Atlanta Housing has extended the deadline for public input on a project to revitalize Bankhead Courts, a former public housing project in northwest Atlanta that the city demolished in 2011.
The agency, which is Georgia’s largest housing authority, said in an announcement last week that the decision to push back the original June 7 deadline was a response to a request from the local Neighborhood Planning Unit, NPU-H, which will allow time for a community meeting “that will facilitate a collaborative idea exchange and meaningful dialogue.”
Now, community members, philanthropic and nonprofit organizations, developers, and other commercial interests have until June 28 to share their ideas for redeveloping the 35-acre plot where the housing project used to stand.
Atlanta Housing has considered several options for the site, including affordable and mixed-income housing, a mixed-use or commercial development with housing, and developing an industrial space that can produce funds that can be invested into building affordable housing elsewhere in the city, according to a “Request For Ideas” released by Atlanta Housing.
Capital B Atlanta spoke with former residents who said they want to see the redevelopment of Bankhead Courts prioritize community resources and affordable housing to address long-standing issues of displacement and homelessness. They also emphasized the need for amenities such as a recreation center with free Wi-Fi access, a health clinic, and job training opportunities to support the new residents.
“It should be something for the community, like a center with a gym people can go use and something for seniors,” said Jeffrey Walker, a former Bankhead Courts resident.
Walker said he moved there with his family just after his ninth birthday and was one of the last people to vacate the notorious housing complex in 2009.
“I was the [tenant] association president at that time. It was like three families left,” Walker said. “I was one of the last ones to leave cause I had to make sure everybody had somewhere to go.”
Walker, who works at John Lewis Invictus Academy Middle School and coaches football at Frederick Douglass High School, now lives in southwest Atlanta, but said he remains connected to the community he grew up in.
He said that young people in the community need more activities, especially outdoors, to keep them busy, and that a community center at Bankhead Courts could bring that.
Originally built on a former landfill, Bankhead Courts opened in 1970 with about 400 housing units. Though many residents remember a strong sense of community there and have fond memories, the development also had some serious problems. It was demolished in 2011 after suffering years of neglect and structural damage from flooding.
Jamario Barron, another former resident who now lives in Smyrna, would like to see Atlanta Housing reach out to some of the people who used to live in Bankhead Courts to see if they would like to come back to a new development.
Former tenants like Walker and his late sister Marsha who both served as tenants association president and were pillars in the community.
“The Walker family did a lot. They were very hands-on with the community,” he said.
Barron lived in Bankhead Courts throughout the 1980s as a teenager when the complex earned its dangerous reputation. At one point in 1988, postal workers had to have a police escort with them just to deliver the resident’s mail.
Although crime and poverty were a part of life at Bankhead Courts, Barron and the other former residents Capital B Atlanta spoke to said the community around them was what made it home.
“It’s about the people,” Barron said. “You have to put the right people in there to make sure the buildings, the property is taken care of and the kids stay in the right direction.”
A small portion of the property has since been converted into a bus maintenance facility for Atlanta Public Schools. But since demolition, the majority of the land, which is surrounded by industrial parks, has remained vacant.
Before construction begins, Khalifa Lee, the chairperson for NPU-H where Bankhead Courts is located, said he wants there to be soil testing done.
“That way we can be sure that anyone that comes over there doesn’t incur cancer or any other type of environmental effects,” he said.
Lee, who used to sit on the mayor’s clean energy advisory board, said he wants the new development to prioritize sustainability and building energy efficient homes that will help keep energy costs down long term.
He’d also like for the apartments or homes to be sold and rented to people making 30% or less of the area’s median income so that legacy residents can afford to live there.
“A lot of the developments that have been popping up in the city of Atlanta are not affordable to the families that have been removed,” Lee said. “We want them to be able to come back to a new, reinvigorated space that they can actually benefit from.”
The displacement of legacy Atlanta residents has long been a hot topic as more native Atlantans are being priced out of their communities because of the rising cost of housing.
That’s why Willie Ray Taylor, who moved into Bankhead Courts with his family in 1980 at 14 years old and lived there until 1999, said Atlanta Housing should ensure the rent is income based.
Taylor said the city also needs to make sure the new residents have access to the same things he did growing up in Bankhead Courts, like a recreation center, a health clinic, and a public library branch. Taylor also thinks the new development could be used to address some of Atlanta’s homelessness problem.
“When they came in and closed down all the housing projects, we got this massive influx of homelessness,” he said.
King Williams, a local journalist and director of The Atlanta Way, a documentary on gentrification and the end of public housing in Atlanta, said more low-income rental units could matter a lot to people who might not fit the typical description of what many people assume homelessness looks like.
“Functionally homeless people, so people who are working, who do not have a lot of money, they might be living on somebody’s couch right now,” he said.
People like Rodney Williams, no relation, who has been bouncing around between different relatives’ homes since he lost his housing after being arrested for a suspected parole violation over 10 years ago.
Though he’s been working full time at a health care facility for over a decade, Rodney still hasn’t been able to secure permanent housing.
Raised in Bankhead Courts in the 1970s and ’80s after his family left rural Alabama when he was a boy, Williams said housing is just one component of rebuilding the community that was there. He suggested the city also provide resources to help young people find jobs and develop workforce skills, a point on which Taylor agreed.
“Offer jobs to the people that are going to move out there versus giving them subsidies to try to survive on,” Taylor said.
Rodney Williams said he’s considering submitting his own idea to help redevelop the place he once called home. Through a nonprofit he created called Jobs2CreateJobs, he said he hopes he can connect young people and people just getting out of jail with retirees that can teach them skills.
“I want to help teach young kids when they reach 13, 14, 15 how to build sheds and houses,” he said.
By rebuilding Bankhead Courts with the resources to help families and their kids succeed, Rodney said the city can help make sure the next iteration of the Bankhead Courts community thrives.
For more information about how to submit your ideas for the redevelopment of Bankhead Courts, click here.
You can read Atlanta Housing’s “Request For Ideas” below.
