The Olympics Are Always A Disaster For Poor People – Huffington Post

Though the two housing complexes had long been the target of developers, previous efforts to raze Techwood and Clark Howell had failed, due either to a lack of political will or the difficulty of removing the residents. But when Atlanta won its Olympics bid, the desire to showcase the city before hundreds of thousands of athletes, tourists and foreign dignitaries finally greased the wheels for the projects’ demolition.

“The Olympics provided the cover for the destruction,” said Larry Keating, a Georgia Tech urban planning professor who has studied the impact of the games on Atlanta’s low-income housing population. “I don’t think they could have mounted the campaign to knock it down with anywhere near the political effectiveness that they had without the Olympics.”

Residents of the two complexes were skeptical when city housing officials began showing up at tenant meetings, supposedly with good news, in the months after the bid announcement. The city had neglected them for years.

But with the Olympics coming to town, officials suddenly seemed to care. They told residents that the latest redevelopment plans would vastly upgrade their housing. Those promises led Techwood and Clark Howell’s residents to work with developers and housing officials in crafting a proposal that would satisfy the existing population, the developers, local officials and federal housing authorities, who would provide needed funding.

The initial proposal didn’t call for the total demolition of Techwood and Clark Howell, only for upgrades to the buildings that had fallen into disrepair. Subsequent drafts suggested a full redevelopment of the site that would replace some, though not all, of the public units ― and allow many of the residents to stay.

The planning process dragged on for nearly five years. The city’s political and housing authority leadership changed. New federal laws eliminated previous requirements that cities replace any public housing units they destroyed with an equal number elsewhere. And the final redevelopment plan aimed to demolish nearly all the units in the two complexes.

That plan, released in March 1995, would use $40 million in federal funding to tear down more than 1,100 homes at Techwood and Clark Howell and replace them with a new 900-unit mixed-income apartment complex. Forty percent of the new apartments ― 360 in total ― would serve as public housing. Forty percent would rent at market rates. The remaining 180 units would be “affordable housing” ― that is, the rents would be subsidized with federal tax credits for Atlantans with low and moderate incomes. It took the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development less than a month to approve Atlanta’s plan.

By the time the destruction actually began, the complexes were nearly empty. Although more than 90 percent of Techwood’s homes had been occupied in 1989, the year before Atlanta won its bid, the residents began to flee during the five years of planning debate, fearing that they would eventually have to move anyway. By April 1993, the occupancy rate in the two complexes had dropped below 50 percent. They were 77 percent vacant by that October, Georgia State professor Harvey K. Newman found in his 2002 research on Techwood’s demolition.

Atlanta housing officials, even today, paint this change as a case of people choosing to leave for better opportunities and note that the residents of Techwood and Clark Howell had voted to approve the plan that led to the demolition. But residential flight was out of character for the neighborhood, which had a relatively stable population before the games. In 1990, the average Techwood resident had lived there for nearly eight years, according to Keating’s research, and nearly one-third of its families had been there more than 11 years.

Some residents left of their own volition, no doubt. But others were surely worn down by a long, complicated process that featured numerous iterations of the plans and left residents unsure whether they would be able to stay after the Olympics.

The city’s housing authority assisted in getting people out of the complexes, revising provisions so residents could be evicted for “minor lease infractions,” Newman wrote. Officials also spun the results of residential surveys to make it seem as if the majority of the people in Techwood and Clark Howell wanted to leave, said Lawrence Vale, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who studied Atlanta’s Olympics housing legacy after the games. One such survey, for instance, found that 51 percent of residents said they expected to live elsewhere after the Olympics. Officials touted the results as evidence that people wanted to move. What the survey really showed, Vale said, was that many residents thought they would have to move.

The residents’ flight served to deepen the neighborhood’s problems, both Vale and Keating said. Widespread vacancies led to increased crime rates and contributed to the idea that people wanted out ― which made the neighborhood an even easier political target.

“It was a rail job,” Keating said.

By the time the Olympic Games began, the demolition was complete, leaving behind the one building that alone bears the designation of the Techwood Homes Historic District. The listing in the federal historic register saved it, barely.