Third World America

Atlanta is the first city in the United States to have dismantled its public housing projects, the grim towers and miles of low-rises housing the city’s poor, mostly black population. Things is, no one has any good idea where the people ended up.

Well-meaning—if completely naive—liberals appear to have fallen victim to the idea that removing the symbols of poverty is to cure poverty itself. Conservative backers of the demolitions relied on the notion that running a fleet of bulldozers over people’s neighborhoods convinces those people to become doctors and lawyers. This notion is based on a bizarrely common misunderstanding that American poverty conditions are somehow a non-stop parade of fantastic moments and that citizens have chosen poverty because it’s so awesome all the time. The conservative logic doesn’t really work without this assumption in place. Whether it’s the housing demolitions or welfare reform, conservative economic initiatives rely on a notion that they (the hard-working productive ones) are slaving away to foot the bill for the poor folks’ pleasure cruise in public housing, living it up on paltry monthly checks and WIC. Ironically, it is quite often a belief held by people who literally avoid “bad parts of town” for fear of being attacked by roving mobs of marauders, which they assume to prowling at all times through the streets. They are terrified of the projects and rough neighborhoods, yet their politics is based on a notion that everyone living there is doing so by choice, because it’s so amazing. And not only do they live there by choice, they remain there by choice, instead of becoming “productive members of society.” So, in total, this notion holds that poverty is quite an attractive way to live and it is achieving success and being ‘productive’ that’s such a bummer, such an awful burden. And that’s why we need to punish welfare recipients—because they’re busy enjoying themselves while we slave away. I have seen some pretty lazy, unimpressive people trot this one out.

This is real-estate-developer-wet-dream grade property, perfect for a super sweet parking deck. Maybe a Burger King.

City officials and real  estate developers (developers, especially) seized upon this conservative notion of civic tough love in order to justify their designs. You see, the Summer Olympics  was coming to Atlanta in 1996 and city bigwigs needed the poor folks gone—they were having company over. Hosting the Olympics is like being asked out on a date by the rest of the world: making a good first impression is how you get screwed. So, in 1994 the city began removing the most visible public housing neighborhoods, like the famed Techwood Homes, which happened to be on some of the most valuable real estate in the downtown  and midtown areas. Thus began the project to cast out all public housing residents, thousands and thousands of families, without any real good idea where they’d end up. In some ways it echoes the dispersion of mostly poor New Orleans residents in the wake of Katrina—both formed a post-industrial urban diaspora, a semi-nomadic population (one guesses, as no one knows for sure) whose homes were literally stolen en masse in the name of progress.

But aside from an article or news report here and there, usually in celebration of the accomplishment, little has been said about those displaced residents. Nobody really knows a whole lot about what happened after the buildings fell. Local media outlets will hyperventilate about an apartment fire or a high-speed police chase, but the massive towers and their erstwhile residents got little attention. The attention that was offered to the destruction was at times shockingly celebratory and naive (or hateful, depending on how you see it). The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the city’s only large paper, issued an editorial dripping with venom about the city’s families who happened to live in public housing. On the spectrum of compassionate human expression ranging from a Mel Gibson rant to the Sermon on the Mount, the piece checks in somewhere around Mein Kampf. The residents are despised as “cancerous,” “abject” criminals. They are an affliction, and the only way to help them is to severely hurt them:

…Carver Homes, a public housing complex in southwest Atlanta, once sprawled like a cancerous growth on the surrounding neighborhood. It has since been transformed into a mixed-income community with a new elementary school, athletic fields and upscale amenities.

Further north, the Perry Homes projects, which had been a wasteland of abject poverty, crime and despair, is no more. In its place stands The West Highlands, an oasis of single- family houses, condos and apartments where middle and upper-class professionals live side by side with neighbors whose incomes qualify them for public assistance.

And how are poor families supposed to manage living next to “upper-class professionals?” Think about that for a second: in what deluded utopian fantasy do ‘upper-class professionals’ and middle-class soccer moms all of a sudden get thrilled about living next to poor folks? Have you ever met an ‘upper-class professional’? I have. And I haven’t yet had one tell me about their burning desire to live in a mixed-income neighborhood. What I have heard, however, are the myriad maneuvers they use to bar poor folks (and people of color) from their neighborhoods.

The simplest way to accomplish this is also the one that usually works automatically: property values. The former public housing resident simply will not be able to afford the market rent on the new privately owned units. Families are issued vouchers to supplement their rent payments, but there’s no way the subsidies are sufficient to live in an upscale neighborhood.

So what happened to the people? The upheaval and displacement has received some scholarly, statistic-based attention from researchers like Georgia State University’s Deirdre Oakley, but even that work strains to tell the human story.

A new generation of rappers is beginning to report from the new circumstances. As long as the inner-city is kept foreign and unknown, these rappers can be thought of as almost foreign correspondents reporting from the hood bureau. Late rapper Eazy-E, whose group NWA pioneered unflinching reportage from the hood, announced the reporters’ creed:

“We’re underground reporters. We tell about…the streets and everything that goes on, you know, around in Compton (Los Angeles), our area, what’s going around around us. We don’t know what the fuck’s going around around by you, but frankly we don’t give a fuck, you know. Most kids in Compton don’t give a fuck who the mayor or the president is, you know.  They’re not even interested in voting.”

Atlanta rapper Pill is one of the first rappers to emerge  out of the new desperation. The rising Atlanta star explicitly asserts that his lyrics are to reflect his 21st century Atlanta, echoing Eazy’s use of rap as a means to report from the hood:

“For people who don’t know Atlanta…and ain’t familiar with the way it really was, the way it really is, I want to show them it’s more than nice condos and nice houses and nice cars and strip clubs. So I kind of wanted to expose the people to the other side of Atlanta, instead of just the side you see on TV.”

Having watched the wholesale destruction of his childhood homes and entire neighborhoods, Pill is able to report on the tremendous upheaval and the anger and desperation of the new urban diaspora:

If you look at it, over the last five years, probably the last ten, we done had them knock down every project, every subsidized home; all that shit tore down. It’s like they leave everybody on the outskirts, and they moved everybody else in, people that can afford it. So y’all let us live here for low incomes, you let us live here for this many years, and then just when we think something’s gonna change or y’all fixing to build new homes for us, y’all are already building them for somebody else. And y’all gonna kick us out? It’s kind of crippling.”

In his song “Pain in They Eyes” Pill describes the otherworldliness of Atlanta’s hoods.  There is the city that is presented by officials and business elite, but the conditions for the poor have only gotten worse, despite the city’s ‘beautification’ projects to convince visitors otherwise:

You know they tryin’ to disguise the streets / With beautification projects / Projects gone and we got mouths to feed…I can see the pain in they eyes / They ain’t lovin’ life.

New Orleans natives Lil’ Wayne and Jay Electronica tell a similar story about  the post-Katrina reformation of their city. Jay Electronica grew up in the city’s projects (the renowned Magnolia projects, among others), and has devoted no small amount of lyrical attention to how the hurricane was used to redesign the city according to will of real estate developers and other capital interests—to get rid, or keep rid, of the poor folks.

From Jay Electronica’s Exhibit A:

They Candyman, Candyman spit me a dream / Blow a chunk of the levee out and spit me a stream / Knock a man’s house down and build a casin’ (pronounced caseen—casino) / A two thousand dollar government check from FEM’ (FEMA)

In “The Levees Broke” Jay Elec describes

They closed down all the projects / And all these wicked contractors can’t see us make a profit / Insurance companies fucked us up the ass, nobody stopped it / That’s why I’m yelling ‘fuck the world’ every time I let my Glock spit / My nigga, we ain’t got shit.

Citizens of New Orleans’ public housing found themselves in an accelerated and sudden version of the process wrapping up in Atlanta. Atlanta had been an experiment; New Orleans was now another laboratory—to test how quickly cities could be rearranged for the purpose of increased profit-making.

(Naomi Klein calls it “disaster capitalism,” this new ability of the powerful to exploit disasters for gain. Whereas commerce used to be conceived of as requiring calm and peace, Klein asserts that disaster can be harnessed [or even initiated by shock; think Iraq] to be made profitable. Post-Katrina New Orleans was the first North American disaster capital laboratory.)

Following Atlanta’s lead, four of the New Orleans’ largest public housing neighborhoods have been destroyed and replaced by for-profit rentals. As one would suspect, these typically “mixed-income” neighborhoods that replace the public housing quickly become unaffordable to those who relied on the public housing. This is beginning to become a recurring story, as the experiments in Atlanta and New Orleans are offering the appearance of success.

So, again, where are all the people?

Oh, there they are.