4 years ago
By GIOVANNA DELL'ORTO Associated Press Writer
ATLANTA (AP) -- The depths of desperate, concentrated poverty -- the areas exposed by Hurricane Katrina for a shocked nation to behold -- are far from being unique to New Orleans.
Atlanta ranks fifth among the largest U.S. cities where the poor live in distressed neighborhoods that most never manage to leave, according to a study by the Brookings Institution released Wednesday. The report blames misguided housing policies and segregation over the decades.
"It's a story of market dynamics fueled by policy decisions," said the study's main author, Alan Berube. "The high-rise projects concentrated the poor and isolated families and kids and the kids' kids, then locked them into poverty. People in these places aren't exposed to opportunity."
In Atlanta, nearly 36 percent of the poor -- mostly black -- live clustered in neighborhoods where more than 40 percent of the population is under the federal poverty line, where 80 percent of children live without one parent and 8.5 percent of adults have a college degree.
That means a population more than double the size of ritzy suburban Alpharetta living in 28 neighborhoods like Mechanicsville where, within sight of the glossy downtown skyline and Turner Field, children run around an overflowing dumpster and older men seated on mismatched plastic chairs play scrabble in a lot overgrown with weeds across from boarded-up apartment blocks.
In these "extreme-poverty" neighborhoods, there are few housing alternatives, subpar schools, high unemployment, rampant crime, little contact with a different world. And little hope of ever moving into that world.
"If you put a neighborhood with all poor people together, who do they look up to to change?" said Janis Ware, whose Summech group seeks to revitalize Mechanicsville. "We don't want to have a city of all haves or have-nots."
But breaking the isolation is possible -- urban developers point to the drastic makeover of one of Atlanta's worst projects, Techwood Homes and Clark Howell Homes just north of downtown, as the best illustration that the recommendations contained in the Brookings study can work, not only here but in hurricane-ravaged areas and the city topping the study's list, Fresno, Calif.
Built in the 1930s, these "slum clearance" homes were meant both to give the poor fair housing and to keep them out of the sight of the middle class. They succeeded better at the latter -- with a 1992 average of one serious crime per household, Techwood/Clark Howell first emptied and then dragged down the communities around them.
"Being next to a project with a lot of poor blacks sends the middle class flying -- white and black," Berube said.
Also flying were private investors, business developers, job hunters and good school teachers. Staying behind, paradoxically, were high prices -- for day-to-day basics, because there were few, if any, stores, and to cure the illnesses brought on by poor living conditions.
"Techwood Homes was a very scary place," said Mindy Turbov, the co-author of another Brookings study released in September. "Drugs and prostitution were the rule of the day. Before, people were captive. Now you would never know what it was."
Between 1995 and 2000, the Atlanta Housing Authority used federal money to lure private investors and made the neighborhood attractive enough that people with average incomes mixed in.
The dreary development is now green Centennial Place, half of whose residents rely on public housing and the other half pay steep market rates for rent, according to Turbov's study. The racially mixed residents have a new elementary school and a pool. Crime has gone down by 76 percent.
"We can assist these families access to the American dream," said AHA's CEO Renee Glover.
Centennial Place is a poster child for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's HOPE VI program, which was created under the first Bush administration, supported by President Clinton, and bled to near death by the current White House's budget cuts.
The program aims at tearing down the worst projects and recreating mixed-income neighborhoods, the first step in combating poverty.
"For a significant number of families in distressed inner-city neighborhoods, the first step has to be removing the barriers associated with their living environment," Berube said.
Breaking up those pockets of despair brings not only immediate improvement in living conditions, the study suggests, but a real chance for today's poor children -- a chance of breaking the cycle of generations of America's poorest, kept in place and out of sight by the double segregation of race and income, at least until disaster strikes.
Associated Press