East Lake Meadows: A Public Housing Story (2020)

[bunniefuu]

[birds chirping]

[dog barking].

[children playing and laughing]

[sirens]

♪

BURSON: Standing with your back towards Glenwood and

looking forward towards East Lake Meadows it looks

like a military installation,

you know the way it was laid out

like Fort Bragg or Camp Lejeune,

because you just had rows of apartments just as far

as the eye could see.

Some of the land was flat and as it went on it dipped

and then it came back up,

and you had apartments on the hill

and it was just vast.

It was, it was a lot of concrete.

PARKS: When we moved to East Lake Meadows that was

just like heaven to us.

We went from no food and no heat and five to a room,

to bedrooms where you can go wash your clothes,

everything in the house, you were warm,

so we were just happy there until it became a nightmare.

ANCHOR: Residents say that drug dealers are all over

East Lake Meadows.

WOMAN: You hear the g*nshots going off all the time.

All you can do is grab your kids up.

DAVIS: We want a community center,

we want some social services programs out there.

BLACKMON: It was just this chaos.

It was called "Little Vietnam" by the police for good reason.

It was just viewed as irredeemable.

It was just it was a place that was beyond the capacity

that anybody could imagine things being different.

ALLEN: We were all saying that,

"They need to do something about this place.

They need to fix it up or do something."

They did something all right.

PHYLLIS: There used to be a lot of, um,

bad things in our neighborhood.

Now they are, now,

now they are tearing down the buildings

and they are going to build them into new buildings and

some of the people won't be back so we will have a good

community where people can have their children

out and playing.

ANTHONY: Is you going to live over here when they

fix the houses up?

PHYLLIS: Um, I don't think so.

GOETZ: We can agree that East Lake Meadows

was a terrible place.

and we can then even agree that demolition was necessary

but if our first concern was the residents of

East Lake Meadows,

then the way we would have gone about it and the

outcome would have been different.

BURSON: They promised families that they would be able to

come back in life would be better.

It didn't happen that way.

PRATTILLO: Over the long decades of housing policy in

this country, we have at some time said, yes,

we have a responsibility to house people.

A responsibility to give decent,safe, affordable housing.

It's a basic human need.

And so sometimes we've said of course we

have that responsibility,

and then at other times we completely turn our back

on that responsibility.

VALE: Public housing has always been both a financial

proposition and a moral one...

about finding not just need but somehow measuring worth.

How do we begin to sort out which of the many people who

could be assisted, both need it and,

and somehow deserve it.

It becomes a window into race relations;

it's a window into understanding the role of home

ownership in society.

And it's a way of understanding the level of

compassion there is for those who do need some assistance.

COBB: We are not mature enough as a society I think to look

in the mirror and see how we manufactured American poverty.

How we manufactured housing that was, uh,

meant to seclude these poor people.

Uh, and how we turned a blind eye to creating,

to creating a middle class while simultaneously excluding

people from it.

["Little Brown Jug" Glenn Miller & His Orchestra].

MAN: Uncle Sam starts clearing Atlanta slums in the

plan to give modern dwellings to the poor.

Secretary of the Interior Ickes fires the first blast.

[expl*si*n]

ROSENSTEIN: We think of public housing as a place where

low income, mostly minority families live,

that's not how public housing began in this country.

During the depression, many,many families lost their homes,

they couldn't afford to pay rent,

and so there's an enormous housing crisis in the country,

that was the reason that the Roosevelt administration began

the first public housing for civilians in

the nation's history.

FDR: Here at the request of the citizens of Atlanta,

we have cleaned up ninesquare blocks of antiquated,

squalid buildings.

And in their place, we see the bright cheerful buildings of

the Techwood housing project.

ROSENSTEIN: The Public Works Administration began to build

public housing across the country primarily for white

middle class families.

It also built some housing for African-Americans,

but it was always segregated, separate projects for whites,

separate projects for African-Americans very often

creating segregation in neighborhoods,

or communities that had not known segregation, before.

VALE: The government had no interest in seeing this kind

of housing go to the poorest of the poor.

The poorest of the poor were the people they were trying to

get out of the slums to make way for the

upwardly mobile working class.

SCHANK: They want residents who fit a certain image...

They present them as a middle-class population.

you'll see a mother in the starched dress and the perfect

white apron in her kitchen with her appliances.

They're telling everyone these people are low-income,

but they're the deserving poor.

And deserving poor means you fit into this middle-class

image of respectability.

MAN: Cities within cities,

scientifically planned and built where a man and his

family with a small income can live with comfort and dignity.

PATTILLO: The government thought about public housing

as a step up for families.

you're working hard so you're able to save,

and hopefully you know you live in public housing one or

two years and you will then be able to move

into your next step.

the next step for whites was very clearly a house in the

suburbs which was supported through the federal

government's um, insuring of home mortgages.

HANNAH-JONES: When the government's deciding which

loan it's going to insure and which loans it doesn't it

explicitly looks at race neighborhoods that are white

will get the highest rating are most insurable.

integrated neighborhoods will be less desirable;

and often the least desirable of all neighborhoods are gonna

be black neighborhoods.

And so the government literally takes maps of every

city and it outlines black neighborhoods in red.

So from the 's until the 's % of all federally

subsidized loans go to white Americans.

That means that white Americans are getting into houses;

they're able to build wealth;

and black Americans are largely shut out of that

market or having to finance through other means.

KRUSE: The suburbs are wholly a creation really of the

federal government.

the government enables the movement out into the suburbs

through the rise of new infrastructure.

The interstate highway system started in ,

is a huge boom that helps make suburban living possible.

In many cities across the country,

they put those highways there, in some cases, to erase what

were regarded as black slums, uh,

but always to try to keep white and

black communities apart.

PATTILLO: So, white families who had been living

in public housing.

They now had the support of the federal government

to buy a home.

Whereas there was no next step for black

public housing residents.

There was no ladder.

ROSENSTEIN: So, the public housing that originally had

been intended primarily for white families,

became really the anchor of many urban neighborhoods that

became all black.

VALE: Increasingly across the country the waiting lists for

public housing turned towards.

More lower income households,

and so in Atlanta and in other cities the

housing authorities went with those who applied.

So this was a major transformation,

to really see public housing become

the b*ttlefield hospitals.

the place where you cope with the poorest of the poor and

not reward the best off among the poor.

COBB: The cumulative effect of all of this is that

you wind up with, twoentirely different relationships

to this country.

one is the lineage of the New Deal,

through post World w*r II, through the reforms in the

economy, you know, suburbanization and housing

that has created, you know, this ideal,

you know, in America.

And the other, is a population that has by and large been

denied access to those things.

["Torquay" The Fireballs].

NAUGHTON: The original East Lake neighborhood was a place

where the wealthy from Atlanta moved out during the summer to

get away from the heat of the city.

And there was a little lake there called East Lake and it

ultimately became the site of the East Lake Golf Club.

[crowd cheering].

NAUGHTON: It was the place where Bobby Jones learned

to play golf.

BLACKMON: At the beginning of the s,

East Lake was this middle class and upper middle class

white area of the city, exclusively white.

I think the numbers are if you go back and look at the

census there were eight thousand white residents and

nine African Americans those African Americans would have

been maids or other people who lived on the property

of a white person.

KRUSE: African-Americans are chronically overcrowded in

this central part of the city,

but they couldn't find space anywhere else.

They weren't able to buy homes in white neighborhoods across

town because of the prevalence of what were known as

restrictive covenants.

These were lines written into the deeds of homes that

forbade the, uh, purchase or occupancy by non-whites.

So when the Supreme Court strikes down the enforcement

of restrictive covenants essentially

rendering them useless.

it's open for African-Americans to move into

previously white neighborhoods.

ALDERMAN: There has been some talk in the plan that there

would be a more or less exchange for the citizens of

the white community to ah, give way to certain land to be

used by citizens of the n*gro community.

BLACKMON: The black population in the city was surging,

and one of the big compromises that developed was essentially

an, ah, an arrangement that areas of the city where

African Americans had been prohibited from living

would be opened up.

Blacks could begin moving into these neighborhoods, ah,

in and in return they would not move

into certain other neighborhoods that whites

still weren't ready to leave.

And one of the results of that was that this previously

all-white, somewhat affluent but beginning to age part of

the city known as East Lake, ah, suddenly became available,

ah, for African Americans to move in.

["Going it Alone" Doug Wamble].

LIGHTFOOT: My Aunt Gladysbought a home and she had moved.

And in your mind, in your heart,

you gonna hope and pray and say,

"I sure hope that all the white people don't move out

the neighborhood just because we're moving here.

We couldn't be that bad."

Next thing I know,

there was for sale signs everywhere, everywhere.

I want to say they gave awaythe community sort of, you know.

Call it white flight.

She said, "the week after I moved in my house,

three white people put their homes up for sale."

They were pretty much giving away those houses.

WOMAN: I hate to leave, really.

But uh, I feel like that I am out of place,

you know living in this community.

REPORTER: Do you feel that your attitude can be changed

to make you want to stay here and live among blacks?

WOMAN: Well, I, I don't know.

I mean I'm not, uh, prejudice.

Uh, I just as soon, you know, to live here is to live

anywhere else, but I don't want to be the only white

family living here, you see what I mean?

KRUSE: Whites had been led to believe that African-Americans

moving into their neighborhood would destroy

their property values,

their real estate agents, local banks,

local politicians, everyone told them that if blacks move

into your neighborhood your property values will crumble.

LIGHTFOOT: They tried to move as far as they could from us.

they had a lot of places to go.

We didn't have a lot of places to go.

BLACKMON: It was a reflection of a classic

apartheid American city.

By the end of the decade, East Lake had gone from having

eight thousand whites and maybe nine black people to

nine thousand blacks and about a thousand white people.

and so it was as dramatic a reversal in terms of the

racial composition of the neighborhood as

could possibly occur.

NAUGHTON: Members of the East Lake Golf Club were doing what

a lot of other wealthy white folks were doing in Atlanta

and that was fleeing the city.

And so the membership of that Club

sold what was called the number two course,

their second golf course to the Atlanta Housing Authority

for a new housing project.

RESIDENT: If you zone this beautiful golf course

for these cheap apartments,

What are you gentleman going to do with the rest

of us out there?

Who wants to live in a section where there are

cheap apartments?

The people of Atlanta are fleeing to Dekalb county where

we get a little more protection.

["Jim Crow" Wynton Marsalis].

BLACKMON: And so they sell this thing off.

And a big giant many hundreds of units housing project is

built on the site right next to,twenty feet away,

from what was once the most historic, elite, exclusive,

country club in Atlanta.

NAUGHTON: East Lake Meadows was built in and .

it was one of the last public housing communities built in

that era in Atlanta, and it was as far away from

mainstream Atlanta as you could be and still be in the

city I think East Lake Meadows was built exactly the way it

was planned in terms of wanting to create a place

where we could push the least of these and

forget about them.

["Fast Blues in A" Rev. Gary Davis].

MARSHALL: I was born in Lincolnton, Georgia.

June the th, .

My father sharecropped.

They had cotton.

They had corn, peanuts.

all types of vegetables,

I used to thought we were rich until I got older,

and then I knew we were just living

from day to day.

We moved in ' to East Lake Meadows.

My husband, he moved here.

then he sent and got me and my two daughters I thought

it was real nice area to live in.

In ', my husband passed,

I had four childrens and I was pregnant with my baby,

I had to take care of,

the household and all of that then so,

I just did what I had to do.

So I just stayed.

PARKS: We lived in a house.

right here in the center of Atlanta.

I know most people would think that we lived in some

third world country, but we really didn't.

It was so many of us that we took turns sleeping in a bed.

My mother could not afford a lot of heat,

so what we would do is the living room was, uh,

sectioned off from the middle room.

and all of the children huddled there.

But, like if we walked into the living room,

you could actually blow your breath and you

could see the frost.

We moved into East Lake around, November of .

And my mother was paying, basically, $ for everything.

We had actually three or four bedrooms,

which we had never experienced that.

So when you come from an environment of no food,

no heat, cold, to a housing project,

that was just like heaven to us.

LIGHTFOOT: I was playing basketball one day

and somebody rode by who knew me and said,

"Hey man, your house on fire."

I said, "Man, you kidding."

"No, your house on fire." So I caught a ride,

went up there and the house was on fire.

ELGIN: Well we had a drop wire over the house and

somehow it dropped down and hit the house.

Somebody called the fire department and they were

putting it out when we got there but it was too late.

LIGHTFOOT: After the fire, they were going to try to

separate us in the, uh foster care system.

my mom told them "No way.

You know, you'll have to k*ll me. No way."

I don't even like to think about it,

but that made me really close to her.

That made us really tight.

When I think about how hard she fought to

keep us together.

BARBARA: We moved to East Lake Meadows in .

It was helpful because we lost so much in the fire

that it was a good place for us to start over.

It was only a few residents over there.

Maybe people living there in East Lake Meadows so we

started out from the very beginning.

LIGHTFOOT: My impression were they were going to be fine

because they were brand new, you know.

No reputation, They were not even filled up so you know,

I figured you know, they was going to be okay.

But I found out after a couple years, they were not okay.

DAVIS: So, by the mayor comingout here ain't gonna do anything

because housing's already doingwhat they promised to do back...

PARKS: You could not speak of East Lake Meadows without

speaking of Eva Davis.

She was a spitfire.

She, she really did a lot in that neighborhood.

DAVIS: I've been doing the job that the

welfare department should have been doing for

the residents of East Lake Meadows.

I've been getting clothes for the people,

I've been using my personal money to help people with food

in my community.

I have been using my personal money to help organize a

little league baseball team so I really don't feel

like I owe them anything.

And by the way...

EL-AMIN: Miss Davis was a feisty,

young old lady and that's what I loved about her.

She didn't play some people loved her, some people didn't.

but she was for the right things.

She helped anybody that needed her help and

even some that wouldn't come to her and ask for help,

she would offer help.

She didn't bite her tongue for anybody,

she was just real, one hundred, with everybody.

DAVIS: I grew up on a farm in Crawfordville, Georgia,

Taliaferro County.

And it was a country place and I,

it was way down in the woods.

but there was no jobs down in our hometown,

none more than the cotton field and I got tired

of the fields.

So I moved to Atlanta.

LONGINO: She met my grandfather and,

Shortly after she got to Atlanta the relationship

apparently you know didn't work so she was a single mom

at that point with eight kids.

HEATH: In June, of '.

we moved to East Lake.

And I said, "Wow, we're in the middle of nowhere!"

Nothing was out there but those apartments.

But they were very pretty and roomy inside.

I really loved it.

LONGINO: She decided as the families began to move in she

would introduce herself, go door-to-door,

just talk to people.

She never met a stranger.

She was all for making sure everybody benefited from the

situation and making the best of a situation.

BLACKMON: Early on in East Lake Meadows they formed an

association of tenants and she was elected the first

president of the tenant's association,

and if you wanted to do anything in the vicinity of

that housing project or inside it,

you got the message that you really needed to talk to

Eva Davis before you did anything.

DAVIS: For number one sir, they got,

they go to visit the welfare recipients without giving them

a written notice or even a call.

NAUGHTON: You could watch her insert herself in between

people and the public systems that were supposed to be

serving them.

If Ms. Davis liked you if you were falling in line with

Ms. Davis, she would pick up the phone then and call the

Housing Authority and make sure somebody got out here and

fixed your toilet.

And Ms. Davis would be a bulldog to make sure that that

really happened.

MOORE: You know, we could have a broke water heater.

If we go call Ms. Eva Davis, say, "Look, Ms. Eva Davis,

my heater's been broke two or three weeks and these folks

ain't come up here and fixed it yet."

After you talk to her, in two or three hours, or less,

somebody's there to fix your water heater.

Politics didn't care about us.

They didn't care.

We had to have people like Eva Davis,

To demand certain things to be done.

ELGIN: They used to have a Revival Tents that would come

in periodically to save us.

they figured you were, like, the demon child,

you were devils and the reason you were poor because

you probably were sinning against God.

they'd have an organ player playing and he would preach a

word and then he would line people up that were so-called

'possessed' with the demon.

he'd put their hand over their head and they would tremble,

and they would fall and they would spit up what he called

the demon coming out.

And then they would ask for their donations and people

would give their money.

They would always go to one project after another with

their little Revival and if they feel we weren't saved

enough they would come back and save some more.

Even as a kid I thought that was crazy but they did,

they did a lot of that.

Because they thought we needed it.

LIGHTFOOT: Whoever designed the apartments,

they did a very poor job landscaping.

And if you look at some of the earlier pictures when they

first transplanted the grass or seeds or whatever,

it's very green.

Three years later, erosion, ditches everywhere.

You know, no grass.

SCHANK: The Atlanta Housing Authority is taking their

federal money and they're giving it to outside architect,

outside contractor and the idea is that it's

going to save some money, um, and while the upfront cost

might be less, the Atlanta Housing Authority really ends

up paying for it dearly in terms of poor construction,

poor site design, so you see problems

happening almost immediately.

GLOWER: I think this problem should be cleared up because

it's causing a lot of inconvenience for a lot of

tenants out here.

REPORTER: Is it the first time it's happened?

GLOWER: No, it isn't.

It happened in my apartment at least four times.

REPORTER: They say you don't miss your water until

your well runs dry.

But East Lake Meadows residents say they wish they

could miss their water.

Especially the sewage water which is now

flooding their houses.

ALEXANDER: The infrastructure,

what we learned after the construction,

was completely inadequate.

The basic water lines,sewer lines,

drainage lines werepoorly done at best.

I think an argument could be made not only were they

negligently done they were criminally negligently done.

KRUSE: As white residents left the city lost the

tax money that they provided.

And so the city is home to more and more poor Americans,

uh, who need more and more city services at the same time

that the city is less and less able to afford them.

And so there's a need for public housing but there's not

the capital behind it.

REPORTER: The angry tenants that have been picketing the

Atlanta Housing Authority management offices have moved

their demonstration into downtown Atlanta.

We're outside the AHA's main office here in

the Hurt Building.

RESIDENT: We need better services period in Techwood

and Clark Howell Homes.

We want this service and we are not playin'.

REPORTER: One of the things you find out very quickly in

Perry Homes is that the people here put up with a lot,

but their biggest complaint is the way this place looks.

And the say no matter what they do or no matter who they

ask, no one will do anything about it.

RESIDENT: I've been here four years and the raggedy

cabinets still torn up.

REPORTER: Your cabinet in the kitchen?

RESIDENT: And the floors need, uh, repairing.

RESIDENT : Roaches run through that,

rats, you understand?

REPORTER: And you have tried to get them to fix this?

RESIDENT: How many times, how many times?

REPORTER: And what do they say?

RESIDENT: We'll get to it when we can.

HANNAH-JONES: Tenants can't get things fixed;

the trash doesn't get picked up on time;

the grass doesn't get cut anymore,

and instead of saying,

"What's going on with the maintenance of the housing"

it suddenly becomes about the value and

worth of the people who are living in there.

As if black and Latino people do not want decent housing,

as if they do not want to keep up their housing...

RESIDENT: Here the raw sewage.

HANNAH-JONES: But it's actually the government that's

not keeping it up.

RESIDENT: See right here? See how it stank?

I know you smell it.

We just got a dead project out here.

People just living here on borrowed time.

["La Cova" The New Mastersounds].

LONGINO: East Lake's location was off by itself

far from downtown.

A lot of people didn't have cars...

Um, so you would catch the bus or you would pay, ah,

someone who had a car to take you where you needed to go,

um, there weren't many cabs because they were afraid to

come over into East Lake.

REPORTER: There are very few stores out here.

Most businessmen don't consider this a good place to

open up shop, and that makes it hard for the

people living here.

PRATTILLO: The separation of black neighborhoods and white

neighborhoods means that businesses make discriminatory

decisions about where to locate.

Things like grocery stores, day care centers, banks,

health care centers, doctor's offices on and on,

black neighborhoods get fewer of them,

white neighborhoods get more of them.

It doesn't mean that black folks don't create many good

things within their own neighborhoods.

MOORE: My dad used to have a rolling store,

one of these big buses.

You know he'll load everything up on it from

anything you need.

Toilet paper, washing powder, snacks, ch-chips like a store.

EL-AMIN: Penny candy, penny cookies, I mean,

that we had our own candy store right there rolling,

just rolling through the community.

Mr. Benny the vegetable guy?

No one knows where Mr. Benny got those vegetables,

but one thing about him: They were always fresh.

the display was always nice, he was always on time.

You could've set your clock by Mr. Benny.

You know, he would come up and blow his horn,

and everybody would run out to the truck and,

"Okay, okay, okay one at a time!"

Ask you what you want:

"Well Mr. Benny my mom says can she

get such and such and such."

He would break out his composition book,

write down what mama ordered, and say,

"Tell your mama I'll see you next time, okay?"

ANDERSON: East Lake Meadows.

It's like many government funded housing projects

in this country.

Today over , people live here,

most of them on welfare.

Many tenants recall the days when it

was a nice place to live,

but now they say it's run down, even dangerous.

PARKS: When you isolate people,

like they did in East Lake, then it's almost like the

people start preying on each other.

It's almost like we lose our humanity.

There's the drugs.

You get people cutting, fighting, k*lling, stealing.

ANDERSON: Kenny White says East Lake Meadows

has a nickname: Vietnam.

That's because it's compared to a w*r zone.

WHITE: I see a whole lotta fighting,

and cutting up and sh**ting.

ANDERSON: Young mothers fear for their children.

That's what Queen Wheeler says.

WHEELER: It's not really a good environment for them

because it be too much sh**ting and fighting.

LONGINO: We knew to be in the house at the street lights,

when the street lights come on.

And if you were caught outside after the street lights or

weren't in the house that meant you were in big trouble

because when the street lights come on things start happening

and people wanted their kids safe in, in the home.

So that was basically our cue for curfew.

[siren]

ELGIN: We got robbed once.

I just woke up one morning and my TV and my sister's

TV was missing.

Somebody just walked in, they could've easily k*lled me,

they just got my TV and left.

DAVIS: We call them quite often when we are being

robbed, our senior citizens are being knocked down and

pocket books took away from 'em,

our doors being broken into and our homes we'll call them

and do you know what they ask us?

"Where do you live?"

We say, "East Lake Meadows"

They say, "well I'm sorry you have to call

the police from Atlanta.

And then we call the police department from Atlanta,

and it takes them an hour to get out here and sometimes

they don't come at all.

CROWD: Right, right.

DAVIS: And so if they can't come to East Lake Meadows when

we call them when we are in deadly need our lives

are at stake.

What in the hell do they come out here for yesterday

doing us like they did?

If they can't come out here to protect us why come

out here to harass and scare us to death.

WOMAN: Right!

[g*nshots]

ELGIN: When there were g*nshots you just want to

see what happened.

One time I did actually witness a guy that was still

there when I got there.

It was kind of, kind of weird and scary at the same time.

You know, because you're seeing them taking these last

breaths and then I knew it was his last breath because you

don't breathe like that.

you inhale all this air...

[mimics inhaling].

Then there's this long pause.

and you sitting there looking, because you're a kid,

you're curious.

and he exhales and it's like two more of those

left I'm sure.

And then you see the last one and you're like,

"I think he's done."

It just hits home you see somebody die that you know...

Or you hear about a friend the night before that got k*lled.

You shouldn't walk over dead bodies,

people shouldn't sh**t through your house.

That's not normal.

WILLIAMS: In disadvantaged neighborhoods,

individuals have a higher level of any given stressful

experience, and that changes how we function

psychologically, how we feel emotionally,

It has negative effects on our ability to adapt and cope

with, with all of the adversities we face in life.

PARKS: At one moment everything would be ok and the

next moment all hell would break loose.

we would witness people being shot.

Uh, r*pes in the broad on daylight.

People were too afraid to report these things.

you could see a friend today and the next day they're dead.

These are the things that happened at, at, at East Lake.

BURSON: There was like a network of grandmothers,

basically they ran everything around there.

It was like the grandmothers,

then the aunts, and so on,

but the grandmother was at the top.

The aunts would be like, her under bosses or whatever,

but they kept everybody in line.

Not saying that there was like a total absence of men,

but even with the men around the women ran it.

LIGHTFOOT: My mom cleaned homes for

a lot of wealthy whites.

She helped with the kids, you know,

she was like a nanny slash maid.

That was considered demeaning work.

But she didn't care.

She got up and did it for us.

Some people she worked for wanted to get rid of their

piano to buy a new one.

So she wanted to buy the piano.

of course she did like she does everything,

she paid a little bit on it, little bit on it until she

paid for it and next thing we know,

we got a piano in the living room.

I think we were the only people in the projects

with a piano.

ELGIN: The first song I learned was,

'I'll Take You There'

by the Staple Singers.

Seriously.

[sings melody].

♪ WOMAN: I know a place ain't nobody cryin ♪

ELGIN: Then the gospel part would come in, and I'd just...

[sings melody]

And I loved it and I played that song every day.

♪ WOMAN: Aint no smiling faces. ♪

♪ CHOIR: I'll take you there. ♪

♪ WOMAN: Happy y'all. ♪

♪ CHOIR: I'll take you there.

ELGIN: Since the walls are so thin in the projects,

the lady next door would play music for like,

you know they'd have these drinking parties.

You know, drinking, dancing, doing whatever.

she would put a stack of records on the and they

would all drop down.

But that last record would keep playing.

Often times the record would play fifteen times.

But that's what I needed I would just play along

with the record.

If I didn't get it right the first time I would get it

right that fifteenth time.

And so, I did that everyday almost.

And that was my teacher.

So I learned how to play a lot of songs off her music.

♪ WOMAN: Ah, ah, ah. Oh, ah, ah, ah ♪

♪ I know a place, y'all.

♪ CHOIR: I'll take you there.

BARBARA: When you're poor you make your own fun and

that's what we did.

The kids and everything, it's just like a big party and

that's the best thing I remember.

People could still get together in spite of them

being really poor.

They knew how to get together and still have a

good time and enjoy life.

♪ WOMAN: Oh.

♪ CHOIR: I'll take you there.

♪ WOMAN: Oh, oh, oh. ♪

PARKS: Even in poverty, there's always light.

And I think that's most of our history as black folks.

There's always that beacon of light through there.

So, we used to joke and we would look for happiness

wherever we could find it.

♪ WOMAN: Gotta let me, let me take you, take you ♪

♪ CHOIR: I'll take you there

♪ WOMAN: Take you over there.

♪ CHOIR: I'll take you there

["Something You Got" Wilson Pickett].

♪ PICKETT: Something you got

LIGHTFOOT: What I saw from my mom was I saw determination.

I don't why she chose me, but one morning,

she got me up and she said, "I'm gonna buy me a house."

She said, "I know nobody thinks I'm gonna get one.

I'm gonna move out of the projects." And she got me,

she took me to the bank downtown Atlanta.

We caught the bus and I went down to the bank with her and

she said, "I have a bank account.

This is my bank book." She said,

"I'mma put whatever I can in this account until I get

enough money to buy me a house." And I never forget she

put $ in and I said to myself,

"That's gonna take a while.

You know, that's gonna take quite a while," you know?

She would come home from work, she would give me , ,

dollars, dollars, and what I got a chance to see is

as the years progressed I looked and I said, "Wow.

Mama started off with $ and now she got $." You know?

So, I saw what determination could get you.

ELGIN: I was in the eleventh grade when she finally saved

enough money and bought a house on Tupelo Street.

And I had my own room I was so happy when she moved.

I couldn't wait to tell everybody,

I just moved out of Little Vietnam.

If you came out of that unscathed, you were lucky,

but do you know what's funny?

We moved but I came back to East Lake Meadows every day.

I couldn't leave.

["My Life" Mary J. Blige].

ALLEN: I was born in Ohio.

My mom experienced, um...

A really bad situation with, in,

in a relationship she was in my mom was brutally beaten by

a man who she was with and he tried to k*ll her.

She wanted to just get as far away as she could.

So she moved to Georgia and took all of the kids with her.

We stayed in the car, the four of us just living out of the

back of the car until we was placed in a shelter.

You stay at a shelter for 'x' amount of time until they

place you and that's how we were placed in

East Lake Meadows.

HARRISON: My mother and father separated.

When I was years old my dad moved out to

East Lake Meadows.

I told my dad that I don't want to stay with mama no more

because she's too strict, she won't let me live there.

He said, "Well, come and stay with me."

When I got there, oh man.

I mean, I was exposed to a lot of things that I never thought

in life that I would be exposed to at a young age.

["Party Groove" ShowBiz & A.G].

♪ CHUCK D: Hear the drummer get wicked.♪

CRITTENDON: It was a whole different environment of

living for me, me coming out of foster home to now I'm in

the most ruthless projects in Atlanta, know what I'm saying.

It don't matter how much my mama cleaned because

we were clean people, it was the roaches.

The roaches would not stop coming, you know.

You lay your bowl of cereal down on the table,

they parachuting from the ceiling.

So I would put a bowl of cereal down and I come right

back, right quick, and man there's a roach in my cereal.

What you going to do?

You going to throw that whole bowl of cereal away or

you going to flick that roach up out your cereal and eat it?

That's how, that's how hard it was in the 'jects, man.

♪ CHUCK D: Hear the drummer get wicked.♪

♪ Wicked, wicked, wicked, wicked♪

MOORE: I was when I had my first son and

I was one of the proudest dad you probably would ever meet.

And raising my kids in there was tough.

You had to make ends meet.

you bringing kids in the world, they got to eat.

I started selling drugs because it was in the family.

At the time my brother did it, my dad did it,

that was our way of surviving, you know,

because it was hard to get a job.

For a black man anyways.

CRITTENDON: Basically when you open your refrigerator you

ain't got nothing to eat, you know,

you gotta put some food on the table.

So we turned to pumping gas, hustling I asked some people

could we pump gas for a quarter.

That was just a sales pitch because we'd end up getting a

dollars or whatever because people were respecting that

you was from the projects and that you was trying

to make an honest living.

ALLEN: If you were a young man in need of money,

you would go and you'd pump people's gas and

they'd give tips or whatever.

But then that wasn't enough money anymore.

["Night Drums" African Drum Masters].

REPORTER: Across the country, crack has already surfaced in

at least of the nation's largest cities.

Some addicts say crack's been available in backstreet

Atlanta for over a year and a half.

CRITTENDON: It happened real fast.

Soon as crack hit, man, it hit like a wave.

REPORTER: Crack is the drug dealers dream.

For quick marketing the convenient new coke,

like a fast food.

CRITTENDON: That's when the money started coming in.

It was fast it was very fast.

you'd make a $ in less than an hour, that's fast.

You had drug dealers out there,

they're throwing up money, you know what I'm saying?

People that didn't have cars got cars.

HARRISON: I mean, I was like, "Yeah man, I'm going to

end up being like that one day, man.

I know it, man.

I can be like Black, you know, or Red."

'Cause they had these nicknames.

I started really learning the game.

I started really selling.

At the age , too.

I mean, I was like, "Oh man, this is it."

Everybody heard about Lil' Willie man.

"Lil' Willie be making that money, man.

CRITTENDON: I just started being like a lookout boy.

My job was just to alerts other people that was out

there serving the drugs when the police were

coming up the street.

So I would get out of school, do my homework,

again I'm heading to them.

You know, trying to make some money for the day.

I was looking at it as being a meal a day for my family.

ALLEN: I mean, you'd have people walking around high,

cracked out, looking for some more crack...

People who, were perfectly normal one day,

the next day they're just not functioning.

I mean, they just walking, trying to find some crack.

And you can tell, because, you know,

they had something to sell.

Something to sell, always something to sell.

HARRISON: Everybody used to party, hang in the streets,

just drink beer or whatever.

Man, we was okay, it was like we was close.

But when crack cocaine hit, we became extremely divided.

There was no more parties.

It was like a ghost town.

I met a guy who was sitting there smoking,

and then I asked him what he was smoking,

and one thing led to another.

I said, "Let me hit it.

Let me try that."

I tried it, so it was crack cocaine and weed.

So, hey, that's all I needed right then.

I didn't think about no food, no nothing.

But when I started doing those drugs man, it just went down.

OFFICER: You have the right to remain silent.

Anything you say can and will be used against you

in the court of law.

MAN: Right, right.

CHUNG: In Atlanta, there is a housing project

where drugs are rampant.

There's so much g*n fire the post office sometimes refuses

to deliver the mail.

REPORTER: Yet another child, the second in two years,

has died at East Lake Meadows, a victim of the violence

associated with the sale and use of ill*gal drugs.

Police say about g*ng members have been

operating in the area.

Gangs go by such names as Warriors, Creepers,

and Down By Law.

RESIDENT: I have saw I think about three guys

get k*lled out here behind drugs.

MARSHALL: It was maybe like three or four times a week,

you know have shotguns sh**ting.

I would get my kids and go in the bathroom,

or if I didn't have time to do that,

we would just lay on the floor.

Sometimes it might be , shots,

sometimes it be two or three, but when it was over with,

you know, we got up and kept living.

HOBSON: You see this overwhelming violence.

robberies, assaults, murders, you had law abiding citizens,

who were just down and out on their luck,

living in these housing projects,

that were being held hostage by the corner boys and then

their own communities are being decimated through the

use of crack cocaine.

REPORTER: There has been talk of building a fence around the

project, an effort to keep crime out.

But tenant association president Eva Davis says

that's not what the community needs.

DAVIS: We want a community center,

we want some social services programs out there,

we want a place for our children to

be able to go and play,

we need a place for afterschool activities

for our children.

We need that more than we do a fence.

HEATH: My mom would call the police on you in a heartbeat.

And she would run you, out from in front her place,

or even off that street.

She was a gangster when it come to drugs.

LONGINO: If you're telling someone that they can't sell

drugs and that's their revenue, that was a threat.

And it even got to a point where when she didn't back

down they fire bombed her apartment.

And we ran out,apartment fully engulfed...

But she refused to move.

She did not want them to move her.

DAVIS: And I hope to Lord that the police department...

LONGINO: It was time for a meetin' and

she went through the community and she was on

the bullhorn announcing we're having a

meeting because you didn't k*ll me.

I just never saw her cry, sweat,

which it still amazes me to this day.

I just, I just never saw her break.

OFFICER: Show me your hands!

Get on your knees, get on your knees!

BELL: I plan to keep some police presence in, uh,

East Lake Meadows.

REPORTER: Chief Bell noted the Red Dog anti-drug unit

continues to work public housing projects with a great

deal of success.

He said starting today he plans to put crime prevention

resources in East Lake Meadows.

BLACKMON: While there's almost no money from any source

making its way to an East Lake Meadows to address

the human suffering that is there or to

open up meaningful channels

for people to make their way out of the situation,

there is now an avalanche of money going to law

enforcements agencies and the people who believe it's their

job to police the behavior in these places and,

contain what they view as a kind of evil contagion.

HARRISON: We used to go into abandoned apartments and just

sit and smoke crack cocaine, or sometimes,

we'd just sit there.

I used to spend the night there.

Only thing you think about is just getting high.

You didn't think about your family, your friends.

You didn't care about no one or what anybody else thought.

They used to call me a junkie.

"Man, Lil' Willie, you done became a junkie, man."

When you got on crack cocaine you was ashamed.

You became ashamed.

So, what I used to do, I used to run.

I used to run and cry a lot.

CRITTENDON: I got caught up when I was , .

We was stealing cars and hanging out late,

We were terrorizing the city we was robbing every day.

That's what got me in prison.

HARRISON: I went to prison in November of .

I was years old.

I was charged for m*rder and armed robbery and I was

sentenced to life plus years in prison.

At that moment when I pulled the g*n out, I was high,

I was on drugs at that moment and I was really, really angry.

I wasn't angry at who I actually k*lled but when

that moment happened I had no feeling, no remorse, nothing.

ALLEN: My mom was strung-out on drugs.

You know, we had people thatwere doctors, nurses, good jobs,

construction workers and lawyers,

come to her house to get high.

And it just felt like,

"Aw, no. We were just having so much fun."

And then it's,

"Okay, go upstairs and when my company leaves,

you can come back down."

I just got tired of it and it hurt,

it really did. I cried in my room.

So I just, I had dolls upstairs in my room and I

would play with my dolls, and play school with my dolls,

and I had a full class session going upstairs.

I would teach them and read them books as if though they

were real live people.

And I enjoyed it.

I just didn't know from day to day what was going to become

of me in the future.

I love my mom and I wanted her to be there more for me.

And the times where she wasn't doing drugs,

we spent good quality time together.

Like sitting by the window, talking about the most

simplest thing, but it was so big to me.

She said, "Now, I'm going to tell you some things.

It might not come out right, but just listen to it.

"Just listen to what I tell you and don't pay attention to

what I do.

and I won't steer you wrong." And she didn't.

She did the best she could do.

She did the best she could do with what she had.

["Pushed Back" Doug Wamble].

BARSH: I moved into East Lake Meadows in, around, ',

because it was taking all of my money just to pay the rent.

When you can't buy a simple thing like an ice cream cone

unless you take some of your bill money,

that's not a good feeling.

I was determined that no matter how long it took,

I'm coming off this welfare, I wanted to be an X-ray tech,

so I enrolled myself in school at

Grady School of Radiologic Technology

and it was going well but when I received my

financial aid, they were calculating the grant money as

though it's my income.

so my rent went up, the food stamps went down.

It just caused everything to start crumbling.

It was like you take one step forward and you get pushed

back five steps.

PHYLLIS: Lupita!

WOODS: We had a two bedroom, small little unit, uh,

it was me, my mom, my two sisters, and my littlest,

youngest brother was born there, my mom worked two jobs,

and she was a security guard,she was also the hair stylist

in the neighborhood.

PHYLLIS: What's your name?

LUPE: Lupe.

PHYLLIS: What's your name?

MARTY: Her name white girl.

PHYLLIS: What's your name?

WOODS: My dad is Mexican so people were always trying to

fight us because they were like,

"Oh, those are mixed race kids,

they probably have a little more money."

Even though we're from the same place.

PHYLLIS: This is a quiet little girl.

She's the head of her class.

She's smart and she's beautiful.

WOODS: They would just pick on us.

There was drunks, there were crackheads around it was like

a w*r zone.

MUHAMMAD: It is heartbreaking to be poor.

me and my husband was always having financial difficulties.

I had three daughters and they depended on us both to make

sure that they had they housing and shelter.

And I didn't want them to ever know what it felt like to not

ever have a roof over their head.

The day I moved in, oh, wow.

Sorry...

Cause that was...

The day we moved in was okay.

It was a pretty day, children were happy,

um and two maybe hours later,we heard some g*nshots and

found out that someone had got k*lled right up under the

steps where we had just moved into.

And it was rough trying to, um...

Trying to help them understand what had happened and

that we would be okay.

["Hard Times" Run DMC].

CHANCELLOR: Cabrini Green is not a color.

It's a high rise crime wave.

REPORTER: There's little hope saving the Columbus Homes.

Deterioration there has just gone too far.

The Newark Housing Authority...

REPORTER : In the next week, AHA commissioners will begin

examining what few options they have for offsetting the

cut in federal dollars, but at this point,

those options are slim.

JENNINGS: Public housing projects in Chicago are the

worst in the country.

Riddled with drugs, overrun by gangs.

REPORTER: The elevators in theeight-story building don't work.

Neither do the incinerators.

♪ DMC: Hard times.

♪ Spreading just like the flu.

♪ Watch out homeboy don't let it catch you. ♪

REPORTER: Public Housing projects.

They can be eye sores to those who live near them,

and nightmares for those who live in them.

HANNAH-JONES: The media plays a huge role in this

narrative about public housing

REAGAN: No one in the United States

knows how many people are on welfare.

HANNAH-JONES: The image of the "Welfare Queen,"

which is popularized by Ronald Reagan, is, ah,

kind of set in stone by the media.

The media picks up on this; the media picks up on what we

now know to be a debunked myth, of the crack baby, um,

the media picks up on this idea of the super predator.

Of all of these, terrible societal problems that are

coming out of public housing and public housing becomes the

image for all of that.

VALE: It becomes a way for the public to generalize from

the worst case scenarios, the most violent places to

the entire program ignoring the fact that,

that this is some projects in some cities and that most of

public housing, ah, across three thousand different

housing authorities in the country, ah,

doesn't have that degree of problem.

♪ RUN: All day I have to work at my peak ♪

♪ Because we need that dollar ♪

HANNAH-JONES: We never saw, um,

more than one image of public housing.

and it's not to downplay how difficult it could be

in that environment.

But what you didn't see was the communities that people

had forged for themselves.

The long bonds that people had

across generations with each other.

I don't think we ever gave enough credit to what that

experience was really like for people who worked very hard,

um, to build a place for themselves that was safe,

who had relationships and who had people who they could

depend on when there was no one else who was

going to be there.

♪ RUN-DMC: Hard Times.

SMALL: It's a myth that people aren't trying.

You get really high quality schools in a low income

neighborhood and you're gonna see kids one

after the other saying, "I wanna go to college.

I want a good education."

This idea that people as a general statement wanna stay

in their conditions because they wanna be

wards of the state...

It's just not consistent with the evidence.

♪ RUN-DMC: I'm gonna keep on fighting 'til my

very last breath. ♪

DOLE: Let's take public housing for instance.

Public housing is one of the last bastions of

socialism in the world.

Imagine the United States government owns housing where

an entire class of citizens permanently live.

We are the landlords of misery.

GINGRICH: Let's talk about what the welfare state has created.

We end up with the drug-addicted underclass with

no sense of humanity, no sense of civilization,

and no sense of the rules of life in which human beings

respect each other.

CHABOT: We must reduce illegitimacy, require work,

and save tax payers money.

CLINTON: Perhaps the mostimportant legislative issue

Congress will take up this year is welfare reform.

And I strongly believe we have to end the welfare system

as we know it.

COBB: In the s we saw the culmination,

of years of increasing resentment and

antipathy, uh, toward, uh, poor people toward

public services, toward, African-Americans

to people of color.

it was reflected in things like welfare reform,

the idea that the public coffers had to,

stop being fleeced by these undeserving people.

PRATTILLO: We malign entitlements because we are

often blind to the ones that we receive and have helped us

so much, and we often see the beneficiaries of those

entitlements or the beneficiaries of any kinds of

benefits, as weak, as dependent.

We spend way more on supporting people who buy

multimillion dollar houses and write off the mortgage

interest from those houses, than we do on subsidizing

housing for poor people.

VALE: So the backlash of this was both against the poor

people who would be blamed for the chaos of their conditions

a blame that paid no attention to the withdrawal of funds

needed to maintain these places, but also, ah,

a sense that maybe the government wasn't any good at

doing this to begin with.

Enough already.

It's not housing the right people.

It's the wrong kind of building.

It's the wrong kind of investment.

We should start over.

[crowd exclaims]

[explosions]

HANNAH-JONES: There's these larger forces that they want

to start bringing white people back into the city and

middle class people back into the city.

They want to start to reclaim these areas.

So you start to see a, um, a lot of policies to,

to implode and bring these public housing structures down

under the guise of new federal programs that are

going to be mixed income.

CISNEROS: When I became the Secretary in ,

the Atlanta Housing Authority was one of the

more troubled in the country.

Our vision is to replace them with

lower scale town houses, smaller in density

with physical security built in a way

that brings dignity to the people in the neighborhood.

CISNEROS: You had the idea that we had these

concentrations of poverty that we could only break up by

creating mixed-income settings,

which meant some allowance for higher incomes in the mix.

GLOVER: What we're trying to do is deal with the issues in

a substantive and comprehensive way.

VALE: When Renee Glover comes on board, ah, initially as,

ah, a board member then chair and then CEO of the

Housing Authority by , uh, she had an enormous task and

an enormous opportunity.

GLOVER: I'd like to tell you that within months we have

solved all the problems.

But the fact of the matter is, is that,

when you inherit something that has been mismanaged for

years it takes a while to build the capacity...

Atlanta had the highest violent crime rate in America.

Atlanta had more public housing per capita than any

other city in America.

Atlanta's public schools were failing so things

were really dire.

I didn't think that just because people were receiving

a subsidy that they had to live in

these horrible conditions.

REPORTER: These days, the head of the Atlanta Housing

Authority is heralding the beginning of a new era.

SCHANK: Up until that point the idea was,

"How can we rehab it?

What social programs can we put into place?

What modernization things can we do to the grounds,

to the physical buildings."

But Glover says it might be time for this all to go.

GLOVER: So Phase one is all of Techwood...

REPORTER: the housing project will be torn down and

completely rebuilt as a mixed-income development.

The first phase should be complete by the time the

Olympics get underway in .

["The People That They Were" Doug Wamble].

BLACKMON: When word of the of this idea of redeveloping

East Lake Meadows tearing it down, rebuilding it,

first arrived I think the tenants' first reaction was

"Well this will never happen just like nothing else

has ever happened."

But if you wanna do anything out here,

you're gonna come and talk to us about it first.

Nobody's gonna do this to us.

COUSINS: We adopted the East Lake Community and this

specific housing project which was the center,

or the primary problem in the community.

GLOVER: Tom Cousins had expressed interest in wanting

to do something out at East Lake.

He had purchased recently the Bobby Jones Golf Course

across the street.

And because of the violent crimes that were going on at

East Lake Meadows, it was very difficult to get anything

going cause there was literally sh**ting, ah,

that was going on, on the property.

BLACKMON: I think that Tom Cousins looked at this

situation and saw a kind of you know win-win-win.

"We should make a big bet."

Let's go in and put a lot of resources into one thing that

can make a big difference and that would be to turn around

this terrible housing project.

DAVIS: My Lord, the shower got holes all in it up in there.

It don't make no sense.

It's ridiculous.

GLOVER: For East Lake Meadows it had everything to do with

Eva Davis, when we startedthe conversation I think

Ms. Davis was skeptical about whether or not, ah,

a mixed-income community could work.

MUHAMMAD: Miss Davis felt that they was trying to

steal that land back.

and expand the whole golf course all the way through.

And they kept trying to tell to us that,

"No, that wasn't going to happen."

But that suspicion was always in the back

of everybody's head.

NAUGHTON: That's a really scary proposition if the only

thing standing between you and homelessness is the public

housing unit that you occupy.

And for families who have not been well served

by the school system, by the housing authority,

by virtually every institution that was supposed to support

them, that was a major act of trust for people to say,

"Okay, I would be willing to leave this community on the

promise that you will let me back."

REPORTER: You don't own this.

So how can you tell them what to do with something

that you don't own?

DAVIS: Well, they think we are dumb,

they think we are stupid, erratic, and crazy.

They don't even give the residents of this development,

credit for even having common sense in which

we were born with.

BLACKMON: They didn't own the property.

They didn't own their apartments.

They had no legal power of any kind.

And the Atlanta Housing Authority could have just

walked in one day and said everybody out tomorrow and

brought in bulldozers the day after that.

So Eva Davis had no power at all except that if you were a

politician who needed votes there she could

mess things up for you.

But also Eva Davis could just make it painful for

you to try to do anything in this environment.

STUDENT: Will the people who live here get to come back?

GLOVER: Well that is a very insightful question.

And that's a question we have been spending a lot of time

with the planning committee.

there are a number of residents who live in the

East Lake Meadows community who are representing all of you

and all of the other families who live at East Lake Meadows

and one of the questions that wehave talked about is the right

of the families to return to the community.

BARSH: Techwood was the first redevelopment and it was very

well-known that only about maybe % or % of the,

the new apartments were available for

public housing residents.

a lot of the residents was not able to come back to Techwood.

RESIDENT: All they want to do is to get us out regardless

of where we go.

They don't care.

As long as we get out their buildings.

WOMAN : I think that they are going to move

another class of people into the inner city

and move us back to the outer city if they can.

NAUGHTON: The planning process was really about

making those decisions:

how many apartments are we gonna be able

to build back on site?

What would the income mix be?

Ms. Davis felt very strongly she wanted it % public

housing assisted and % market rate.

ALEXANDER: The debates were very intense about

who should be allowed to live in the community.

The Residents' Association had as their image the

people that they were.

They wanted to exclude the violent ones.

The Housing Authority had an image of a higher

income class of tenants.

So we began to see much stricter lease enforcement by

the Housing Authority.

WOODS: The biggest memory, to me is when everybody

started getting evicted.

And a lot of people's stuff being thrown in front.

And everyone that was left would flock there and try to

take all their stuff, there was always somebody that was

there trying to fight people away to keep their stuff

because people were coming from all angles

to try to get stuff.

All the druggies would come, try to sell that stuff.

MUHAMMAD: It took tolls on a lot of us and especially

Miss Davis out of all people, it took a toll on her.

But we did have to eventually come down to saying,

"Okay, are we going to go with this plan or we not going

to go with this plan?"

BLACKMON: So this finally comes together.

Eva Davis, ah, is, is finally reconciled to this for a

variety of reasons.

I think that Eva had actually begun to come to terms with

the fact that she was not gonna be alive forever.

But, I remember sitting with her and talking about this,

"How did you make this turn that you've made?"

Um, and, and she said something to the effect of

that, "Something is gonna happen out of this and so I

think this is what we oughta do."

NAUGHTON: Even though it wasn't required under HUD

regulations we all felt it was important for the

community to vote on this change because it

was such a monumental change.

And so Ms. Davis, um, took it to the

Resident Association for a vote.

BLACKMON: And so it then comes to this meeting in the

community center there out at East Lake Meadows...

It's a tense room, it's a tiny little room without air

conditioning and people are packed into it, you know.

It's a broken down old community center, ugly,

squat building.

Police outside.

HEATH: Three or four of the tenants gathered a group of

people together and say, "Eva Davis lyin'!

She's gone get, get these people,

let them buy this out from under you,

you ain't gon' have nowhere to go."

DAVIS: They was poisoning residents mind

telling them once they get you out of there

you ain't coming back.

I said "oh yeah, you're coming back

if you want to come back

if you done lived right in the past..."

MUHAMMAD: It was really intense because

a lot of people spoke their opinion,

a lot of people was saying that actually we was

sellouts, that...

Miss Davis was being offered this nice home.

it was very heated.

LONGINO: My grandmother jumped up, um, and you know she said,

you know, "Wait a minute!"

Are you sayin' you don't want better schools or a better

place to live for your kids?

Aren't you tired of duckin' b*ll*ts?

you can't really want another lifetime of what

we're already in...

NAUGHTON: Finally Ms. Davis called the question and people

voted overwhelmingly in favor of tearing

East Lake Meadows down,

relocating, rebuilding in the model that we had been

negotiating for the last year and a half.

[cheers].

[cheers].

REPORTER: So, what do you think seeing all

this going on?

SHANNON: It's great.

I thought it would never happen.

It's great.

REPORTER: Alright, A little sadness seeing any of this go?

SHANNON: No, no, no sadness, no!

♪ BOTH: East Lake! East Lake! ♪

♪ You better get ready to move, we're coming to town. ♪

♪ East Lake, East Lake!

♪ Better get ready to move, where you gonna go? ♪

♪ When they tear east lake down. ♪

WOODS: Video club was set up through school.

They gave us a video camera and a microphone,

some journals, we would rap, and sing.

♪ CHILD: We're coming to town.

WOODS: We'd just be living our little lives through the little

camera that we had.

MARTY: This is where they are tearing down all

of the houses.

I am kind of sad because I have lived here all my life.

That is where people still live.

MARTY: These are the new apartments.

LUPE: Hi this is Lupe Barnes we're showing about the houses.

We're going inside.

REALTOR: Ya'll used to live in East Lake Meadows?

GIRLS: Mmm-hmm.

REALTOR: So you kinda want to see, you know,

what everything looks like?

PHYLLIS: Yeah.

REALTOR: This is a four bedroom and down here you have

half a bathroom.

This is a dining room area, okay?

And I'm going to show you guys out this door and you kind of

get you a little picture of the golf course there.

Is anybody, uh, parents, uh, coming back over here to stay

or, just, no?

ALLEN: When we saw them tearing the apartments down

one by one, they were promising that they would move

people out per building move them somewhere while they

renovate the building, and bring them back.

But we were seeing buildings being,

just torn down and people dispersing.

We just saw everybody around us gone.

We didn't want to be the only ones in the building

so we moved out and that was that for East Lake Meadows.

We didn't, didn't go back.

♪

ALEXANDER: A substantial number of them simply wanted

to get away.

The other half, or perhaps more,

wanted ultimately to be able to come back.

they wanted the right to return.

Every month some tenants would voluntarily leave;

some tenants were being evicted.

So the total pool of affected families was declining.

By the summer of ' we probably had less than

seventy families on site.

MUHAMMAD: My main decision that I made to actually take

the Section voucher and move from East Lake was my girls

had got involved with some young boys over there that

actually was messing around with drugs and dealing drugs.

I did not want them to be involved with that.

The actual getting the voucher that was easy.

The process of looking for a house and trying to find the

area you wanted to live in was the hardest part

because everybody didn't accept Section vouchers.

And a lot of people, when they found out that you

moving from a housing project,

that was another stigma they had on people too.

But it just so happened I found a, um,

landlord that was in Gwinnett County that was

willing to take the voucher.

ROSENSTEIN: In most places,

if you have a Section voucher that's helping

you to pay the rent,

a landlord is permitted to refuse to rent an

apartment to you.

the result is that most apartments that are available

to rent for Section voucher holders are in already

segregated communities.

HANNAH-JONES: So these vouchers which were supposed

to get poor people out of poor neighborhoods,

end up keeping them in poor neighborhoods.

And the only place that they're able to use the

vouchers are in the same crummy neighborhoods that the

housing projects were in that they were trying to escape.

GLOVER: You'll often hear the critics say about

the Section Program that families were

moving from one, ah, low income neighborhood

to another.

And if you put it in the context of what was going on

with racial segregation, well of course that's where

families were moving.

One that was the only place where they could move.

But at least the poverty was not as concentrated as it was

in the public housing.

VALE: Renee Glover is supremely confident that this

was the right way to go.

And she always is careful to frame the situation as this is

a terrible place, there was no community there at all,

good riddance, the question is are there important losses to

moving away?

And how dependent are people in good ways on the community

that they once enjoyed?

the capacity to provide support networks,

the capacity to have childcare from a family member the

proximity to some kind of job should we be completely

dismissive of those things?

PATTILLO: In many cities, what we have done,

is move the conditions somewhere else,

and in many respects it's about just moving people

around so that we don't have to see

the deplorable conditions.

LUPE: This is our house.

And as you can see the ribbons...

WOODS: I didn't want to end up like the other people that

didn't have homes and were living on the street,

or that got their stuff thrown out.

So, I was happy about moving.

We had a voucher.

We ended up moving to Candler Road,

to a little green house out there.

It was a little street with houses on it and we had our

own space we got to get away from.

There was still people with their loud music and hanging

outside drunk and stuff like that,

but of course we were a lot more happy because

it was our little house.

CRITTENDON: In prison I had seen the newspapers word on

the street, they tearing down a lot of the projects in

Atlanta and we was one of the first ones to go.

I got out, , February the th

it was no more Meadows.

WOODS: When they finally got it up,

my mom took us down there and we all went down

there as a family.

And we just walked around and looked at what our

neighborhood had turned into.

It was where we grew up at,

So we went back and we just looked around and,

that was that.

They were still doing construction on some parts and

that was the last time I went back.

DAVIS: They tore down hell, and they built heaven.

And now we are living in paradise.

LONGINO: She got what she wanted and as long as she was

happy I was happy.

She didn't wanna live anywhere else.

She didn't have a desire to do anything.

She ate, slept and breathed East Lake.

It was her world.

EL-AMIN: I didn't know she had ovarian cancer until later on

My grandmother said that she didn't want to go to a

hospice, if she was going to pass away,

she was going to pass away in her home.

I can remember it was a Monday morning I was on the way to

work my uncle called me and said, "She was gone."

She died at home.

I miss her a lot.

I miss talking to her, hearing her advice,

because she gave a lot of advice.

I really miss her.

NAUGHTON: The Villages of East Lake will always have

mixed-income apartments

including that are reserved for low-income families.

EL-AMIN: We have a bank now, we never had a bank.

We have a grocery store, Publix,

we never had a grocery store.

It's safe. It's safe.

What community wouldn't want to have a security company?

Gated community.

You have to have rules.

If you don't have rules, it'll go back to what

it used to be.

BOSTON: The uniqueness of what the Atlanta Housing Authority

did and also the Cousin Family Foundation is that they

started from the standpoint of trying to create an

environment that would allow families to be

more upwardly mobile.

They have a charter school there.

A new YMCA.

Early childhood development centers, daycare.

They have after school programs.

At East Lake they can learn how to play golf.

Some of the original families moved back,

but that was roughly only about % of the families.

ALEXANDER: East Lake Meadows was occupied by the poorest

people who had the greatest needs and the

fewest support mechanisms.

Many of them were disqualified from coming back.

Stricter screening requirements were in place.

The goal of the Housing Authority in the new community

was to have a higher income class of residents than lived

in the Meadows.

A handful of families ultimately got back

in to the Villages.

And most of them could not afford to remain there.

BLACKMON: A clear benefit was for that subset of the

original residents who were able to come back they did

come back to, ah,

a certainly much nicer existence than

they'd had before and one without the crime and,

and that is the case.

There's no doubt about that.

ZAKEYAH: I go to Drew Charter and we have an elementary

school, and a high school, and a middle school.

And it's very popular, let's just say that.

MS. TAMBER: Arms up.

Here we go!

Let's go! Yeah.

JAMILAH: There's always a story with my mom about how

her school career was different from mine,

how they didn't learn the same things that we did,

so it's really interesting, um,

how different things were then then now.

MS. TAMBER: Good and stop.

TEACHER: Monday, we are going to review and I'll

give you the study guide.

And then the test will be on Friday.

EL-AMIN: They want to go to college and Jamilah,

she was saying that she wanted to move to New York

at one point,

so they have a mind of their own and I want them to

stick with it and don't deter away from it.

So they, their dreams are when they finish Drew,

they're going off to school.

That's it.

NAUGHTON: The surrounding neighborhood,

the single-family neighborhood really

has changed dramatically.

It has become much wealthier.

Back in the average sales price of a house in

the East Lake neighborhood was about $, if

you could find a buyer.

Today, the average sales price of a home in the

community is about $,

ALEXANDER: It is tough to create a brand new community

in an area that has developed a very tough reputation.

So it takes courage to do it in the Villages.

The danger is forgetting for whom it is being built.

WOMAN: Don't have that on now.

MOM: It ain't on.

WOMAN: It is I see the light.

You think I'm crazy, man.

[inaudible].

ALEXANDER: We lost sight of the population,

the individuals, the families that lived there when the

demolition began.

It has created a stronger community but it has also

created a community where it's tough to live if you're making

minimum wage or less I don't wanna be critical of the

Villages as a success in its own right.

What I am quite critical of is the fashioning of housing

policies where we no longer serve those who

are most in need.

GOETZ: If you're only looking at the place,

then there's really no denying that it is amazingly different

And that it works for the people who live there in ways

that are almost unimaginable given the previous kinds of,

of conditions that existed.

So as place-based redevelopment,

the model is really quite good if, however,

one is interested in the welfare of

the original residents,

then the model was insufficiently attentive

to their needs.

where they ended up and the impact of this on them.

Our record nationally in terms of getting original

families back on site is ridiculously bad.

We made better places,

but we by and large didn't make

better places for the people who originally lived there.

BURSON: When they toredown East Lake Meadow they

displaced a lot of people, but it needed to be torn down.

It was dilapidated, crime filled, just run through,

so it was time, but the way they did things

after they demolished it.

They promised families that they would be able

to come back in.

life would be better.

It didn't happen that way.

Some people attempted to get back in only to be told,

well we caught your grandson over in a neighborhood seven,

eight blocks away and he was selling drugs,

so he can't come back and you can't come back.

I mean if you gonna take something away from them and

they're innocent, give it back.

VALE: The question is how to do this moving forward

in a way that does not repeat the mistakes of the past.

Maybe it makes no sense to concentrate the very lowest

incomes together only by themselves.

But at present,

only about one quarter of the people who have

incomes that would make them eligible for housing subsidies

are actually receiving them.

Why should we be losing ground on the numbers of extremely

low-income people that we're actually serving?

And we have been losing ground.

HANNAH-JONES: I think we could absolutely serve

the most vulnerable and do it well,

I just think we don'treally have the will to do that.

When public housing was seen as something for the

white poor or the white working class,

then it was seen as legitimate,

it was seen as something that we should support,

that these were people who were deserving.

And we know that our sense of who is deserving and

who is not deserving is completely racialized.

So I don't know how we get to that point

where we believe that,

um, when the face of public housing is a black

mother that, that black mother is deserving

of quality public housing

that is actually going to assist her and help her to

provide her children a way out.

So if the question is can we do it, absolutely.

Will we do it?

We never have.

["Have Some Love" Childish Gambino].

♪ GAMBINO: Have a word for your brother. ♪

♪ Have some time for one another. ♪

MAN: Crab legs, fish, we're gonna have it all.

MOORE: We're gonna have it all, man, I'm telling you.

MAN: It's just the start. MOORE: It's just starting out.

MAN: It's just getting started.

MOORE: I just starting out.

Every grill around here is gonna be smokin'.

♪ GAMBINO: Have some time for one another.♪

♪ Really love one another.♪

♪ It's so hard to find.♪

WOMAN: East Lake Meadows.

I enjoyed those days.

Ain't nothing but family around here.

MAN: Tell them what day it is.

MAN : East Lake Day baby, ya'll know what it is,

every year come out and show yourself.

ELGIN: It's good to see you man!

I'll talk to you in a minute.

MAN: Alright.

ELGIN: I learned a lot from East Lake Meadows.

I'm glad I was there for my own reasons,

what it did for me.

I found my love for music there,

my love for sports I met a lot of friends,

people I still talk to today.

So to me it was a good thing.

It wasn't supposed to be a permanent thing but

it was a good thing.

It was school for me.

It was, it was an education.

HARRISON: What's happening ya'll!

MOORE: What's going on!

[overlapping greetings].

MOORE: It was a good thing and it was a bad thing.

This is where we learned

everything we know about everything.

This is our home.

Ain't nothing like home.

Ain't nothing like home.

CROWD: East Lake! East Lake! East Lake! East Lake!

East Lake! East Lake! East Lake! East Lake!

East Lake! East Lake! East Lake! East Lake!

♪ Come on baby, oh

♪ Darling no, no, no, no, no, no, no ♪

♪ That's right baby

♪ That's right

♪ I see wherever, wherever, wherever you are ♪

♪ Wherever, wherever, wherever you are ♪

♪ I see wherever, wherever, wherever you are ♪

♪ Wherever, wherever, wherever you are ♪

♪ That's right baby

♪ That's right

♪ I see wherever, wherever, wherever you are ♪

♪ Wherever, wherever, wherever you are ♪

♪ I see wherever, wherever

♪ I see wherever, wherever, wherever you are ♪

♪ Wherever, wherever, wherever you are ♪

♪ I see wherever, wherever, wherever you are ♪

♪ Wherever, wherever, wherever you are ♪

♪ Wherever, wherever, wherever you are ♪

♪ Wherever, wherever, wherever you are ♪

♪ That's right, baby

♪ There's a big wide world out there I need to get in.♪

♪ We have got to really stay together.♪

♪ And I hope and I pray.♪

♪ We will find it someday♪

♪ We have got to really stay together.♪

♪ So have a word for your brother. ♪

♪ Have some time for one another. ♪

♪ Really love one another ♪

♪ It's so hard to find

♪ Have a word for your brother. ♪

♪ Have some time for one another. ♪

♪ Really love one another

♪ It's so hard to find

♪ Oh-oh. Mmmm

♪ I know a place.♪

♪ Aint nobody cryin.♪

♪ WOMAN: Happy y'all

♪ CHOIR: I'll take you there.

♪ WOMAN: Happy now

♪ CHOIR: I'll take you there.

♪ WOMAN: Oh

♪ CHOIR: I'll take you there.

♪ WOMAN: Oh, oh, mercy ♪

♪ CHOIR: I'll take you there.♪

♪ WOMAN: Oh, let me take you there. ♪

♪ CHOIR: I'll take you there.

♪ WOMAN: Oh, let me take you there. ♪

♪ CHOIR: I'll take you there.

♪ WOMAN: Let me pray. ♪

♪ Play your piano, now.♪

♪ Alright.♪

♪ Do it, do it, come on now.♪

♪ Play on it, play on it♪

♪ Big daddy, now.♪

♪ Daddy, daddy, daddy.♪

♪ Ooh, Lord ♪

♪ Alright, now baby.♪

♪ Little lady, need ya here, help me out♪

♪ come on, little ladies.♪

♪ Alright.♪

♪ [scatting]♪

♪ I know a place, y'all.♪

♪ CHOIR: I'll take you there.♪

♪ WOMAN: Ain't nobody cryin.♪

♪ CHOIR: I'll take you there.♪

♪ WOMAN: Ain't nobody worried.♪

♪ CHOIR: I'll take you there.♪

♪ WOMAN: No smiling faces♪

♪ CHOIR: I'll take you there.♪

♪ WOMAN: Uh-uhn.

♪ CHOIR: Down to the races.

♪ WOMAN: Oh.♪

♪ CHOIR: I'll take you there.♪

♪ WOMAN: Oh, oh, oh.♪

♪ CHOIR: I'll take you there.♪

♪ WOMAN: Mercy now.♪

♪ CHOIR: I'll take you there.♪

♪ WOMAN: I'm callin, calling, calling for mercy ♪

♪ CHOIR: I'll take you there.♪

♪ WOMAN: Mercy, mercy.♪

♪ CHOIR: I'll take you there.♪

♪ WOMAN: You got to, got to gotta let me.♪

♪ CHOIR: I'll take you there.♪

♪ WOMAN: Take you, take you, take you,♪

♪ take you over there.♪

♪ CHOIR: I'll take you there.♪