ATLANTA — After residents complained about "deplorable" conditions in their new apartments after moving out of the condemned Forest Cove apartments, Mayor Andre Dickens said the city is looking into it.
"The pain, the trauma, being relocated,” said one former Forest Cover resident at Tuesday's Community Development and Human Services committee meeting. “Lives just snatched and changed at the blink of an eye -- being placed in places more deplorable than the places that we came from."
11Alive spoke with the mayor on Wednesday, who said the city helped residents get HUD vouchers for housing. He added that he hopes people remember what conditions were like at Forest Cove.
“As folks are saying they’re in certain conditions now, they actually get to choose the places that they go. They have now just got the most transactional document they could ever have. A better document than they had before. This document allows them to choose where they go in the region,” Dickens said.
“They used to be confined to Forest Cove, which was rats, roaches, mildew, broken glass, HVAC problems, as well as crime. Now they have a document that we negotiated with the federal government, with HUD that now they can go anywhere they want to go.”
“So my response to that is there's already a tight market. Particularly with the affordable housing in Atlanta,” said Alison Johnson of the Housing Justice League. “My response is that they need to push the button, push the envelope to do more, to have the landlords in the City of Atlanta accept more of these vouchers, prioritize these residents who have been displaced not by their own course.”
11Alive spoke with Johnson outside the condemned and partially demolished Forest Cove apartments.
Johnson said the Housing Justice League is one of the organizations that is fighting to help nearly 200 families who once lived in Forest Cove and are still struggling to find safe housing after being relocated to other parts of the city and DeKalb County.
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“What is happening now is that it has fallen even further from despair because people are disconnected from their jobs, their place to live, their schools, their networks, their doctors, and it's just more and more problems and more stress for folks,” Johnson said, agreeing with the frustrations shared at Tuesday’s meeting from women who say the places they relocated to have crime, mold, bugs and a lack of transportation.
She said people, regardless of the conditions at Forest Cove, made the most of living there.
“They've done the best; they have the smallest amount of resources that they have been given. And they have connected with people. And it's not just about the physical buildings. It's about the camaraderie, the love, the family, the people that they have grown up with, the people they have known, the elders that they connect with. So there's life,” Johnson said. “There was life here once upon a time. Although it's under destruction. There was life here. And people want to be connected back to life. When you're disconnected from your networks, that's your bloodline. And when your bloodline is gone, you have nothing else.
Johnson also added she'd like to see city-owned public land used for affordable housing and have the residents who once lived at Forest Cove prioritized.