Episode 37: Public Housing and Tenant Power in Atlanta with Akira Drake Rodriguez

Shane Phillips 0:04
Hello, this is the UCLA Housing Voice podcast and I'm your host, Shane Phillips. Joining us this week is Professor Akira Drake Rodriguez from Penn to talk about her book 'Diverging Space for Deviance', which explores the political history of Atlanta's public housing program, from its inception in the 1930s to the eventual demolition and redevelopment of many of its sites in the 1990s. And later, I found that the conversations we have about the history of housing policies, programs and politics are some of the most engaging and interesting to me personally, and this one absolutely does not disappoint. I've never been to Atlanta, but I learned so much from our interview and reading Akira's book that I know is going to inform my own research and advocacy here in California, and I'm sure you'll feel similarly after listening. While we start out with an overview of the history of public housing in the US and some of the misconceptions we have about it, this is really a discussion about tenant power, and the unique almost certainly unintentional way that very top-down federal public housing programs led to very bottom-up political organizing and demand making on the part of poor and especially later, almost exclusively black constituents within Atlanta. I'm really excited to share this one with all of you, so we're going to jump right to it. The Housing Voice Podcast is a production of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, with production support from Claudia Bustamante and Jason Sutedja. As always, feedback and show ideas can go to me at Shanephillips@ucla.edu., and we'd really appreciate your support in the form of a five-star rating or review. Now let's talk to Professor Akira Drake Rodriguez.

Akira Drake Rodriguez is an Assistant Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design and she's here with us to talk about her book from the University of Georgia Press, 'Diverging Space for Deviance,: The Politics of Atlanta's Public Housing'. Professor Rodriguez, welcome to the Housing Voice podcast.

Akira Drake Rodriguez 2:15
Thank you for having me.

Shane Phillips 2:17
Mike Lens, co-host welcome.

Michael Lens 2:19
Thank you, Shane. Welcome to Akira, great to see you.

Akira Drake Rodriguez 2:22
Nice to see you. Nice to see you both.

Shane Phillips 2:26
We always ask our guests to start us off with a quick tour of somewhere they know and they love. We'll be talking about mid and late 20th century Atlanta for most of this conversation, but you're based at Penn so we will start with present day Philadelphia. If we're visiting Philly for the first time, which it would be my first time, where would you want to take us and get a sense for the city?

Akira Drake Rodriguez 2:47
Philly is a city of neighborhoods, which I know every city makes that claim. But in Philadelphia, it is particularly true. So I would probably take you to some of my favorite neighborhoods or places where I've lived. So that includes South Philadelphia, where both of my parents were born and raised. I would take you to Point Breeze but I would also take you to the Italian market which is now the Mexican market, the great Southeast Asian food that we have on Washington Avenue. I would take you to all of our beautiful riverfront trails, this is also a city of parks I think like a super majority of our population lives within a 10-minute walk to a park so you can just find a park anywhere in Philly (and) vibe out. I would take you up Broad Street, which is where I live, which runs North to South in the city, and you get to see all the way from our stadiums, all the way up to Fern Rock and Elkins Park where we have beautiful synagogues designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and just a bunch of really wonderful architects. I will take you down to Society Hill so you can see the towers designed by I.M. Pei during urban renewal. I'd take you to German town which I'm working on right now writing about a huge bastion of community organizing in the city. I would take you to West Philly to the site of the move bombing of 1985 on Osage Avenue, and then head over to Cubs Creek Park and then Fairmount Park. I'd take you to a lot of places

Shane Phillips 4:26
Yeah, you've done this before you just like roll those...

Akira Drake Rodriguez 4:31
We do a lot of tours in my history and theory class. So we give them for tour so it's like I could take you on this tours but there's so much more.

Shane Phillips 4:40
Historians are great for this kind of thing, great tour guides.

Akira Drake Rodriguez 4:42
They are!

Michael Lens 4:43
I want to go to go to Philly right now, this same minute

Akira Drake Rodriguez 4:46
Yes, yes, please come. You've been to Philly, what do you mean?

Michael Lens 4:50
Oh, sure, a couple of times but it's been a while.

Akira Drake Rodriguez 4:54
It's been a while, it's changed a lot like most places I guess are

Shane Phillips 5:00
So this is our first episode talking about public housing in any real depth. So before we get into the thesis of your book, we should begin, I think, with a little bit of history. As you know, in the book, the US public housing programs started in Atlanta in 1934. What was the context in which the public housing program was established, and at a high level, at least, what problems was it trying to address both socially and economically, and I suppose, racially as well, what was the vision among its founders and early reformers?

Akira Drake Rodriguez 5:32
Yeah, so I started the book in 1934 with the inclusion of a shack and beaver slide, and that was done by FDR. It was a huge deal. Everyone was there taking photos, singing and lots of courses, and that was sort of the inaugural origins of the public housing program as we know it. So it started off as a New Deal program of course, in response to the Great Depression, so we're talking about massive unemployment and massive foreclosures but also still a need for affordable housing as a result - so both a need for homeownership, which, of course, we see with the FHA, but also this sort of public housing program, which starts in in bits and pieces. It starts off through the US Housing Authority, and then it's later transferred into the sort of local housing authorities that we see in the 1937 Wagner Act. So Atlanta is notable for being kind of the first city to have public housing with the opening of techwood homes in 1936, and the second city to have all black public housing in 1937 with the opening of the University homes. In Miami in 1936, you have the opening of Liberty Square which is really the first public housing for black people in the country. So this is a time where people are really kind of like an all hands on deck approach to thinking about these massive social problems. I talk a lot about public housing that was always occupied by black residents because I think that particular trajectory is very important. In Atlanta, and in the state of Georgia in particular, the state was dominated by something called a white democratic primary, which means that in a state that's all Democrats, the primaries, which of course, sort of determine the general elections, were actually private, and thus could discriminate and be whites only. So this lasted until 1946, with the end of that, which is determined unconstitutional. So essentially, public housing and Atlanta for black people began before they could legally vote in any real way, and so I talk a little bit about how this happened at the federal level through the Black Kitchen Cabinet, which was led by Robert Weaver. There's a great book about by Wendell Pritchett, about Robert C. Weaver, who would later go on to be the first Secretary of HUD, but he and a whole host of others, including Mary McLeod Bethune, formed this Black Kitchen Cabinet to really create opportunities for black people during the New Deal. So in terms of political opportunity, you see public housing, providing jobs, providing housing, of course, but really addressing a number of problems that at the local level, and the state level, black people were really unable to do on their own.

Shane Phillips 8:33
And alongside that positive, more kind of hopeful vision for public housing. It was also intended or at least used in ways that furthered some more nefarious goals. It could be used in a very physical way, you know, as you talked about in your book to harden boundaries between black and white neighborhoods, or as a means of justifying slum clearance and the dispersal of existing black communities where land values are rising, and nearby owners wanted to clear that space for higher value uses and more affluent residents, likely white ones. Can you say more about how public housing was used to strengthen or reinforce the existing social order?

Akira Drake Rodriguez 9:13
Yeah, so Atlanta is also kind of an interesting study, because unlike places like Chicago, or New York, or Philadelphia that had very small black populations in the 30s and 40s before you know, the height of the great migration, Atlanta was like 40%, black from the start. So people kind of lived, black people in general kind of live in five areas in the city, and so they were already segregated but there was a lot more race mixing, as you know, in the South. I always remind myself of my grandmother saying, "In the south you can't be too big, in the North you can't be too close". And so how segregation plays out in the adult environment is very different because of sort of the social norms and customs of Jim Crow in the South, as compared to the North. So the the hardening of public housing and racial segregation didn't really occur until urban renewal, when you start to see a massive ghettoization of public housing concentration in the Northwest of the city. But until that point, public housing was mainly used to clear out mixed race areas, and areas of vice. So that is also pretty typical of many cities but in Atlanta, it wasn't so much like, "Oh, we're going to clear out this black area and put it over here", it was more so let's make sure that these boundaries stay hard, and there isn't this sort of race mixing that we've seen in the past. And that again, kind of correlates with the ability for the black southerners to begin voting, we start to see that shift in power where you could get too big in the South.

Michael Lens 10:50
Right, and I guess one concept that you introduce early in the book, is this idea of racial uplift. And I think that's tied to WE DuBois and the talented 10th, what role was public housing supposed to play in this in this effort or idea of, you know, racial uplift and kind of, you know, I guess that's a time we can start getting into some of the kind of class differences that exist within the black community in Atlanta and other places?

Akira Drake Rodriguez 11:26
Sure, so racial uplift was sort of the dominating mode of integration and liberalism at the time from black elites in particular, but also black, middle, and working class. And the idea was, as you mentioned, with talented 10th that the top 10% couldn't advance until it lifted up the bottom 90. So these were sort of in keeping with the day right and thinking about settlement houses, and Don Parson talks about this in his book on LA public housing about the americanization of ethnic groups. This idea that people who were impoverished had to be trained and civilized to be Americanized, and so there was a lot of citizenship classes, there was a lot of political education classes, and university homes in particular, they formed a lot of partnerships with the local HBCUs. So they formed partnerships with Atlanta University and had people come in and give lectures, there was a lot of gendered courses that were offered, you know, how young girls could become young women and domestics and how young men could sort of take care of the homestead. But this was also happening in the white public housing developments as well. So you see, you know, a lot of victory bonds and patriotism and a lot of things committing to the war effort. And so this was just, again, kind of building on that legacy of settlement houses during the 19th century, with Jane Adams and Hull-House and things like that, kind of seeing that the poor had to be trained how to not only become good citizens, but good homeowners and housekeepers, and that like continues into the present day. So if you work at like public housing, even if you're like looking at your lease, sometimes you'll find these things, of you know, you can't hang your clothes off of the side of your balcony, and you can't, you know, have things out in the yard and things like that. So these kind of paternalistic agreements continue in the present day.

Shane Phillips 13:27
If maybe the average person thinks one thing about public housing in the US, I think it's probably that it was a failure. They think of the crime and the poverty, the poor maintenance of these properties, and maybe the images like the destruction of the Pruitt Igoe development come to mind and other public housing projects. In this frame, public housing was a mistake, and probably never could have succeeded. When people learn more about the program's history, they get a more nuanced understanding and might come to believe instead that the US public housing program was in some ways designed to fail, that early compromises made with opponents of the program, set it on kind of an unsustainable course. The entire history of public housing in the United States is big and complicated. Neither of those stories capture it all by any means. And so what are some of the key misconceptions that people have about public housing in the US that you think are it's important to address here?

Akira Drake Rodriguez 14:26
I think a lot of the key misconceptions come from that images of Pruitt Igoe, and the images of Cabrini Green and, you know, the idea that there were these Greek towers that were like prisons and I have this great like article that I show my class where it's like 'Public housing, a human file cabinet set to explode' so there's this deemed fatalism about you know, this idea of concentrated poverty and crime and all of that is like totally true. But the context around that is quite different, right? So this is like the 70s and 80s, where police budgets are being slashed, we're seeing like record inflation, record unemployment, it's a new era. And these public housing residents don't have any alternatives on where to go right? There is no affordable housing, there is no opportunity to purchase a home because they don't have jobs, and crime is sort of this outlet but it's not necessarily a way of life. So I'm thinking about, you know, public housing and Atlanta and there are no towers, only elderly are in high rises in Atlanta, they were all garden style. So it wasn't that sort of concentration in that way. It was definitely a lack of opportunity, and some of the structural aspects of who was living in public housing at the time. So these are kind of, you know, once public housing became majority black and led by women who some of them were, you know, taking public benefits and public assistance. It is at that point that public housing becomes untenable, and you start to see this shift and how people are talking about it, right, it is no longer like, you're doing this great civic duty by living in public housing like we were in the post war era. It was very much like, we need to get rid of this: this is a burden, this needs to come down, this is dangerous, (and) this is taking our tax dollars. And of course, there are changes at the federal level, Nixon introduces the moratorium on public housing construction so there's also no new housing stock that's being added while at the same time, you know, in Atlanta in particular, these are buildings constructed in the 30s and 40s, that were quite old at the time. They were also not modern, right? So they were small, they were, you know, didn't have proper utilities, there was still a lot of vermin, a lot of public housing was put in areas that was not developed so there was like poor infrastructure, raw sewage that was pouring into people's yards, rats, vermin, things like that, that made it just a very inhospitable place to live. And those are images that people see right? Even today, there's a place in Philly, called the University City Townhomes that is project based section eight, which means everyone, the entire development is vouchered right? That voucher has expired, expiring subsidy, and then like it's familiar with that, and it was sold, right, and they have to go. So over two years, they've been trying to evict these residents for some time, and there's been a lot of protest and resistance, and encampments to kind of stop that. And I'm walking up to it one day, and this woman who worked at the grocery store at the street stops me and she's like, "Oh, what's going on?" I tell her that these people are about to be evicted, and she said "Good!" She said it's dirty, you know, they don't take care of their homes, and it's just a mess over there. But it is a development with 70 units, also garden style, very integrated into the surrounding community, which is the University of Pennsylvania. And there's two dumpsters to serve 70 units. And so it's just impossible, right? I mean, it's just poorly maintained. It's been disinvested, and this is what we saw. Even if you watch the, you know, the predicament, you can see that, like, these places were never really meant to be homes. They were meant to be kind of like something that would just keep people quiet and like solve this very temporary problem, but they were not really considered to be long term housing for anyone.

Michael Lens 18:42
Right.

Shane Phillips 18:43
And yet, you know, they've lasted generations and some still exist to this day.

Michael Lens 18:49
Yeah, and I think, you know, one concept that we have, I think of, you know, maybe the civil rights era, the middle of the 21st century, in particular, right, is that cities in the South especially, to a lesser extent Atlanta but that's a different story of where I'm going here, you know, are very recalcitrant in the face of racial change, right, in that there's this federal government that comes to the rescue at different points throughout the civil rights era that is racially progressive, and, you know, kind of pushes the South to do better. If I'm, you know, painting a straw man there. I may be, but like, I think that there's a lot of people that have that kind of memory of the 20th century, of the civil rights movement, but like, where I'm going is like, how much does the local provision of public housing, whether it's through citing decisions, you know where the public housing is going to go, whether it's through tenant selection decisions, whether it's going to be segregated, you know, what's the income mix, etc, and then these questions of maintenance, obviously, are relevant as well. Like, how much of that do you think has to do with how we set it up with local control in terms of a lot of the failures that we saw?

Akira Drake Rodriguez 20:20
Yeah, so local control is interesting because at the beginning, and you know, the 1930s, when they're developing University homes, they have these local advisory committees. And these are people in the case of University City Homes, it was a biracial committee. So it was like, you know, the first black man to own an insurance company in Atlanta, with like the white woman President of Spelman College. And so there was like a really kind of diverse group of elites in particular, who were thinking about the feasibility of this particular housing development. And prior to kind of like the New Deal stepping in, and the federal government stepping in, John Hope, who was the lead of this Local Advisory Committee, (and) who was the first black president of Morehouse College, had been trying to develop limited dividend housing for years. And the issue was land assembly, right? So that was sort of like the local rub was that like, when you're in a segregated area like Atlanta, it is difficult to assemble enough parcels in a black area to build public housing. And so the federal government was quite helpful there. But the federal government couldn't really understand the local mix. So the advisory committee commissioned W.E.B. DuBois when he was at Atlantic University to do a feasibility study, he surveyed everyone he learned, you know, these are people who work, this is a two-worker household, these people need this number of rooms, and provided these recommendations to this local advisory committee in a way that couldn't have been done if it was done at the federal level. So the Local Advisory Committee was also important in saying, "Look, we need different income limits like even though there are two black adults working in this household, they still make less than this one white worker, and so we need to lower these limits actually". And then you have people like Florin Tweed, this white woman President of Spelman College, she's like, "You know, we don't allow single people on public housing, and I think that's terrible." She was like, you know, we have teachers are legally kind of required to be single women, and there's nowhere for a teacher to live. And so again, like a lot of the same issues that we're seeing today with like, we have these sort of, you know, required occupations in a city that pay so little that like people actually cannot afford to live in these cities as they grow. And so I thought it was sort of really interesting that these like, very, you know, black people on the committee were like, yeah, you know, sometimes people take in a cousin who's like coming from the rural areas, and like we should allow for, like non-nuclear family inhabitants to come into public housing. And it was actually rejected by the black housing manager at the time who said that this would cause like, great corruption into the family structure if they did that. And so a lot of these issues are like interracial, intra racial, and kind of these different class dynamics that really shaped it again in a way that I don't think could have happened at the federal level. And then once, you know, you start to see the Housing Authority, which was governed by all white men and all white real estate developers for quite some time, then you start to see that like, traditional public housing story of like, we're going to cite them in the worst areas, we're going to use the cheapest materials, we're going to make sure that it's like horrible, so it doesn't compete with our properties, and then you start to see those problems arise. But in the very early days, there were like home visits, applications, employment verification, income minimums and maximums; it was like a well oiled machine.

Michael Lens 24:01
One way we've used this conversation so far is to, you know, give a specific local context for public housing development in the United States right? But I think where your book is really an important contribution to me is this notion that public housing has been a venue for political organizing and power amongst low income tenants, obviously, or a tenants rights movement more broadly, and a black political participation and power and struggle more broadly, as well. And then, you know, there's also I think, very important gender dynamics, which you've touched on already. Aso I think, you know, that's where, you know, it would be great to kind of shift the conversation, you know, in that public housing created a space to bring people together where they can organize and make demands on the city of Atlanta for you know, myriad issues, but obviously, you know, most first and foremost pertaining to housing. So can you talk more about, like, you know, first, like how you kind of learned about, or, you know, how you kind of maybe theorized that and kind of learned and kind of tested like, how, how public housing plays this role, and then, you know, I guess what this what this role looks like to you more specifically?

Akira Drake Rodriguez 25:23
Yeah, sure, great question. So the book kind of starts or like I guess my whole PhD trajectory starts with an interest in gentrification, and then I kind of narrowed that down because they were like, you can't study this.

Michael Lens 25:39
I'm just gonna do a dissertation on gentrification

Shane Phillips 25:42
It's going to be a 4000 page dissertation

Akira Drake Rodriguez 25:44
And so they say, okay you need to choose a topic, and so I'm looking mixed-incomeome housing, I'm looking at Chicago, I'm looking at Mark Josephs, and Robert Chaskin's work there, and I read this vignette about barbecues, and that public housing residents in this mixed income development couldn't barbecue in their backyards because it was a fire hazard, couldn't barbecue in their front yards because it was, you know, distracting to the built environment, it didn't have good curb appeal. And then when they went to barbecue in the park, you know, the third space of social mix and role modeling and all of that mixed-income promises, the homeowners didn't like the smoke interrupting their walks in the park. So they couldn't barbecue anywhere, and it's like a small thing but barbecue is pretty important in Chicago, and it just felt like a really weird, like, I was intrigued by that. And so I started digging some more and I realized, okay, there are no tenant associations in these mixed-income places, there are only homeowner's associations. And if you look in, if you watch 70 Acres - this documentary on Cabrini Green development, they talk about that - how they couldn't vote in these sort of like discussions about public safety in the community so I was intrigued by that. And I actually asked a developer in Atlanta who does mixed-income redevelopment of former public housing sites, and he said, "why do they need tenant associations, there's nothing wrong". Like there's nothing broken, why do you need them? Exactly. And so that was like, at the end of the book, but I was like, "dammit, I knew it" so that was my validation.

Shane Phillips 27:35
Do you think the idea was like, you know, this is public housing, it's already affordable, like, you don't have to worry about rent control? Why would why would someone think that?

Akira Drake Rodriguez 27:46
People didn't know the history of tenant associations, they thought it was purely like, there are problems and people need, because that's what they became at the end - I was primarily studying grievances as the unit of analysis in the public housing records. And so, you know, they start off as these sort of top-down manager forced organizations that like help people save and run all the programming and do the annual events and the fundraisers, and then they start becoming a bit more antagonistic, as the racial and class makeup of public housing shifts over time until finally, you know, they kind of end up as these Resident Management Corporations, or a lot of cities now have Resident Advisory Boards, which are kind of like representing all tenants but they, you know, at one point in the 1980s, 10% of Atlanta's population lived in public housing, so they weren't insignificant.

Shane Phillips 28:42
How does that compare to other cities, were any other cities, you know, at or near that marked 10%?

They were at the highest, and that's kind of why they got the attention of Hope Six to begin with, you know, Hope Six kind of comes out of this, like Newt Gingrich sort of alliance, where they wanted to get the Olympics in Atlanta, and they thought this would be a good....

And this is like a redevelopment program of these public - we can get into it later but just so people know what we're referring to, it was a program that redeveloped a lot of public housing into mixed-income communities.

Akira Drake Rodriguez 29:13
Yes, it funds the demolition and redevelopment of public housing communities that were designated as severely distressed, or severely troubled. So yes, this sort of is piloted in Atlanta during the Olympics, but but in terms of like the political power, yes, that's why I had the 10%. They were powerful, right, and they were ignored and so Atlanta, you know, Mikey talked about Atlanta being a little different, because we don't associate the fire hoses and the dogs with Atlanta like we do with like Selma, Birmingham, and they became, you know, the city too busy to hate. But that's not actually true if you look in the archives. They just didn't publish all of the house bombings that happened and they didn't talk about the very, very careful and calculated moves of the housing coordinator during urban renewal, where they were serving white households like, would you move if we kicked black people out (or) would you move, you know, if we gave you like a sorry for your troubles kind of like stipends to get you to move into the suburbs, and so there was like this very careful hand holding of white neighborhoods still in the city, as a way of like, kind of controlling black expansion. They worked with black realtors at the time, they annexed, you know, additional land for Atlanta in the 1950s, to kind of create this ghetto in the Northwest. They did a lot.

Shane Phillips 30:44
They also annexed to try to kind of offset the rising black population, as well as politically add the planet adds to annex some white areas.

Akira Drake Rodriguez 30:54
Yeah, they annex white areas, but also like undeveloped areas, according to the areas where black people were already settling, and just expanded it there and concentrated public housing there. And so you know, Atlanta is a city too busy to hate, and it requires this very sort of careful behind the scenes negotiation with black and white elites, and there really isn't a space for the black working class and the black poor in those political negotiations and conversations; they are literally in the backroom, or in the case of the black elite, you know, meeting at the black YMCA, and others sort of segregated spaces of power where they were not letting domestic workers come in, for example. And so this was a way for them to hold, you know, mayoral debates and kind of get their questions answered, and their grievances known, which became increasingly important even when Atlanta sort of switches and becomes the first Southern city to elect a black mayor with Maynard Jackson in 1974.

Shane Phillips 31:57
It's interesting, because public housing was a very top down program, especially at the beginning, but it became this space for bottom up organizing. I'm wondering if there was any intention behind that at all, or if it was actually, you know, if anything, the opposite of what they were really hoping for, and it just kind of came about,

Akira Drake Rodriguez 32:15
It was not intentional yeah. You know, the changes in public housing admissions, from this sort of, we are taking applications and we're making you know, these decisions and there's a long waitlist, etc, you'll get kicked out if you lose your job, or you get divorced, or anything happens to your family structure to "oh crap, we have to rehouse everyone who's been displaced by urban renewal". So you start to see the demographic and thus, the political grievances and mobilizations of the tenants change. So, you know, before the tenants were working with the housing managers and giving them awards, and singing their praises, and then 20 years later, they're like doing sit-ins and rent strikes. And even the tenant association becomes kind of part of the machine, and so even in the 60s, you start to see alternative tenant associations outside of the formal Tenant Association, such as Tenants United for Fairness, United Tenants Council in the 1980s forming because even the tenant associations become too limited.

Shane Phillips 33:24
And Mike mentioned this already, and it's come up but black women featured prominently in the book, as they do in the history of public housing all over the country. And as you discuss, this was a time when black women were excluded from most other avenues for political engagement or leadership not to mention economic and other domains. What roles do they play in the political life of Atlanta's public housing communities and even beyond their borders, and, you know, both in creating political and other opportunities, but also constraining them in some ways as well?

Akira Drake Rodriguez 33:58
Yeah, sure. So, you know, part of the book's kind of thesis is teh unique kind of position of black women where they are sort of underpaid, but are expected to work, have always worked outside of the home, are expected to sort of still be these caretakers, are expected to kind of be eyes on the street and do public safety. Take care, in particular, in the case of Atlanta, white people's families as well. So they were saddled with a lot of, responsibilities, but at the same time facing really unique forms of discrimination. So to be you know, a black woman who was poor, a lot of times they were elderly, sometimes they were disabled, they were facing discriminations that could not be captured in the sort of dominant civil rights movement, you know, capital CRM. And so what they brought was a new kind of perspective and way of kind of thinking about problems and finding the solutions out of nothing. So one of my favorite examples, which is like a good and a bad example at the same time, is this idea of the Granny's house, which was, you know, at the height of really high substance abuse in the black community in Atlanta, but also, at the same time have really high vacancies and public housing because of this high drug use, you start to see this conundrum that black women are facing that they want to seek out treatment for the substance abuse and substance use, but if they do, their kids will be taken by the state. And so Granny's house took over the vacant units and public housing developments and provided temporary foster care so that these women could get into a treatment facility. And that is something that's like, you know, what white guy is coming up with that? That is like, you need to have that experience and be able to, like, have this, like, you know, black women were traveling everywhere, they were like going into the downtown to get groceries and food because there was none of that in their community. They were going into the northern suburbs to work as domestics because that was the only economic opportunity. So they were seeing so many things beyond their own neighborhood, had such a good understanding. And a little bit of what I'm working on now is like the multiple roles that these women fill, so they were in the church, they were at the mayor's office, they were in this club, they were on this board. So they were able to really marshal resources and the way that again, capital CRM was not able to do, and so that I feel like is the kind of critical contribution. But on the other side, you know, the end of the book talks about, at the time of like the mass demolition and displacement of these predominantly black woman households, black women are printing the city of Atlanta, they are the Superintendent of the public schools, they are the first black woman Chief of Police, they are the first black woman Mayors, and the first black woman to have the housing authority. And all of these women work together, you know, lots of letters of support, and these grant applications for Hope Six, to kind of end this like, single or one of many sites of political opportunity for poor black women.

Shane Phillips 37:18
Right, were they sort of acting separately from the black community or black tenants or was there support among black tenants for this redevelopment, or you know, hope that this would actually create better living conditions or opportunity for them? I know, it's not going to be a monolithic response, of course, but...

Akira Drake Rodriguez 37:37
Yeah, but it kind of is, you know, that's the kind of weird thing about like, anti-blackness is that like, it's really pervasive. It's not just limited to whites or leads or whatever, you start to see black women, even in the 70s and 80s, taking up the language of the welfare queen. And during the kind of Atlanta child murders where, you know, upwards of 30 children and young adults disappeared and murdered in Atlanta in the early 80s, the Tenant Association leaders are blaming black mothers who are watching TV and not their kids. And so this is a time again, like not a monolith if at all, there were plenty of black women who were who were not saying things like that but those are the ones who got the quotes in the newspapers, right? And it continues to this day, there's still just like, a lot of stigma around public assistance. And I think that is really the problem of public housing, I don't think it's, you know, the program can be fixed, it can be funded, it can be supported, it can be, you know, added to, right, we can improve public housing, we can build more public housing, but people don't want that label. It has such a stigma and a stigma that is racialized and gendered, and classed, that people would rather go without housing than take housing assistance in the way of like a voucher or something, right? We don't mind the mortgage interest tax deduction as welfare, but we do mind that voucher or living in public housing, and that is something that makes the program untenable, I think.

Michael Lens 37:37
Yeah, and in a lot of that, it, there's like a couple of cultural layers to that, right. I mean, if you're in a European country with more of a social democratic welfare state, you know, there's a much broader population receiving those benefits. And it's more likely to be including people who have, you know, significant earned income, and so those biases are less because you know more people who are doing it or you might be receiving it yourself, and then the big giant elephant in the room, of course, is race and how we have racialized public assistance or racialized the bad public assistance, the undeserved assistance right? And I guess that's probably a pretty good segue into this to more of a discussion on what you mean by deviance, and I guess, you know, deviance with it with a 'ts' are a group of people that are specifically, you know, in the title, right, and so what are these forms of deviance with a 'ce', I guess, and, you know, who are the deviants that you have in mind, and how are they not supported by some of these political forces?

Akira Drake Rodriguez 40:47
Yeah, so there's this great article in the 80s by two women political scientists or policy scholars, Schneider and Ingram, that talk about the social construction of policy targets, and how we see who gets what and how deserving they are -so it's a bit of a deserving poor argument. And political deviants are, you know, people who don't vote, and people who are unemployed, and you know, they're not politically engaged, and they don't participate. But when the history of your people is that you couldn't vote and you were beat for voting, and that you're always the last hired, first fired, the political participation doesn't really look the same. And so I think that's what I was getting at when talking about deviance, it's not necessarily like a normative thought of deviance. It is more so that deviants are constructed, in a very sort of politically convenient ways -just the way sort of crime is what's legal, what's illegal, who is a citizen, who is not a citizen, who is a deviant, who is not a deviant, these are all sort of like political categories we construct over time. And so that I think was more what I was trying to capture with that title, it's not necessarily, you know, these are people who are deviant, and this is the space for them. It's more so the construction of deviance is an ongoing project and public housing tenant associations, in particular, make space to accommodate them and allow them to participate and allow their grievances to be heard, in ways that the dominant ways of political participation do not.

Michael Lens 42:31
So on this topic of deviance another way like if we think that public housing tenant associations can be a vehicle for political action, how can this be without marginalizing deviance? And I think in particular, to me, there's questions of like, tenant selection, right, if your public housing development is mostly housing of last resort, where it's people who don't have much political power, how can public housing tenant associations be kind of a vehicle for organizing that? Also includes these more deviant individuals, people who don't vote, people who are less likely to be employed, things like that.

Akira Drake Rodriguez 43:22
Yeah, I think it's a bit of a both and, so again, like deviant isn't isn't normative, right? So, you know, I was unemployed for a long time, I didn't consider myself a deviant, it's just a bad market. So there's this idea, you know, that like being the housing of last resort, they had to make space if they wanted to live in community, right? So the issue with Granny's House, for example, is, you know, we could kick these women out of our community and just be done with it or we could actually address the problem. And so I think that's what the tenant association was good about was like, "okay, this is the housing of last resort, and let's address the problem". And to me, that makes a better city, right? When you exclude all of the deviants from your city and from your like political way of life, you are really going to have a hard time when the bottom falls out, and we are seeing that now. When we make it so that we don't have any public housing, we don't have any vouchers, we don't have any alternatives, we're going to see a housing crisis like we've never seen before. And the reason that is because we decided to get rid of the deviants, no different than urban renewal, no different just, it's blight, it's slums, we need to get rid of it. It's a cancer, we need to cut it out. But that problem doesn't actually go anywhere because we've not gotten to the root of the problem. And so the root of the problem is poverty. The root of the problem is racism. It's sexism. It's classism, right? We're not going to end this with one or two policies, but by failing to even account for it, it only makes things worse for everyone in the long term. I say this all the time to my students, I was like, wouldn't your life be better if the government was paying a third of your rent like this is? Like, you know, like, it's not like a bad thing. Like, I would love to have welfare, I would love to have food stamps, I would love it. And I think that, you know, your life gets so much easier, when you don't have to plan for those types of things, right? When you have this sort of safety net, like it's a literal safety net, right? So much more of your anxiety, your mental health, your physical health is just by like the basic like, shelter, food, family, right? And how can we actually address those things for everyone in a way that makes our economy, our way of life a lot more stable than it is now.

Shane Phillips 46:01
And I think, you know, to the point of your book, or one of the main arguments in it, the case of like the Granny's house, you know, it's hard to duplicate that in, say, a voucher system, or other less centralized programs, because who is your neighbor, in those cases, who's going to actually, you know, see you as a part of their community and care enough maybe to, or just have the kind of almost economies of scale, have enough neighbors who need this kind of support to provide that kind of service. We can jump ahead here a little bit, and you know, by the 70s, and especially the 80s, public housing was really struggling, it was kind of a rise and fall. And many of our listeners are familiar with that, in the sense of, you know, crime being very high, poverty being very deep and very concentrated. But your book also draws out how this was intimately connected to that political space and the power of tenants as well. And it seems that as the conditions of public housing developments got worse, the ability to organize tenants and demand modernization and other improvements also suffered. It could also be that the faltering tenants movement was part of the reason for those deteriorating conditions. And I think we couldn't really say necessarily which direction that causal arrow points. And it's probably more of a sort of a feedback loop where you know that worsening conditions influence the organizing, and the declining ability to organize further undermines the conditions. But it seems like the the Resident Management Corporations played a role here, too, that I thought was interesting, where basically, this kind of turned a subset of the residents into the landlord, or they operated on behalf of them in many ways. And that kind of undermine the solidarity among the tenants. Could you trace out a little more of that history for us, the sort of waxing and waning of tenant power in these public housing communities, and maybe how that set Atlanta up for the eventual demolition of many of its public housing developments in the 1990s and onward?

Akira Drake Rodriguez 48:06
Sure, so modernization comes about through mass sort of tenant revolts across the country, both public and private, in the 70s. We're seeing, you know, the decline of multiple affordable housing stocks at this point, and there's a need to kind of get it in control, particularly as revenues have dried up and operating and capital budgets have decreased substantially,

Shane Phillips 48:28
Because they were depending on the rent revenues to support operations and maintenance, right? And as the population got poor and vacancies increased, that actually sort of a downward spiral

Akira Drake Rodriguez 48:39
Populations got poor, the Brooke amendment in 69, caps all public housing rents at 25% of income, you start to see, you know, this is also at the same time of like the Fair Housing Act, and so you start to see a lot more mobility coming out of black public housing developments where before they really couldn't move out of public housing so you do see that sort of flight of the middle class that's also kind of a well-trod narrative. But modernization comes as like a way to kind of like tamp down the resistance, whereas, you know, modernization couldn't happen, funds couldn't be expended or allocated unless there was kind of like a tenant body to vote on them, and so this starts to produce these mega tenant associations that are more common now, the resident advisory boards, etc, and in Atlanta, it was the City-wide Council on Public Housing.

Shane Phillips 49:33
These are the ones that span multiple development; they're not just associated with one public housing development, but over maybe a whole city,

Akira Drake Rodriguez 49:41
Yes! They cover the entire city so this was a lot of housing stock, that, you know, a pretty small group of residents were in charge of sort of developing. But the thing with the federal government with these policies, whether it's, you know, the modernization funds or the resident management councils in the 90s is that they're really sort of confined in what they could do. So you get a couple pots of money to plan, you can maybe hire a friend in maintenance, but you can't really do anything that's actually going to change the way of life and the condition of public housing developments. So that the Resident Management Corporation agreements that I looked at from the 90s, you know, they were in charge of evicting people, but couldn't really determine the policies of eviction. So they were kind of like the bad guy cops in that they got to kick people out of public housing, but they couldn't really change any policies to allow for public housing to be more accommodating. So that's sort of what they were, they were the kind of like, safety monitors or whatever in the hallways - no real power, but they look like it right, and so hall monitors

Shane Phillips 50:55
The Res Cop?

Akira Drake Rodriguez 50:54
Yeah, exactly so that's kind of what they were, and you know, people like power, so can't sugarcoat that. So they did kind of appreciate these roles however limited they weren't, they were still the most powerful people in the development. And that sort of cooptation of tenant power continues through the Hope Six demolitions and redevelopments where you start to see tenants from these boards take positions within the Atlanta Housing Authority. They were always the rumors that they were promised the first townhomes and, you know, they would get out. And so that was kind of enough, whether it was the rumor or any truth to the rumor, but the actual idea that the tenant association was no longer representative of interests. So that definitely causes a loss of power. And then you have tenant associations, they don't really have like, rules, you know, like, you have to have one kind of, but not really, in public housing, and so people would run them for like, 20 and 30 years. And so there was just absolutely no way, you know, it's like four or five women that controlled the budgets, and, you know, the jobs and the programming of these developments. And so they had a great deal of power. So, you know, they were able to advocate, but the advocacy starts to become a little individualized and self serving, and not again, and because so many of them are taking on the sort of landlord duties and responsibilities, they're quite keen to get rid of the troublemakers, the young single girls on welfare, with their boyfriends running in and out right? So that's kind of like the theme, you know, from the welfare queen, that kind of like, funnels down into the tenant association, you see that rhetoric happening in meetings and conversations with the mayor all over.

You see that just kind of conservativeness in a lot of the leadership, which, when it's people who have been around for 20 or 30 years, it's not surprising. They're a generation or two behind maybe a lot of other residents in some cases.

Right, yeah, and they, you know, they weren't right. So they were women who weren't domestics, they were teachers. And they saw themselves quite differently than the younger girls who lived in public housing who didn't have the same. I mean, it's hard to call it like an economic opportunity. But even those economic opportunities were not available for the younger generation in the 80s, and the 90s of Atlanta. And so there was a lot of hostility and judgment that shaped their opinion, and really did facilitate the eventual demolition of public housing.

Shane Phillips 53:39
And I think we're gonna have to do a whole episode on Hope Six or the redevelopment of public housing in the future. But we can get into it a little bit here. Some of Atlanta's public housing developments were demolished in the 90s, with the Olympics coming to the city, with them being redeveloped into mixed income communities under this federal Hope Six program, units in these new developments were set aside for about 20 to 40% of the public housing tenants, as you say in the book, and the remaining 60 to 80% were given housing choice vouchers to rent on the private market to somewhere else. A part of your book that I think some people might find more controversial, or at least where it's more difficult to, you know, think about good alternatives, is in your criticism of the voucher option. And I don't think it's a very strong criticism but, you know, this is a program that has a pretty good reputation among housing scholars and policy folks other than it being underfunded. But when your focus is on political organizing opportunities that public housing helps create, it makes more sense why that deconcentration that housing vouchers facilitates can be seen as a problem. I personally hadn't really thought of it this way before and I know this isn't how most voucher proponents see the program, but I can definitely imagine vouchers being used as a sort of tool to disperse communities, and thereby weaken their political power. But vouchers clearly help a lot of people, and I don't think you're proposing that we could get rid of them, and so I'm curious to hear what you'd like to see instead. You know, is it just that we need more and better run public housing and vouchers or do you have a different vision in mind here?

Akira Drake Rodriguez 55:23
I do not have a solution for the housing problem no. I know, you know, vouchers...

Michael Lens 55:33
I should say that more often myself!

Akira Drake Rodriguez 55:39
So the thing with vouchers is that, yeah, I have no beef with vouchers. But I do think there are some limitations. Obviously, we have source of income discrimination, we have vouchers in areas that are not attractive. The resonance that I mentioned at University City townhomes, they have been offered vouchers. And these vouchers, you know, where they live now is right in Penn's campus, basically. And it's like, there's a train right there. There are hospitals, world class hospitals, right there, grocery stores, food, retail, everything that you could possibly want. And they're being asked to move, you know, two miles north two miles west, and it feels like a totally different area for them. So from a, you know, from a school's perspective, and thinking about women with children, that's where you really start to see people losing their voucher, because they're not willing to relocate. They would rather, women would rather live with cousins and other family members, and then short term extended stays, sort of like temporary housing, than take their kids out of school. And that in itself is what makes the voucher difficult. Vouchers also have a stigma, right? So these residents have also mentioned literally, this elderly woman who's lived in this sort of project based voucher development for you know, 10 or 15 years, said, "I worked my whole life, I never saw myself as a voucher girl", right? So there is like a stigma. If you think about the incident that happened in McKinney, Texas, where a young black girl was body slammed, because there were a bunch of kids using a pool down there, one of the women yelled at her to go back to Section Eight so it is not stigma free program, it still does not address those core issues that people would rather actually make a go of it, than take this subsidy. And again, like the response to that is more and better, right? Federal Government knows this is a problem, you gotta put some pressure on the locals, right? Like, these are things that we know are structural issues beyond, "oh, we don't have enough funding for this program, there aren't enough vouchers". There are fundamental issues, there are time limitations, you know, if you don't use it, you lose it right? You got two weeks sometimes to find a house, and people are like, should I live 14 miles from my family and friends or should I just eat this, you know, and risk that whole cycle of eviction and displacement and churning and churning. And so I think there are a few criticisms outside of the political argument, which is a good argument although we do know that the voucher holders tend to cluster in areas right, they do kind of have a concentration, a spatial concentration that could afford some political power, but there are no tenant associations or voucher holders, right? So already the actual mechanism for organizing is gone but,you know, the stigma is to me the biggest component and I think that stigma is only growing over time.

Shane Phillips 58:53
I think we can, for our last question, kind of combine a couple here. I had the question as I was reading, you know, where do residents who are people of color but they're not black fit into this story of public housing in Atlanta? And maybe Mike, you can throw in your your black Mecca question, which I feel like that's a fun place to close this out maybe.

Michael Lens 59:20
So I think Shane's questions is important. And then, you know, my question is so there's two kind of myths about Atlanta that come to mind. One is that it's the city, you know, too busy to hate that you brought up and you know, then it has this moniker 'Black Mecca' that people give it a lot of the time, right? The first black millionaire was from Atlanta, there's, you know, obviously, a long history of black elites from HBCUs to the civil rights movement to black entrepreneurship more broadly in the economic and business community. But so to what extent is there a big inequality within the black community that that glosses over? Is Atlanta special or is it not really special? Is it just like every other metropolitan area where you have your rich and your very poor, you know, black families struggling in concentrated poverty, etc?

Akira Drake Rodriguez 1:00:33
Okay, so I'll answer both questions. The first question I actually don't have an answer for so in looking at public housing obviously, if you're thinking about like Latinx, or Asian Americans in the city of Atlanta, those sorts of immigration patterns sort of happen in the middle of this narrative that I'm selling, which is mainly about black empowerment. So I don't talk about non-black or non-white actors at all unfortunately in this work, but plenty of other people do. And there is like, wonderful, I have this Sociology student that's writing a great dissertation right now about the role of identification displacement in immigrant communities in Atlanta, which has a really robust immigrant community in that sense. And in terms of the second question, which kind of relates to the first a little bit ...

Shane Phillips 1:01:37
I knew it, i knew it. I'll take it

Akira Drake Rodriguez 1:01:37
Atlanta has always been a city obsessed with image, like ever since, like Sherman burned it down, their like city motto is Resurgence and they just like so much adversity, they've made a way out of no way. And so they don't, you know, they like that history of like, you know, we weren't racist, we had Martin Luther King, we were like organizing, we were peaceful, we transitioned, we desegregated it meanwhile, they didn't like desegregate their schools until the late 60s and public housing until after that, and they made sure every white person got what they needed to get safely out of the city before they decided to desegregate or integrate. And so like that image into like, the idea of like nonblack or nonwhite people in Atlanta is like a bit of a conundrum for that image in that way. And in the other way is that the image is like we don't put out the dirty laundry, this is already kind of like a black thing already. It's like we don't air dirty laundry, we don't like you know fight in public and things like that. We don't want those tensions between the race to give, you know, the white people more ammo (ammunition). And so that like really kind of like, dampens any sort of like other articulation of organizing and politics and opportunity, and so certainly Atlanta is a black mecca for the black elite but for no one else. And it is becoming, I mean, you look at the foreclosures, you look at the evictions like please bring Dan on the show to talk about his book because like, it is the perfect end note to like, this is why - you took away the only thing that was like keeping any level of affordability in your city, and decided to just let the market go at it, and this is what we're seeing. And so I certainly think you know that those two things are actually related. I think it's actually kind of hard to like, uncover the stories of nonblack, non white actors in Atlanta, particularly in their political and organizing history, and that is related to the fact that it is this black Mecca and like a place of great respectability. But it's, I mean, it's impossible to be poor in that city.

Michael Lens 1:04:01
It's impossible to be poor.

Akira Drake Rodriguez 1:04:03
Yeah, for sure, for sure. For sure, for sure.

Shane Phillips 1:04:07
What a place to end.

Akira Drake Rodriguez, thank you for coming on the Housing Voice podcast.

Akira Drake Rodriguez 1:04:16
Thank you both for having me. I really enjoyed myself.

Shane Phillips 1:04:24
You can read more about the Akira's research on our website lewis.ucla.edu show notes and a transcript of the interview are their too UCLA Lewis Center is on Facebook and Twitter. I'm on Twitter at ShaneDPhillips, and Mike is at MC_lens. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.