Atlanta building -- and old public housing model -- demolished

By Ariel Hart

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

In downtown Atlanta, a building came down Sunday, and with it three-quarters of a century of public housing policy came to an end.

The Atlanta Housing Authority on Sunday imploded Roosevelt House, former public housing for senior citizens and disabled residents. With that and another building, the nation’s first city to try public housing projects now completes a 16-year effort to tear most of them down.

Carefully timed explosions on Sunday imploded Roosevelt House, which contained 150 apartments, on Centennial Olympic Park Dr. Demolition crews used about 150 pounds of explosives to bring down the structure in about 15 seconds, the Associated Press reported.

The building was named after Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the American president who with an Atlanta developer founded the national public housing policy.

Palmer House, another building named after the developer, Charles Foster Palmer, will be taken apart more slowly starting this week, according to Rick White, a spokesman for the authority. Imploding Palmer House like Roosevelt House would be too dangerous to the other buildings around it, White said.

The two are Atlanta's last project buildings to be demolished, he added.  Eleven senior high-rise buildings remain but are not slated for destruction.

The last residents left Roosevelt House about two years ago, he said. It was built in 1973.

According to the authority, Atlanta was the first city to start building housing projects for the poor -- big uniform buildings or complexes to replace slums full of ramshackle houses. Roosevelt and Palmer pioneered the policy in the mid-1930s, according to AHA.

But the projects became breeding grounds for even more poverty and despair, and in 1994, Atlanta set about eliminating them, opting instead for mixed-income developments.

“Ultimately, the more than 40 housing projects across Atlanta severely damaged the city’s economy, livability and schools,” the authority wrote in a statement.  AHA says studies show its new approach is working better to deliver the goal of Roosevelt and Palmer: "They wanted low-income Americans to have opportunity and the means to move up in society."

The senior housing high-rises didn't have the same problems with drugs and violence as the other public housing, according to a Lawrenceville resident who said his mother managed Roosevelt House from its first days.

The man, Henry "Rick" Richter, remembers going into Roosevelt House before it opened and looking down into the Georgia Tech stadium.

"It is a sad day," Richter said.