"If you can’t pay your utilities, you lose your voucher," Beaty said of the program.
People must find housing without assistance, which could be difficult depending on the housing market, Beaty added.
Griever described to the AHA the shortage of low income housing as “critical.”
"If everybody did get a voucher, where would they go?” Courtney asked. He said a person selling his home for $200,000 or $300,000 “is not going to take a Section 8 voucher.”
"If they could realistically relocate people in a way that would work, they would do it," Griever told APN after the meeting. "There just isn’t a way to do it."
“We think AHA should put the brakes on this project until people have had more time to think about alternatives, ways that don’t destroy communities,” Courtney said.
“Let’s redefine the City in ways that are just and give power to the people who are most affected,” he added.
THE FUNDING PROBLEM
Since fiscal year 2001, federal funding for public housing has decreased by $1 billion, according to a document from the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) obtained by APN. This includes cuts in operating, capital, and HOPE VI funding.
The capital fund is important because it provides money for “modernization, including developing, rehabilitating and demolishing units, replacement housing and management improvements,” according to the NLIHC document.
"There is a more than $20 billion backlog for Capital Fund repairs in public housing."
Some advocates for the homeless argue that the underfunding of public housing has been part of a strategy, because later the worn down condition of the units are used as an excuse to argue for demolition.
Atlanta has turned 11 of its original 42 public housing units into mixed use, mixed income developments since 1995 under the HOPE VI public housing revitalization program, according to the AJC.
The AHA maintains the HOPE VI redevelopment is moving too slow, leaving 5,000 families in housing units that they claim are too costly to operate, maintain, or renovate.
Courtney does not buy the contention the housing is too costly to renovate or in such bad shape that it all needs to be torn down.
“Why can’t we rehabilitate the community to have the quality of condos and then help the people organize in such a way to have a real, solid decision-making voice in how development happens?”
