Apartment complex reconstruction tainted

ATLANTA -- When President Bush praises the Villages at Carver on Monday, one resident wants him to know that she thinks the neat lawns, fresh paint and secure buildings of the new mixed-income community hide an injustice.\nThe Villages replaced a 990-unit housing complex called Carver Homes as part of a national push to repair troubled public-housing tenements.\nFor people who can afford the high rents, all it takes to move in is an application. For former Carver Homes tenants, the process can be a lot more challenging, and that, 47-year resident Louise Watley said, isn't right.\n"The poor aren't making it back. They're only letting in seniors or people with decent jobs," Watley said.\nCarver Homes, built in 1950 and once home to as many as 4,000 people, were torn down two years ago by the Atlanta Housing Authority to make way for the $175 million Villages complex.\nThe first new apartments opened last fall, putting middle-class people -- some paying more than $1,000 a month in rent -- next door to residents receiving subsidies. The housing authority lauds Carver and eight similar communities as examples of how public and private partnership can revitalize poor communities, and Bush is expected to promote it as a model for other cities.\n"We've revitalized an entire section of the city in a very short period of time," housing authority spokesman Rick White said. "That has to be a success in anybody's books."\nSo far, 220 units have been built at the Villages, with only half for low-income residents, leaving hundreds of people on a waiting list, including many former Carver Homes residents.\nThe authority can reject applicants for everything from failing an inspection to having a conviction. And the rules are inflexible, critics say, with entire families being banned because of a crime by anyone who once lived with them.\nSome new residents, like Rashon Mitchell, love the Villages at Carver. The recent graduate of Clark-Atlanta University said she chose the complex because it's safe, cheap and close to campus.\n"I tell students to come here all the time because a lot of people don't know it's over here," she said.\nBut Watley, president of the former Carver Homes Tenants Association, misses the old complex's sense of community. Residents who couldn't get back in are scattered around Atlanta in other public housing tenements, private apartments or homeless shelters.\nThe old complex had suffered years of neglect, and drugs and violence became problems. Then more middle-class people began moving back into the city, and the site, a short walk from the state Capitol, became attractive to developers.\nIn 1995, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development launched Home Ownership and Opportunity for People Everywhere, which provides grants for cities to tear down projects and build new ones.\nAtlanta was among the cities leading the charge, and White said no one has been hurt by the renovations.\n"When you talk about displacement, people have to ask themselves, displaced from what? We don't believe most families view an opportunity to move out of a cycle of poverty that many of them have been stuck in for decades as a negative," he said.