Organizers canvassed Woodland Heights tenants to pressure for repairs
Atlanta City Councilmember Dustin Hillis joined a squad of community organizers to go door-to-door at the Westside’s Woodland Heights apartments on Sunday and compile a list of code enforcement issues from the dilapidated Section 8 complex’s tenants. That included mold outbreaks, leaky pipes, fire hazards, pests, and broken appliances.
The goal is to file so many code enforcement complaints with the city of Atlanta that Woodland Heights’ owner, a California LLC called Rolling Bends | Preservation Limited Partners, can’t keep ignoring the tenants’ demands for safe living conditions.
The city of Atlanta has been battling the landlord in court through its Safe and Secure Housing initiative — but Preservation Partners routinely pays code enforcement fines and paints over problems.
Organizers from a national group, American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) Advocacy Foundation, joined local housing advocates for the Woodland Heights canvassing effort at 2500 Center St. and 2591 Etheridge Dr. By mobilizing the network of activists, the repair and remediation campaign gives the Atlanta Solicitor’s Office a larger target — a long list of complaints to inspect and then confront Preservation Partners with in court.
ADOS organizer Ray Jones hopes the canvassing effort will arm advocates with enough evidence of property neglect to get more political muscle behind the fight to hold negligent landlords accountable.
“It’s hard to be optimistic about this,” he said. “But when you have organizations applying pressure like this, politicians respond.”
→ Read Atlanta Civic Circle’s full report on the outreach effort here.
DeKalb’s new housing boss on confronting the affordability crisis
Earlier this month, Alan Ferguson resigned as Atlanta Housing’s (AH) top real estate official for a new job as DeKalb County’s first chief housing officer.
Ferguson says DeKalb created the position in response to the widening housing crisis. He is charged with developing the county’s first comprehensive housing plan as a policy roadmap to expand its affordable housing stock.
Ferguson told Atlanta Civic Circle that he intends to diversify DeKalb’s housing stock with more “missing middle” options.
“You’re going to find us doing traditional multifamily, but we might also lean more heavily into panelization or modular construction,” he said. “That way, we can build quality housing faster. And we’ll also create more tiny homes and look at different configurations to get higher density, but still maintain the quality of neighborhoods. The net effect is that it’s going to produce more affordable housing.”
→ Read our full Q&A with Ferguson here.
Legal experts scrutinize Trump’s anti-homelessness order
National advocacy groups may sue the Trump administration over its July executive order that threatens to cut federal funding to cities and states refusing to jail or institutionalize unhoused people. Legal experts told Atlanta Civic Circle the White House edict leaves plenty of room for scrutiny.
The US Supreme Court’s City of Grants Pass v. Johnson ruling in 2024 could stifle legal challenges over the executive order’s directives for local law enforcement crackdowns against homeless people, because it allows local governments to impose criminal penalties for urban camping.
But the order’s involuntary civil commitment provisions could be more vulnerable, said Georgia State University constitutional law professor Anthony Michael Kreis.
“The biggest constitutional red flag is the order to evaluate unhoused people to determine if they’re ‘sexually dangerous,’ and to encourage civil commitment — even absent evidence that a person is a danger to themselves or others,” he told Atlanta Civic Circle.
The executive order leaves a critical question unanswered, Kreis explained: Whose responsibility would it be to determine whether people pose an imminent danger to themselves or others? “It’s a very dangerous proposition to let federal bureaucrats make determinations about future criminality,” he said.
Trump admin to accelerate Section 8 evictions
As Congress considers gutting the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Housing Choice Voucher program, the Trump administration is preparing to expedite evictions for Section 8 renters, The Intercept reports.
The White House is promulgating a new rule that would do away with a HUD requirement that Section 8 landlords and public housing authorities provide 30 days’ notice before starting eviction proceedings.
Repealing that Biden-era requirement could give subsidized-housing residents as little as two weeks’ notice before their landlord files to evict.
The Trump administration has fast-tracked the proposed rule change as an interim final rule, dispensing with HUD’s usual 60-day public comment period. If it goes through, the 3.6 million households receiving Section 8 rent subsidies will find themselves with fewer housing protections.
Atlanta to break ground on affordable housing for teachers
The city of Atlanta will break ground in October on a 424-unit residential high-rise for intown educators, according to 11Alive.
The “Teachers Village” will replace downtown parking garages at 98 Cone St. with a 31-story apartment tower featuring 197 workforce housing units for teachers and 227 apartments for seniors. The tower will include 23,000 square feet of retail space on the ground floor. It’s expected to be completed by 2027.
The city and its development partner, RBH Group, chose the location for its easy access to the Five Points MARTA station.
Invest Atlanta approved the project’s funding in 2021. As far as the rents, 20% of the workforce units for teachers will be priced for households earning no more than 80% of the area median income (AMI) — or $60,240 for a single person, according to Invest Atlanta. Another 40% will target renters earning 60% or less of AMI, or $45,180 for an individual. The remaining 40% of the units for teachers will be priced at market rate.
Invest Atlanta approved financing through a $4 million Tax Allocation District grant and $26.4 million in tax-exempt bond financing for the teacher-unit portion of the project.
Today’s newsletter was written by Sean Keenan and edited by Meredith Hobbs. Your donation makes Housing Happenings and ACC’s housing reporting possible. Support local, nonprofit journalism that empowers Atlantans to improve their communities.