Ep 37: Public Housing and Tenant Power in Atlanta with Akira Drake Rodriguez

In this episode we do a deep dive into the history of Atlanta’s public housing program, from its inception in 1934 to the eventual demolition and redevelopment of many sites in the 1990s and onward. But Professor Akira Drake Rodriguez’s focus isn’t the public housing developments themselves. Rather, it’s on the tenants — overwhelming Black, and disproportionately women-led — who called public housing communities home, organized and built political power within them, and used that power to make demands of the government. It’s a complex history without clear or consistent “good guys” and “bad guys,” and it complicates the narrative which argues that housing vouchers (or “Section 8”) are a complete substitute for the decline in public housing across the country. Whatever your connection to Atlanta or your knowledge of the US public housing program, there’s a lot to be learned from this case study on the politics of public housing in Atlanta.

Show notes:

• Rodriguez, A. D. (2021). Diverging Space for Deviants: The Politics of Atlanta's Public Housing. University of Georgia Press.
• Pritchett, W. E. (2010). Robert Clifton Weaver and the American City: The Life and Times of an Urban Reformer. University of Chicago Press.
• Parson, D. C. (2005). Making a Better World: Public Housing, the Red Scare, and the Direction of Modern Los Angeles. University of Minnesota Press.
• The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (documentary).
• Ingram, H., Schneider, A. L., & DeLeon, P. (2019). Social Construction and Policy Design. In Theories of the Policy Process (pp. 93-126). Routledge.
• W. E. B. Du Bois: A Study of the Atlanta University Federal Housing Area, 1934.
• Chaskin, R. J., & Joseph, M. L. (2015). Contested space: Design principles and regulatory regimes in mixed-income communities in Chicago. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 660(1), 136-154.
• 70 Acres in Chicago: Cabrini Green (documentary).