Living Cities:The National Community Development Initiative

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Studioplex, Atlanta, GA

Current Challenges

With 40 percent of its children falling below the poverty line, Atlanta continues to have the highest rate of child poverty among Living Cities sites.

Suburbs are expanding

While the Atlanta metro area and suburbs shows the second fastest growth among Living Cities over the last 20 years, most of this growth is happening in the suburbs—a 44 percent population surge in the past decade alone. Even incoming immigrants are bypassing the city and moving straight to the suburbs. Today only 10 percent of the region’s residents live in the central city. Most work commutes entail suburb-to-suburb travel, and nearly two-thirds of Atlanta residents drive alone to work, increasing congestion, worsening residents’ dependence on cars and contributing to the drain on the city’s economic core.

Race is still an issue

Atlanta is also a city divided: Most neighborhoods remain segregated by race. Education, work, and income figures reveal further separations. While overall the city has the fifth-highest percentage of college graduates among Living Cities sites, only 13 percent of African Americans hold a bachelor’s degree. The typical household income for black families lags behind white families by $38,000, and Hispanic families don’t fare much better, with an income gap of $25,000. A full third of the city’s African Americans live below the poverty line.

Atlanta

Turning Neighborhoods Around

When Living Cities began investing in Atlanta in 1991, CDCs were virtually nonexistent. Since then, Atlanta CDCs have worked on 37 projects and garnered a $10.4 million commitment from the Woodruff Foundation. Living Cities has invested more than $9.6 million in loans and grants to the city in the past decade, with a focus on supporting seven major CDCs that have not only launched their own projects but also widened their mission past housing to address issues of education, economic development, and public safety.

Olympic Visions for Mixed-Income Housing: Centennial Place

Techwood Homes gained early fame as the nation’s first housing project. But in the 1980s and 1990s it had become infamous, one of the most troubled projects in the nation. Techwood’s proximity to proposed sites for the 1996 Summer Olympics provided the impetus for city leaders to rehabilitate this historic property. When it became clear that surface repairs to the troubled Techwood/Clark Howard Homes would do nothing to fix the underlying infrastructure problems, the city reached an agreement to allow the buildings to be torn down and be rebuilt as a mixed-income, mixed-use community that would provide housing at three tiers of rent levels. The newly constructed Centennial Place now offers its residents not only housing but an entire community of resources: childcare and job training facilities, a YMCA, a public library, a police substation, and a magnet elementary school.

Housing on the Green: The Villages at East Lake

The historic golf course that was once the training ground for Bobby Jones, the greatest amateur player in golf history, has also become part of a housing project and revitalized East Lake Meadows intown community. In a neighborhood where 80 percent of families earned less than $5,000 a year and almost all residents fell below the poverty line, corporations joined with the nonprofit East Lake Community Foundation to develop a country club, renovated golf course and pool that would provide amenities alongside the garden apartments of the newly built Villages at East Lake. With half of the apartments available as subsidized housing and half at market rates, Villages residents also benefit from a K-8 charter school, community and recreation centers, and after-school enrichment programs and job training through the East Lake Junior Golf Academy.

Cultural Revitalization: Sweet Auburn District

atlanta
Sweet Auburn Home after renovation.The Sweet Auburn District was the center of black commerce from 1860 to 1940 and was the birthplace of Martin Luther King, Jr. But a highway project divided the neighborhood, worsening a period of decay and disinterest that had begun in the 1960s. The Historic District Development Corporation, whose original mission was to restore the block on which King was born, has turned its attention to restoring the district as a whole while preserving affordable housing. The King National Historic Site on Auburn Avenue and King’s birthplace are now more readily accessible to the Five Points station. And a former cotton warehouse has become Studioplex Atlanta, an $18 million residential, retail, and gallery space—attracting artists and bringing together history, housing, and culture.

Atlanta Facts

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