ABSTRACT
Atlanta became the first city in the United States to receive approval and federal funding for the development of public housing, which opened in 1936. In 2007, the Atlanta Housing Authority (AHA) announced that it would demolish its remaining traditional family public housing projects, as well as two senior high rises. This involved the relocation of approximately 10,000 residents around the city of Atlanta. Closing public housing is, as many have pointed out, a reflection of the neoliberalization of social service provisioning in the United States. But a historical look at Atlanta's public housing offers a window onto both the changing ideological position of public housing as a public good over time and also the different geographies of these moments. Through the years, Atlanta's urban poor have been moved through space, circulated in and around the city, from "free market" slums to public housing and back again, as the process continues unabated.
