City begins demolition of troubled Forest Cove apartments

The city of Atlanta began demolition work Wednesday at Forest Cove, the troubled Section 8 complex where residents lived in deplorable conditions.

Mayor Andre Dickens was at the complex at New Town Circle Southeast in the afternoon to signal the start of a teardown of several burned-out units.

He said the work marked the “end of multiple decades of dilapidation” and took aim at Ohio-based company Millennia Housing Management, which owns the complex through an entity called Phoenix Ridge.

“We are putting on notice any landlord, any bad operator in the city of Atlanta, that we mean business when we say that if you are going to operate in a way that’s going to cause hurt, harm or danger to the residents of Atlanta … we will see about you,” Dickens said.

With its shattered windows, broken facades, discarded mattresses and overgrown grass, the vacant complex looks something like a ghost town. But as recently as September 2022, some people were still living in crumbling units infested with rodents and cockroaches — in a complex that was a magnet for violent crime.

These conditions were exposed in the AJC’s investigative series “Dangerous Dwellings” which featured Forest Cove and hundreds of other neglected apartment complexes.

Dickens recalled walking around the complex one winter when he was still a councilman. What he encountered shook him so much that he said he “shed tears” after he left.

Credit: Ben Gray

Credit: Ben Gray

“It was 30 degrees. Community members got doors open, windows open. It’s cold. They don’t have HVAC that’s working. Rodents and roaches and mildew — all these deplorable conditions. And they’ve been asking for help over and over again,” he said. “I was driving away thinking about what would my life be if I lived in these conditions and I had to cry for help over and over again and nothing meaningful was done.”

Last year, Phoenix Ridge filed a lawsuit against the city claiming it had upended the company’s plans to rehab the complex after Atlanta Municipal Court Judge Christopher T. Portis ordered the buildings condemned in late 2021.

Phoenix Ridge said in a statement Wednesday that it acquired Forest Cove in 2021 after “decades of deterioration ... under the watch of the city of Atlanta and Forest Cove’s previous owner.”

“Today the city is not only celebrating the demolition of Forest Cove but also the success of its plan to steal Forest Cove from its former residents and Phoenix Ridge, in order to hand it over to a developer of their choosing for their vision, which notably excludes the subsidized housing crucial to those residents,” the company said in a statement.

After Dickens spoke, an excavator ripped into a building close to the entrance of the complex as a worker hosed it with water — a precaution to abate asbestos because a recent environmental assessment found there are cancer-causing fibers in all 396 units, officials said.

Daphne Talley, director of code enforcement for the Atlanta Police Department, said the city would raze seven burned-out buildings. She expected the city to finish the work by the end of the week. The entire project would take about five months, she added.

Last week, Dickens said the Atlanta Urban Development Corporation had released a Request for Qualifications, or RFQ, seeking development partners to revive the nearby Thomasville Heights neighborhood in southeast Atlanta, and relocate Forest Cove residents who left the complex in 2022.

The Urban Development Corporation said the first phase of the project on public land will include two, three and four-bedroom homes. Dickens said today he hoped to have a developer in place by the end of this year.

Millennia owns more than 30,000 apartment units nationwide. It has previously received federal subsidies from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Last week, the Atlanta Civic Circle reported that HUD would enact a national ban on the company, preventing it from entering into Section 8 rental voucher contracts.

Additionally, the federal agency said it planned to cut off funding for the troubled Fairburn & Gordon apartment complex on Fairburn Road in the Adamsville neighborhood.