A Reflection on Atlanta – Housing. People. Neighborhoods. Daring to Dream. Thinking Differently.
Over this past week, I was asked to participate in planning a national association’s future. How may we affect and influence the future of housing and community development in our nation? It was an honor to be at the table and tapped as a subject matter expert for this effort.
To inspire us to think big, we had the opportunity to visit the Atlanta Housing Authority and see the work they are doing under the HUD Choice Neighborhoods Award they received. What follows are a few of the photos from the visit. If you’d like to see the full (50+) photo gallery you may HERE.
You may ask, “What is the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative (CNI)?” CNI is a competitive grant award program that focuses on PEOPLE. HOUSING. NEIGHBORHOODS. Today that grant amount is $50 million.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development describes the CNI grant program as:
“The Choice Neighborhoods program leverages significant public and private dollars to support locally driven strategies that address struggling neighborhoods with distressed public or HUD-assisted housing through a comprehensive approach to neighborhood transformation. Local leaders, residents, and stakeholders, such as public housing authorities, cities, schools, police, business owners, nonprofits, and private developers, come together to create and implement a plan that revitalizes distressed HUD housing and addresses the challenges in the surrounding neighborhood.”
As noted, the Atlanta Housing Authority and the City of Atlanta (GA) are a CNI grantee. Choice Atlanta shows their efforts and their progress. As you can see by the photos above, the work is amazing! Under Choice Atlanta, the partners around the table were able to drive significant change and impact in their Scholars Landing neighborhood.
The original 675 public housing units have been demolished and nearly 600 mixed-income (low-income affordable, workforce, and market rate) units are built or being built in their place. This also includes homeownership units adjacent to rental units. Additionally, all this work was done with residents in the master planning process and subject to relocation and/or return to the site post renovation. Partners in the People and Neighborhood spaces have achieved greater outcomes across workforce, Health, and Educational realms. These areas are measured with metrics approved by all partners governing the process and project decisions are democratic.
With these photos, I think we would all be hard pressed to disagree on how wonderful these outcomes are especially if we look to check the people and neighborhood indicators.
The foundation of this success has been listening to residents, including them and community partners in the project governance, and leveraging their initial CNI grant to bring millions, hundreds of millions more in public and private investments to the table. Well done Choice Atlanta!
I could end the post here, but I feel I need to continue. I have been inspired for decades by developers who build quality housing spaces – including affordable housing and low-income affordable housing units. The commitment to quality is often impeccable because we know when people live in high quality homes, it says you matter, you’re important, and you’re part of our community. When people feel that way, when we show dignity through housing and the amenities and supports around housing, people respond differently and live better lives. Better lives mean more involvement and ownership in our communities. Better lives mean reduced violence. Reduced violence and pivotal investments in struggling neighborhoods bring more investment and growth. It’s a model that can work everywhere when you design for it, when you measure it, and when you align for it.
I bring this up in hopes that we can leverage what is a short window of opportunity – leveraging extra infrastructure funding to move swiftly into plans that trigger the creation of new housing units, restore our neighborhoods and work to build housing, across all price points. If we need to see what it can look like, check out those Atlanta photos and let’s dare to dream big, be bold, and execute.