Diverging Space for Deviants by Akira Drake Rodriguez

Author:Akira Drake Rodriguez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 4.5. Undated list in Helen Bullard Papers on the Atlanta Housing Authority. Source: Atlanta Housing Authority Ephemera, 1974–1979, Helen Bullard Papers, MSS 58, James G. Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center.

Results from the tenant survey are illuminative of structural and citywide tenant priorities that were not represented by individual tenant associations. The survey identifies the factors that prevented the public housing development from becoming a public housing community—lack of control over spacemaking for the equitable distribution of public goods and services. The top three grievances from the survey across eleven developments and nearly eight thousand respondents were the need for more recreation facilities, tile floors (instead of cement), and better lighting. The survey was administered door to door and listed thirty-five possible grievances, largely concerning the design of the individual unit and wider development (“more closets” “day care facilities”), as well as some behavioral issues (“have parents discipline their children”).34 Tenant grievances around recreation, floors, and lighting articulate the emerging concerns of Black women concerning the quality of their homes, the opportunities available to their children, and the safety, livability, and comfort of the surrounding community.

Bullard’s role at the AHA was to continue to uphold Atlanta’s race-friendly image in the wake of national urban unrest. Bullard did so through a series of compromises and messaging—she helped create bureaucracies around new tenant association formations (such as the Citywide Advisory Council on Public Housing), which facilitated folding these tenant representatives into the newer, more progressive housing authority. At the same time that some tenants were being empowered and folded into the political regime, others were systemically identified and evicted as undesirables. Bullard’s time at AHA marks a significant period of change—where some tenants would be empowered and would gain more political opportunities within the structure, while others would be permanently disenfranchised, marginalized, and eventually removed from it.

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