Conversations with Advocates of Fair Growth
Overview | Conversations with Advocates of Fair Growth | Living on the Fenceline
Hattie B. Dorsey
Hattie B. Dorsey is president and chief executive officer of the Atlanta Neighborhood Development Partnership. Dorsey worked for the Stanford Mid Peninsula Urban Coalition on affordable housing in the San Francisco Bay Area before returning to lead ANDP's push for equitable smart growth activities in Atlanta. She describes herself as having to "elbow myself to the table" in order to place class, race and equity issues in front of metro-regional planners.
ANDP is lobbying for more mixed-income housing developments arguing that they will help slow the growth of sprawl and relieve traffic congestion. They have met stiff opposition, however, because Atlantans are worried that when African Americans move into a community they will bring undesirables with them and lower property values. This widely held public view flies in the face of good research which demonstrates that property values in economically diverse communities appreciate faster than those in economically homogeneous communities.
The desire of Atlantans to live among people of their own race and class is not uniquely held by affluent whites, Dorsey notes. Many middle and upper class African-American residents also like to live among neighbors of the same race and economic background. Black parents want their children to grow up seeing other affluent blacks as role models, she observes.
While it remains difficult to integrate the wealthy suburbs of Atlanta in terms of both race and class, Dorsey sees some hope in shifting public perceptions. To begin with some businesses in Atlanta are beginning to recognize that they are being hurt financially by the fact that their workers have to commute over long distances on traffic-clogged highways. Placing affordable housing closer to their work sites is becoming a priority issue. As the business community begins to recognize the need for mixed-income developments, Dorsey expects to see a change in public policy.
Another point of leverage in changing exclusionary zoning policies in the suburbs is the fact that some grandparents are fed up with the fact that their grandchildren can not afford to live near them and as a result they see them infrequently. In the past developers, when presenting plans for the housing they want to build in affluent areas, made a point of noting that the price tag of their new homes were going to be high enough to keep out the poor. At one such presentation, Dorsey recalls, an elderly woman asking a developer how much the houses would cost. When he told her how expensive they would be she said that he didn't understand that she hoped her daughter and grandchild, currently living 50 miles outside the city in low-income housing, would be able to afford to move closer to her. The bottom line here, Dorsey notes, is that for the first time people in affluent suburbs are beginning to find self-interested reasons for wanting affordable housing to be built in their neighborhoods.
Dorsey also travels to colleges to talk to students about the need for affordable housing. She asks them where they plan to live when they graduate and many say they want to return to the communities where they grew up. They do not, however, want to live with their parents. When Dorsey points out that they will not, at least initially, be able to afford to live in the communities out of which they came it is often news to them. Dorsey goes further and asks if they would mind living next to a school teacher and then notes that teachers make only a half to a third enough money to live in the suburbs out of which many of the students come. This kind of education of the public about how they will be personally affected by exclusionary zoning may pay off over time, she suggests.
But Dorsey is also for taking stronger measures to break the grip of exclusionary housing in Atlanta. In the 1970 and 1980s she worked with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in California bringing landmark legal suits against those who practiced housing discrimination. The same tactics should be used on exclusionary zoning. "We should sue the hell out of them," she says. Dorsey also wants to take on the bus companies that bring white commuters in from the suburbs to jobs in the city but are not set up for the reverse commute that could take urban residents out to jobs in the suburbs.
Dorsey describes how she helped bring the concept of mixed-income housing to Atlanta from the Bay Area and introduced it into some developments that were going up through HOPE VI projects around Centennial Park. She also describes how one of the ripple effects of mixed-income development in the East Lake community have gentrified the area to the point that some of the low-income neighbors of the project are being displaces as their property taxes go up.
Interview
Hattie B. Dorsey (HBD): We are having a stakeholder meeting of some 40 people to talk about making a case for affordable housing as part of the regional smart growth dialogue. We have been working on this with help from the Ford Foundation. We want to put out the message that if in fact we are going to grow smart we have to be inclusionary in our approach and one of the mechanisms that we have found works is mixed-income housing that is accessible to mass transit and job centers, and that is pedestrian friendly.
Stephen D Lerner (SDL): Those are a number of the things that many experts agree would solve a number of social problems but are hard to actually bring about in the real world.
HBD: You have to get to the point -- like in Minneapolis, Minnesota and in Florida -- that this is one of the workable approaches when you build consensus. We have always said that when the private sector begins to say: we can't relocate any more businesses because people find it too hard to be caught up in traffic jams and the workforce population is furthest away from jobs, we have to find a way to correct that and balance ourselves. We need to speak out on those issues. When that begins to happen then you will see more attention focused on solutions.
The other side of this is that we now have the mayor in Atlanta (and some of the more progressive mayors in the region) are beginning to say: this [mixed-income affordable housing near jobs] is a component that was not previously included in our plans. Also, the Atlanta Regional Commission is beginning to indicate that it is going to abide by the letter of the law in ISTEA regulations and that we have got to make certain that our Livable Centers Initiative has in it mixed-income strategy. As a result people applying to us for transportation dollars will [have to] include mixed income [in their proposals] when they come to the table to negotiate.
SDL: Are metro regions beginning to compete with each other for business on the basis of which area is more livable? Are you seeing movement in the business community on these issues?
HBD: Yes. Our land-use and transportation planning -- if you look at what the state and regional planners propose -- it involves sitting in traffic for hours to get in to work. It doesn't matter where the job centers are the transportation problems are great. We have been tugging at their coat-tails for awhile through the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, arguing that they have to do something about housing. We tell them that we are talking about a mixed-income housing strategy; and that they need to say something about this in their land use plans. GRETA was the only group that had the leverage and the power to do something about it. They focus on transportation and I said why not look at transportation and land use side by side. I told them I thought they were making a mistake when they focused just on transportation only.
SDL: What did they say?
HBD: They said: well, we need to solve this transportation problem. But they will not solve it if they don't look at their land use planning. We are a little slow down here.
SDL: I don't think you are slow down here. I think everyone is slow on creating mixed-income housing because it is a highly controversial political and racial issue.
HBD: It is.
SDL: You are going up against one of the most entrenched problems in our society and that is that people are very clear about who they want to live near.
HBD: ANDP has been very outspoken about that. We put it on the table when no one else will. We will say: it is about race and class. You find clusters and in this region you also find clusters by choice. You have black folks who want to live near other black folks. Even among middle to high income black people, nine times out of ten they chose to live close to other black people. And it is not just the fact that they are comfortable; it is also that they want their children to see successful black people and not just successful black people.
The other real issue is that as the region grows it continues to segregate itself by where you find the roads being built, the access to and from places by transportation, and all the other stuff. So if black people move here they will bring all the undesirables along with them. There is that association and there is no getting around it.
ANDP has always been vocal that we are bringing race and class issues to the table and insert it in the conversation. Are we always welcome at the table to do that? The answer is no. My book is going to be called "Elbowing My Way to the Table." We come to the table to bring certain messages and to advocate for inclusion. We are not always invited to every table. Sometimes we just show up.
SDL: Give me an example of where you just show up.
HBD: The Chamber of Commerce and the Atlanta Regional Commission. We were not always welcome visitors at the end of the day. I got a piece of advice from Andy Young who asked me to be a vice chair of the Democratic Party. I figured it was just to be a figure head and they needed a woman and it would be nice to be a black person. I told him that I had never been known as a quiet person and asked how I would get to be taken seriously. He said: just keep showing up. Eventually they will think that you are supposed to be there and that you will have something to say. I know how to do that. I can show up and voice my opinions. Before, I had to elbow my way to the table, but now being invited is more routine than it was in the early days.
SDL: I was here a few years ago at a smart growth gathering where Andrew Young gave a talk and I learned that in Atlanta you have whole counties that do not permit the construction of multi-family apartment complexes. That shocked me.
HBD: That's right. Douglas County [in the western Atlanta Metro-Regional Area] is going to be challenged by Habitat for Humanity. They [the county] have a 1,600 or 1,800 square foot minimum on any house that is built there. That is a big house. That is bigger than Habitat builds.
SDL: If you have a low-income or are just starting out with your first house it would be hard to afford something that large.
HBD: Right. Habitat builds houses at 1,100 to 1,300 square feet at the high end. So this is a way to keep them out.
SDL: The other thing I learned from Bob Bullard was that MARTA [the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority] doesn't service some of these outlying counties where most of the jobs are being generated.
HBD: MARTA is also know [from its acronym] as "Moving African Americans Rapidly Through Atlanta." They say it is too expensive to pay for buses in HOV lanes out to these areas but the Governor is backing a multi-billion dollar bond deal to build more HOV lanes and make the highways bigger and for start up costs for bus transportation
It goes back to Myron Orfield's statement: Cities bear the burden of suburban growth. So why don't you want us (in the city) to link to your county transportation systems at no cost. The state doesn't support MARTA, the region as a whole does not support MARTA, and when you try to get support there is the most hollering and screaming that you ever want to hear. MARTA is the vehicle that has the infrastructure that we should be dependant on. The reason I think the counties don't want to link to it is that it is controlled by a majority black management. The outlying areas have representatives on the board of MARTA and I asked why because they bring nothing to the table. MARTA has a regional board but a very limited service area limited to the city and Fulton and DeKalb counties. So why are those other [outside] people having something to say about MARTA's growth and management of the system. Those are some of the inconsistencies but it was set up a long time ago with the hope that it would eventually link to DeKal and Guinette (sp?) counties.
SDL: That is what you are up against.
HBD: Yes, but I think the gauntlet was thrown down by Fulton County, DeKalb County, and the City of Atlanta who said we are not going to approve a one percent sales tax for MARTA when it expires. So now they are forced to make tremendous cutbacks and the elimination of certain routes and longer times between buses.
SDL: So we are going backwards here.
HBD: I think that if it hurts the white people then we will see change. If they can't get in here to their baseball games and if they can't find the shuttle service to get them to and from the train station to the baseball game or other things that are here, then the owners of those attractions will begin to say that this is stupid and you are hurting us. The revenue that Atlanta generates supports the rest of the state by a lot. And there is an inequitable redistribution of those tax revenues. So until it begins to hurt some people other than black folksthat is when you will begin to see change.
SDL: It is hard to convince a county that has taken an exclusionary approach and has done well financially by doing so that they should change to inclusionary zoning and permit mixed-income development. By having high minimum lot zoning requirements these suburban areas have made sure that only the wealthy can move in, they have a healthy tax base it is hard to break through that defensive fiscal zoning. It is almost as if they have put an invisible financial moat around the county to keep out the poor.
In Portland I heard you ask the question: what will these people do when their children get out of college? Where are they going to live because there will be no affordable apartments for them to move into in these wealthy counties that have forbidden the construction of multi-family complexes. Is that argument beginning to make sense to people in these communities? So they understand that they have to change their zoning in order to make it possible for the old and young members of their families to live in the same community? Does that begin to make sense to people who previously supported exclusionary zoning?
HBD: Yes. A developer was presenting his plans for a brand new development that he was trying to get approval for from a [suburban] community. And someone asked what the price range was of the new units. And the developer said that the units were going to start out at a high figure, expecting that this would please members of the audience. And the woman said: no, you don't understand, I want to find out if my daughter can afford to live there because right now she and my grandchild live 50 miles outside the City of Atlanta and I find it hard to visit with them. I want to know if you will build the kind of houses or apartments that will mean that she can afford to live close by me because I don't see my grandchild enough. And when that person begins to say thatand this is a true storythey were flabbergasted. These were the people who used to say they didn't want affordable housing in their community until it began to hit home and it meant that this woman couldn't visit with her little grandchild because her daughter had to move too far away and she had to commute in order to see that child then it was real to her
What we do in our advocacy is to go to the classroom in Georgia State University and we start talking to the young people. We ask them where they want to live when they get out of college and ask them if they can go back to their hometown and their community. And we ask them how much they think housing costs and whether their community has affordable housing. And we start breaking it down for them and then the bells and whistles start going off for that population that is going to be looking for housing and they realize that something is wrong and that they can't even go back to the community that they grew up in. Do they want to live with their parents? I don't think so. Do their parents want them to come back home? I don't think so.
We also ask them: are you opposed to a school teacher living next door to you? Most will say no. Then we ask if they know how much a school teacher makes. And it turns out that in order to live in their [suburban] town they would need a salary that was two or three times higher in order to have school teachers living there.
I travel every year with this group called LINK and we visit a lot of communities. It is a regional group and we have done it for eight years. We just came back from Boston. And Boston is just like Atlanta. When we got out into the suburb in Marlborough and there were all white presenters talking to us and they said they needed affordable housing because they were losing the 19 to 24 year olds who couldn't afford to live nearby. They don't want to live here. They go to Boston. They have a reverse commute. Why, because they don't have affordable housing units. We would like there to be affordable housing but we would like homeownership. So if you go into Boston the town is alive at night and it is those young people roaming the streets, going to the restaurants, and it is the cultural center for everything. People of this age are going to Boston or Atlanta. So we ask: do you have a pedestrian friendly community or is it car oriented? And is it high-end income home ownership. This is the isolation that you have developed [using their existing zoning regulations]. That brings about a brain dead environment because your population is aging in those houses. You have a corporation that has developed out here and it could have a whole lot of parking lots and all the young people who come out here must go on a reverse commute.
SDL: In Portland you also asked why it was that people in wealthy communities were willing to trust their babies to nannies, who had to travel from the city on some heroic commute out to the suburbs, but they wouldn't trust them as neighbors to live in the community. That gets at the crux of the issue. All of these arguments for mixed-income housing make a huge amount of sense at every level and yet we have all over the country exclusionary zoning. The pricing of housing in these communities is homogeneous. The prices are all in the same range. If mixed-income housing makes sense why is it happening at such a small scale?
HBD: I think it goes back to the individual home buyer who wants to get the greatest return on their housing investment and they believe that if someone who lives next door to me does not have the same sprawling acreage that he has then it will bring down my property values.
SDL: However, you said in Portland "homes in mixed-income communities appreciate faster than homogeneous areas."
HBD: Yes.
SDL: That is your research and you can give me citations to back it up?
HBD: Oh yes. In our report we will cite that. I will be at ANDP three more years. If I didn't need to get some other work in order to make money to retire gracefully, there is a program we operated in California that was a fair housing program. When I moved out to California, the land of opportunity that was not racist like Atlanta, in the Bay Area, when I went there the real estate people offered to put me in a motel and I said no, I was looking for an apartment. I found one on my own but the broker was going to send me off to a motel. I said no.
I ended up working for the staff of the Stanford Mid Peninsula Urban Coaliton that had a fair housing component that was supported by private corporations. The reason was that people couldn't find housing near where they worked. We had a Bay Area campaign asking people to dial H-O-U-S-I-N-G if they suffered racial discrimination. And we did landmark cases in the 1970s and 1980s. We teamed up with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and we sued all over the place. We had a team of lawyers. We would go and investigate cases of housing discrimination and we would sue them. And we did those tests all day long. We had one cased, the Park Merced case, that was on the outskirts of San Francisco and they sued because they excluded people of color from joining. So the tenant sued and they got a big settlement that they directed to our fund and that allowed us to continue. We sued for discrimination in housing. This is what has got to happen, from my pint of view, to begin to break up exclusionary zoning laws. You have to sue them for preventing people from living and working in these communities. So that is the side of me I would like to kick into high gear to go after them. We need to organize in a methodical on-going way to become the agents for suing the hell out of them.
SDL: Could you go beyond suing individual landowners for housing discrimination and broaden it out to target county zoning practices.
HBD: There was a suit filed against Henry County. There was a man who wanted to build moderate-cost housing, affordable housing and use smaller land lots, and the county turned down his permit. And then they enacted legislation that would prevent him from building and he took it to court.
SDL: In Atlanta you have whole counties that will not allow multi-family housing. Can you sue them?
HBD: Yeah. I think that is what some of these folks are now gearing up to do. But it is piecemeal it is not organized. I don't think ANDP will be the vehicle to do this. But you could have an organization that identifies areas where there are exclusionary zoning laws and you go out and challenge that law. If they have one acre minimum lot sizes you challenge that law. If you have 1,800 square foot house size minimums you challenge that law.
SDL: On what basis?
HBD: That they are exclusionary.
SDL: Is that illegal?
HBD: If we can show that the law eliminates a population of people's ability to live there then it becomes illegal.
SDL: That is what I'm not sure about.
HBD: We would have to find ways to do it. If the intent of it is to exclude a certain population of people and that is the reason you have the regulation there
SDL: I have interviewed Geral Frug at the Harvard Law School about this. I pointed out to him that there were counties in Georgia where there were no multi-family units. And he said it wasn't illegal because it is up to the state. The counties are passing these zoning laws but they can do this only because the state permits it. The state, ultimately, has the power on these issues although it devolves the land use decision making power on the counties.
HBD: Then let's sue the state. DCA's rules and regulations on passing down certain dollars is that they have to have a mix of housing. They submit those plans and no one ever holds them accountable for it. So sue the state and the county. There is a path there. That is why you have the legal research team. [The impact of all these exclusionary zoning regulations in the counties is that] it puts the burden on the city to become the host of all affordable housing units. And that is not fair. It is blatantly unfair. And that is another aspect of this discrimination. So you have to bring the suit on the basis of discrimination.
This is true in the transportation system as well. Buses [from wealthy white suburbs] drop them [commuters] off [in Atlanta] in the morning and then pick them up in the evening. [They do not carry urban workers out to jobs in the suburb]. So low-income workers cannot get out to jobs in the suburbs unless they have a car and a lot of low-income people who are operating on the margins can't afford a car.
SDL: Let me get this straight. I've heard this before from Robert Bullard but just for the record let me go over it with you again. There are suburbs outside Atlanta with economically comfortable residents who get a bus into Atlanta and that bus (under and agreement from the community they come from) will not pick up central city people who want to do a reverse commute and go out to work in the suburbs. They will not pick them up?
HBD: I don't think so. I can't be 100 percent sure. But if they are only running twice a day in the morning and in the evening there is no middle ground. So it is not designed to pick up urban residents and take them to places of employment in the suburbs. And, even if they would, they would be dropped off in parking lots in the suburbs and then how would they get to their job? These parking lots may not be next to a job center. So it is screwy. So businesses make decisions not to come here.
SDL: Exclusionary zoning creates residential communities that are segregated by race and class. Why has this been allowed to go on? Is the reason that it continues that it works politically? Affluent people settle in areas protected from the poor by exclusionary zoning. They feel comfortable in an area where people look like them and make the same amount of money and when they pay taxes in this county most of the taxes stay there. They get pretty parks, nice schools, a well-funded police and fire department. So they like it. They are pleased that no low-income people can move into their community. Given that there are many communities around d the country like this you are talking about a lengthy and difficult assault on this exclusionary zoning through the legal system.
HBD: I think that is one of the mechanisms that has to be employed at this point in time. But we are in the genteel South and we don't do things that way. We collaborate and talk it to death and eventually it gets done.
SDL: I remember some civil rights marches down here that challenged segregationist policies.
HBD: The lid has been put on. And to our own demise we said we made itsome of us. We are just as bad when it comes to class distinctions. I am working with as church that is getting ready to develop a large tract of land. At our old site we own 15 acres across the street from an old affluent black neighborhood. We want to sell to a developer who wants to develop some houses some of which are not mansions. They will be more affordable than the neighborhood wants and they will be closer together than the neighborhood wants. So they are about to have a stroke. And they want us to put conditions on how the land is developed. My view is that we don't want to put conditions on it because we are trying to sell the land. Let him [the developer] fight the battles with the neighborhood. It has zoning. He has to try to change the zoning if that is what he wants to do.
SDL: You are pointing out that affluent black communities have the same reaction to the construction of affordable housing as do affluent white communities.
HBD: Absolutely. It is by race and it is by class. So we have a double whammy because both groups don't want low-income neighbors. And low-income communities don't want more low-income residents. You hear them saying: we don't want any more low-income people.
SDL: Some of them don't want higher income people either because it will create gentrification.
HBD: But some of these people want to bring in goods and services so they don't have to commute for the lack of a grocery store or dry cleaners and all that. [Some will say]: We want all that stuff but we didn't think about the fact that it affected our tax base. They say: I was paying $25 on taxes and it has now gone up to $50. I didn't realize the consequence. I don't like this thing called gentrification.
None of us thought about the cause and effect [of gentrification] and the rising taxes on low-income home-owners, especially our seniors who are on fixed incomes. And they suffer as a consequence. So we didn't put the protections in place in time that would work. I went to Brookings to talk about what we should do about gentrification and came out with the slogan of 'managing gentrification." And we need to manage it in a way that is fair and equitable to all stakeholders in the community. We need to do that so that we don't push out, involuntarily the people who have been there in bad times and that we have a mechanism to keep them there. And that means sometimes grandfathering [properties] so that if a property changes hands then it begins to accrue [higher] taxes. And you get a CDC in the neighborhood to agree to keep a certain amount of housing in the neighborhood affordable. We need to think of strategies for the policy makers to ensure that it happens.
But, at the outset, we had such deteriorated neighborhoods that we were glad if anybody wanted to move back into town. And we never imagined that it would switch [property values would go up] as fast as it has. These neighborhoods have gone from $75,000 house to now building $400,000 homes.
SDL: A preventive strategy requires looking ahead and buying land while land is cheap; or putting a land trust together so that once the market takes off you have some land where you can create some affordable housing and get a mix.
HBD: The Community Development Partner Network is meeting here next week. And the slow-growth cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore, which are losing population, if they ever turn around, which I think they will, let's be prepared and learn form Atlanta. We were once a slow growth city. People were leaving and moving out into the suburbs. But now we are experiencing a population gain in the core city, a rapid population gain and we are not controlling it. It is astounding. I go into the neighborhoods a lot and I have to ask myself: where did that [development] come from. You see these apartment buildings coming out of the ground and you didn't know it was coming.
SDL: My next stop is East Lake where I will be speaking with Carol Naughton. Would you comment on the mixed-income housing experiment going on out there?
HBD: ANDP and prior to that the Atlanta Redevelopment Corporation, which is now known as the Atlanta Development Authority, were the first to position the whole concept of mixed-income development in the late 1980s. That was based on research. Are you familiar with Bridge in the Bay Area? That was my model when I was talking about mixed-income. I was out there for seven years. I took my board members out there. I went out personally to pick their brains before ANDP got started. They did mixed-income developments. I though this approach would break up the cycle of poverty in our communities. So I began to talk about this and my experience with the Mid Peninsula Housing Coalition that evolved out of the Stanford Urban Housing Coalition.
When I came back from California they must have thought I had been hanging out drinking and smoking pot and some other strange things that they do in the Bay Area. I started talking about the notion of affordable housing and they said: don't we have enough of that. They said we have enough public housing and I said: no. I didn't talk about public housing, I talked about housing that looked like Post Properties [a local upscale developer] and they thought I was really smoking something. But I said that if they could do it in the Bay Area they could do it here. My experience with the Mid Peninsula Coalition was bringing housing into Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, Mountain View and all those places and you could drive by them and you couldn't tell it was affordable housing. It was nice. So I said if they can do it there with the high cost of land in California, then we can do it.
In Atlanta we put together this syndication and guess who was behind us: the corporations. They underwrote some of our loans. Variant, Arcada National, and a number of other companies guaranteed our early loans because they wanted to bring employees closer to where they work. It was a self interest thing; it was not all altruism. They paint themselves into a box and then try to figure out how to get out of it.
I said we need to do mixed income housing. Right after we won the right to hold the Olympics here I went to this meeting and I said to myself: self, be quite, because I looked around the room and there were no black people there. There was just me. It was a sharette about what to do about Centennial Park. They hadn't acquired the land but they said: what if we did? Everybody was excited about creating this park downtown. I sat there and told myself: keep your mouth closed. They said they needed to do housing around the park and they gave the example of Central Park in New York. And I knew most people could not afford to live near Central Park. Finally the stepped on my toes and I raised my hand and said that I agreed with housing around the park but I suggested they used a mixed income strategy around it. And the room erupted.
In the corridor someone said to me: I disagree because we have enough of that housing. Techwood was there at the time. I said: at some point we should get past the point where when we talk about mixed-income housing we are talking about subsidized public housing. I had not mentioned public housing but rather the opportunity for a secretary to be able to walk to work to some of these downtown offices. I talked about the fact that a person who is at the margin and works every day should be able to enjoy the amenities of a park in Atlanta. I talked about mixed-income strategies. They debated that and it was in the paper the next day that this big argument took place.
On my way out the Chamber president approached me and said: I don't know how come you are so myopic. Why would you insist on having low-income people living around the park And I said: read my lips: mixed-income. I told him: that is your problem: because I said it, a black woman, you thought I was saying all low-income people. I have not used low income in my conversation. I said mixed income. And I told him that I had to go pick up my baby and that I would see him later. We brought that to the table.
ANDP is a "think/can do tank" We advocate for change but we also demonstrate how it can happen. So Centennial House, which is near the park with out fund raising ability we can not just advocate for something we can also make sure it happens. Sun Trust bank sent a developer to the table who was having a hard time piecing together the financing to do what he wanted to do at the park. He came to us and asked if we would partner. We got into a fifty/ fifty relationship. Our dollars closed the gap so we brought equity to the table but we also brought out notion that if they wanted our participation the had to bring the costs of the units down so low that school teachers and firemen and young professionals could afford to live there. We brought down the costs of the units by $50,000 per unit. That made them available for $120,000 to $160,000 and some of them went up as high as $300,000. These were one bedroom studios to two bedrooms. We tied some stipulations on them. They can't sell them for the market rate. If they stay in there ten years it is theirs. We did 101 units and we got 26 of them. And the people there love it. They are young professionals. It works. That same developer went down on Peachtree Street and built the Metropolis and he did the same thing. The units went from $160,000 up to $375,000. And he sold out in a heartbeat because there is a demand for moderate priced housing. At $160,000 you can qualify for down payment assistance and homeowner assistance. So it works it brings moderate cost housing into the downtown. But you have to overcome some obstacles.
SDL: Tell me more about Carol Naughton and the East Lake project. She is at the front lines of this trying to make it work. What do you hear?
HBD: Renee Glover and Egbert Perry and I visited Cisneros early in the day to get the notion of mixed income happening. I carried that notion to Renee Glover who was chair of the Atlanta Housing Authority. It was a troubled housing authority and she had gone after this new grant that HUD had with HOPE VI. Egbert had come to me to make that introduction and so I went to talk to her and asked if she had thought about the fact that this was a very fexible grant and that she could do something extraordinary downtown. She was concerned about stirring up a fight with the local residents [over the introduction of affordable housing]. I told her we had a partner in Egbert Perry and McCormack Baron [a developer that does mixed-income developments]. I gave her a paper to read. She then asked me to introduce her to Egbert and the rest is history. He joined her as a consultant to development. Egbert has the whole notion of mixed income based on McCormack Baron's success in Pittsburgh and he wanted to bring the model here. So Techwood [a troubled public housing project] turned into Centennial Place. That was the beginning of the story.
But the HOPE VI project did not extend to East Lake. East Lake was under a remodeling grant that HUD offers every five years. It was a renovation. I said: why renovate East Lake again. So Glover maneuvered and got HUD to allow her to tear it down and follow the model of what had been done with Techwood.
Tom Cousins then joined a partnership. He was doing the golf course so it was in his own self-interest to begin to eliminate the blight. He started buying up property. Tom wasn't good at the neighborhood. So gentrification has taken place and begun to push out It is hard to edge in a process and a procedure when you see a neighborhood begin to change for the better. And the displacement issue Channel Two ran a story What I talk about all the time. This man had a nice ranch house, he is a senior, and he said that the neighborhood is finally changing back to the way it used to be but I may not be able to live here. I am going to be forced out because I am on fixed income and the taxes are going up. The house is paid for but I can't afford the higher taxes that I am going to be assessed. And those are the components of East Lake.
Has it changed for the better? Yes. Is it going to mean a whole group of new people coming in? Yes. My point is that there will be decent citizens who will be forced out. How do we keep them there?
SDL: You are saying that the impact of this project will be a good deal of displacement.
HBD: Yes, a good deal of displacement is happening.
SDL: But is there a good deal of housing for people of both low-income and middle income in this mixed-income project?
HBD: In the project itself, yes. But all around it the prices are going up. The properties that Tom Cousins bought up all around it He isn't interested in affordable housing. And the units going up around it are not interested in affordable housing.
We used to say that our job was done when the private sector is recaptured in the market place [in some of these low-income areas]. But our job is not done because we have to stay in and ensure that there is affordability there. That is why we are now advocating for inclusionary zoning and inclusionary policies. And our mayor is now in our corner. So at some time the City of Atlanta will grapple with inclusionary policies.
Those are the lessons we learned along the way. If we had thought that we might be successful we might have thought about what the consequences would be [in terms of displacement by gentrification]. Think about the dangers of success. It is a changing climate. I tell our Board: If you think it is going to be fixed in five years don't even bother sitting down. If you think it will happen in ten years don't sit. This is a minimum 25 year process. And even then we may not accomplish everything we want to do. So when I think about quick fixes I know there will always be other issues that will emerge that we did not anticipate. We have to learn from each other and apply those lessons. So a Philadelphia, a Baltimore, a Detroit, and everyone else who is going through the same thing should come to Atlanta and see what the lessons were that we learned and what they have to avoid.
SDL: Do you think you will get inclusionary zoning here?
HBD: I think it will be spotty. And it will be fought. They will do it over here but not over there. They will say: Let us take our affordable units and put them over here. So the mayor will have to be strong enough to say, no, it goes in your area.
SDL: And that is the "Fair Share" part where you can't trade it off.