Politics & Government

"They're not compounds, they're neighborhoods."

An agenda-setting meeting normally isn't the setting for fireworks.

Things got a bit testy at the Athens Clarke County Commission’s agenda-setting meeting Thursday night.

Commissioner Doug Lowry was asked why he didn’t support putting an item on the consent agenda for the August 6th Commission meeting. The item was an Athens Housing Authority request for support, $1.3 million, to redevelop the Jack R. Wells/Pauldoe apartments. (For more on the project, click the link.)

Lowry said in other cities, dispersing people out of public housing and scattering them across the general population was a better idea than keeping them in “compounds” and “reservations of poverty” with their own subculture.

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Commissioner George Maxwell called Lowry out, telling him that had lived in Broad Acres, and scolding him for calling such places “compounds.”

“They are neighborhoods, not compounds,” Maxwell said. “Don’t tell me nothing good can come out of places like this.”

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Almost bouncing out of her seat, Commissioner Kathy Hoard said, “This is anything but a ‘poverty reservation,’” but a housing complex that will attract people of various economic backgrounds.

She called Athens Housing Authority Director Rick Parker to the podium. He told the Commission the planned 375-unit community will feature public housing, market value housing and tax-credit housing, like East Lake in Atlanta. Those receiving tax credits are “working class individuals” making about $30,000. Of those in public housing in Athens, 4 percent receive welfare; 40 percent are elderly; 40 percent hold part-time, minimum wage jobs; and the rest are transitioning.

The reason the project is unfolding along Hawthorne, in roughly the same place at the other, 1967 original is that the Housing Authority had enough land there to do a mixed-income development, Parker said.

"It sounds like a radical, new way of doing things," said Hoard.


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