Capodice: So this housing program, which was designed to give homes to Americans who needed them, was also designed to exclude disenfranchized and vulnerable populations, in part because of these value judgments about who was deserving of public housing, who hit the moral or ethical brief.
Hannah McCarthy: Honestly, that in a nutshell, sometimes feels like the twisted history of federal financial assistance for low and no wage people and families in America. But let's get back to how people used their situation to get what they really needed. You've got these all black public housing developments with all sorts of resources for the community and not just the tenant community, but the surrounding black community as well.
Akira Drake Rodriguez: They put in a library, they put in one of the second public auditoriums in the city. And so literally the right to assemble comes through this public housing policy at once. The primary is deemed unconstitutional in 1946. [00:16:00] They are immediately registering voters in this auditorium and in this public housing development. So it starts off immediately as this sort of hotbed of political activism.
Hannah McCarthy: This new high density physical space ended up being crucial to political power in the community, specifically Akira found among single women.
Nick Capodice: But earlier, you said that this concept of a single woman in a public housing apartment was not the advisory committees idea of the right kind of family.
Hannah McCarthy: That started to shift with the 1949 Federal Housing Act, which was passed with the goal of providing a, quote, decent home and suitable living environment for every American family. As the country entered a post-World War two housing crisis, it's basically Harry Truman's expansion of what Franklin Delano Roosevelt started. Suburban areas boomed while cities were viewed as increasingly unsightly. [00:17:00] This was, by the way, 100% tied to increasingly white suburbs and black cities and racism. And the act included money for cities across the country to demolish their, quote unquote, slums.
James Baldwin: They were tearing down his house because San Francisco is engaging, as most northern cities now are engaged in something called urban renewal, which means moving Negroes out. It means Negro removal. That is what it means. And the federal government is it is an accomplice to this fact.
Nick Capodice: This was a nationwide program to demolish neighborhoods.
Hannah McCarthy: Which is not too terribly different from how the first public housing in Atlanta came to be. Teakwood and university homes were constructed where, quote, blighted neighborhoods had stood only a year before. The difference in this project, [00:18:00] which was billed as urban renewal, was that it was more widespread. Despite the pledge for more housing, the federal government also limited spending on housing infrastructure itself.
Nick Capodice: Infrastructure like the materials for the apartments themselves, cheaper material, shoddy or construction, etc..
Hannah McCarthy: Bingo. So you have more apartments, but not particularly well built apartments. Now, by the way, the 1949 Federal Housing Act included a provision that for every dwelling that was demolished, an affordable housing unit would be built. But that 1 to 1 construction did not exactly pan out. And then, of course, with the clearance of loads of black neighborhoods across the country, public housing saw an influx of new tenants, new tenants who joined tenant associations.
Akira Drake Rodriguez: And so you start to see the public housing development and particularly the tenant association change from being [00:19:00] kind of, you know, coupled households and male leadership and the tenant association to single parent households and more women leadership in these organizations.
Hannah McCarthy: And it is with this shift that Akira started to notice something powerful, this politically deviant population, black women, often single mothers, leveraging the power of their numbers to make gains for their communities.
Akira Drake Rodriguez: Mary Sanford, he was the head of the Tenant Association and Perry Homes was very pivotal to getting subway service. And in Northwest Spur, where most of the public housing was concentrated, and Louise Whatley, who also kind of was tenant organizer at Carver Homes and other major development in the Northwest. Susie Laborde I write about her a lot. She was the organizer at Great Eight Homes, and she went to the White House and met with President [00:20:00] and started economic opportunity. Atlanta. Even Davis, who also met with Jimmy Carter and brought a lot of resources to East Lake Meadows in particular.
Nick Capodice: So you had these women who, because of housing policy, had needs that weren't being met. And so they pushed they pushed for better conditions. But it also sounds like those conditions didn't stop at the apartment gate, so to speak, because subway service, for example, is city infrastructure, like it might serve public housing, but it changes the actual landscape.
Hannah McCarthy: Exactly. They were attempting to bend their physical space to meet their needs. And then on that apartment level, there was a shift away from tenant associations being the allies of management to prove public housing a viable project. These women knew it was a viable project. They were living there. They were creating political power. What they needed was investment [00:21:00] in this viable program.
Archival: This project is 40 years old, the oldest one in the world, and it's also to the first one built and the largest one. And we have not gotten anything and it's gone down. The community building look like a shamble. What are you prepared.
Archival: To do to see that these things are taken care.
Archival: Of? Whatever action needs to be done, if we have to, whatever step we have to take farther to go, we we we are just tired. The people is really tired.
Akira Drake Rodriguez: They are like the pipes are leaking, There's vermin. You never built a sidewalks. You actually never built anything after you initially build this out. And so they started engaging in a lot of direct actions like protests and rent strikes and occupations as a way to express their disapproval, but also to show themselves as sort of independent political thinkers and actors. There was meaningful change and, you know, so they got [00:22:00] policies, they got grievance procedures, they got autonomy, they got greater sort of control.
Hannah McCarthy: These women represented what Akira calls black feminist spatial politics. They were motivated by the public housing policies that shaped their lives, and they in turn used the public housing space to create a space conducive to their lives and their needs. Or is it cure? Calls it building cities hospitable to the modern deviant. And then just as soon as these black feminist politics were truly gaining momentum.
Akira Drake Rodriguez: These sort of successes because of the timing of. Kind of correlate when when we see the federal government pulling back from funding public housing. And so again, and thinking about those earlier kind of like social constructions, a policy target as the, you know, tenants become less white and less married, [00:23:00] you start to see this sort of shift in how the government is approaching and thinking about public housing. It goes from kind of like a necessary steppingstone for the middle class to, again, this sort of housing of last resort and creating almost like a new slum.
Nick Capodice: Even though the whole point of these developments was to replace what city leaders designated as slums.
Akira Drake Rodriguez: They constantly like think of them as an eyesore. And it's actually pretty ironic or funny, or maybe both or neither, because these public housing developments were supposed to replace slums which were also maligned in the same way. So any time you have this sort of concentration of what I call deviance, but, you know, underemployed, you know, marginalized populations, vulnerable populations, a concentration of them and in substandard housing is considered a blight. Right. Is considered a scourge, not just for those who live [00:24:00] in it, but also for city leaders in particular.
Hannah McCarthy: Public housing was integrated with the 1968 Fair Housing Act. We talked about this earlier with Richard. Right. You could no longer segregate these homes into all white and all black. And while it took some time, the populations of places like Teakwood homes, the first ever and all white federal public housing development in Atlanta did eventually integrate. But this is also an era of the federal government pulling back. Five years into the Fair Housing Act, President Richard Nixon announced that this model of federally subsidized housing construction had essentially failed the new model one that he promised to be a lot less expensive for taxpayers would be to directly provide people with money to seek housing in the private market.
Akira Drake Rodriguez: Tenants were very protective of their property and really just wanting greater investment.
Archival: When you have said that it's the government [00:25:00] got down, maybe it else. But I tell you what, you got some proud folks here and I'm just as proud as I am. If I lived in Sandy Springs and I tell you what, my home, my yards are just like those in Sandy Springs.
Akira Drake Rodriguez: And so, you know, the seventies and eighties are a rough time in urban policy. So federal government doesn't have any money. Cities definitely don't have any money. And so it is very, very difficult to get any new resources.
Hannah McCarthy: No money, by the way, because of a massive recession in the seventies. So the physical conditions are deteriorating, but the community and the space shaping power it created remained for as long as it could.
Akira Drake Rodriguez: All of them were really, really fierce advocates for public housing. They wanted to keep public housing. You know, maybe they wanted to change the shape of it, change the funding, change the population. But they were very sort of adamant that public [00:26:00] housing wasn't good and did not deserve to be demolished.
Hannah McCarthy: Eventually, though, they would be between the housing voucher program, which was appealing to many public housing tenants and the disinvestment of cities. This space for black feminist politics was about to crumble.
Akira Drake Rodriguez: Literally, it was all kind of for naught. And so because of this very sort of constrained resource environment of austerity, you see these conservative politics emerge and eventually kind of contribute to the demise of public housing.
Hannah McCarthy: And then in 1990. Atlanta, Georgia, won the bid for the 1996 Olympics.
Archival: The 1996 Olympic Games to the city of Atlanta.
Akira Drake Rodriguez: So [00:27:00] the Olympics is kind of like the major catalysts, right? Investment is coming in. This is a mega event. The Atlanta Olympics was the first modern Olympics to turn a profit. They made $3 billion at the Olympics. And the goal was like, we absolutely cannot have this blight or the eyesore of public housing near our new stadium.
Hannah McCarthy: This was as straightforward as, Oh, no, If you drive toward the center of Atlanta along the freeway and glanced to the side, you'll see the sprawling eyesore. And that will not do for all of the visitors headed our way.
Akira Drake Rodriguez: And so the demolition discussions, the redevelopment discussions began in the early nineties, and they were demolishing public housing in Atlanta through the late 2010.
Archival: By this [00:28:00] time next year, all public housing projects in the city of Atlanta will be gone. The Atlanta Housing Authority says it's ahead of schedule in reaching its goal to be the first major city...
Hannah McCarthy: Check out our episode on the Olympics, by the way, for a clearer picture of what hosting the Olympics often does to cities and why it is not always positive. So there is this long, drawn out process of demolishing these developments. And I should mention, not every city demolished all of its old public housing stock. Many still exist in this country today, but Atlanta did.
Nick Capodice: But they had to replace it with something, right?
Hannah McCarthy: Well, a few years before the Olympics, the federal government launched a program called Hope six. It was designed to replace existing public housing with mixed income rentals. Smaller developments that are usually privately owned. Some of the apartments in these developments are rented at market value and others at a more affordable cost for qualifying low income renters. These low income apartments [00:29:00] can either be paid for with Section eight vouchers or are simply available because the government gives that private company a subsidy to provide affordable housing.
Akira Drake Rodriguez: When you privatize the management at lease of public housing, you're privatizing kind of like the leasing terms and leasing options, which means that you may meet the kind of like income requirement, but you have bad credit or you were arrested or, you know, you took a drug test and let's say you're disqualified or someone in your household hits these kind of strikes. And so that kind of lost a lot of population as well prior to you even demolishing them. They were doing a lot of what was called the one strike rule, which is if anyone was arrested in the household, you could be evicted. And so you see these like changes in welfare policy, changes in public housing policy, all sort of happening at the same time in the early nineties. So [00:30:00] the actual population that has to be kind of relocated or rehoused is shrinking every day.
Hannah McCarthy: So again, Nick, this is the Atlanta story, one of many public housing stories in the country. Atlanta's post Nixon housing era looks different from Boston's. Boston's looks different from San Francisco's, San Francisco's from Kansas Cities. But the Atlanta story is important because of what occurred in developments that would eventually be deemed a failure. Political power and attention achieved by a deviant group, in part because of the space they occupied. When that space was eliminated. So was their coalition.
Akira Drake Rodriguez: So I was reading a lot about these mixed income developments, and I noted how there were homeowner [00:31:00] associations to kind of advocate for the interest of the homeowners and the development. But there were no tenant organizations. And the reason for that was that a lot of the developers said that, what do you need a tenant organization for if, like you have a new apartment? Right. And so the idea was that the only reason that these tenant organizations existed was to complain about the property or complain to the landlord, and that was effectively ended.
Hannah McCarthy: I asked Akira for her one big takeaway from all of this research What should people learn from the story of what happened, if so briefly? Within Atlanta's original public housing.
Akira Drake Rodriguez: Tenant associations are for more than just complaining about your landlord. They are literal spaces of working class politics, organizing and mobilization. And so they should be standardized everywhere and not just sort of [00:32:00] like this weird, archaic thing. So that would be my my one takeaway.
Hannah McCarthy: So the Atlanta story, you know, the why of telling it is not simply that it was the first for me in the context of federal public housing policy, a policy that was explicitly designed to segregate a policy that prohibited so many black Americans from securing a path to wealth, which, by the way, is the same thing as a path to political power and civic influence. That is why the Atlanta story and this last message of a is is so significant, so important because political power and civic influence happened anyway, both in spite of and because of these policies. This [00:33:00] episode is produced by me, Hannah McCarthy, with help from Nick Capodice. Christina Phillips is our senior producer. Jacqui Fulton is our producer and Rebecca Lavoie is our executive producer. Music In this episode by Anemoia, Nul Tiel Records, Kesha, Xylo-Ziko, Experia and Chris Zabriskie. You can listen to part one of this two-parter on federal housing by going to our website, civics101podcast.org and clicking on episodes. It is there you will find all of the many, many other episodes that we have made, and you'll also have the opportunity to submit a question of your own. Part of our job is to answer them sometimes in an episode. Civics 101 [00:34:00] is a production of NHPR New Hampshire Public Radio.