Category Archives: Decatur

Affordable housing

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In February, a consultant delivered a report to the City of Decatur (Ga.) on teardowns and their impacts in the community. Tucked away in the report were two pages on how the city was meeting affordable housing objectives laid out in a 2008 report by the same consultant.

Affordable housing was one of several topics in the consultant’s report, Decatur Infill Housing Analysis. New homes, wrote the consultant, are “more expensive” than the older homes torn down. “This is resulting in a shift in the economics of the respective neighborhood and in what income levels are needed to reside in the community.” Consultant Market+Main added, “More cities are focused on this side of the infill issue and in wanting to preserve viable housing opportunities for the income levels represented by the older homes.”

But not Decatur, Ga.

According to the 2014 report, the City has implemented only one out of ten affordable housing objectives. The City’s consultant wrote,

The Decatur Affordable Housing Study was completed in 2008 and provided a thorough review of the affordability of housing in the City of Decatur. Even as the nation and the region emerge from the economic setback of “the Great Recession,” this analysis and its recommendations are still applicable today. The following highlights from this study support the need for housing affordability in Decatur. Many of these are also un-implemented to-date and all steps should be taken to act upon and implement the findings of this study.

  • Generate and/or allocate a dedicated public funding stream to provide a partial grant and/or loan to mortgage eligible workforce affordable potential home buyers for home purchases within Decatur. NOT IMPLEMENTED.
  • Create an allocation of local public grant and/or loan funding for renovation of existing Decatur homes and purchase by mortgage eligible workforce households. NOT IMPLEMENTED.
  • Establish a down payment assistance fund to provide a portion of the required down payments for eligible workforce affordable homeownership candidates. NOT IMPLEMENTED.
  • Establish a Homeownership Rehabilitation Program (HRP) which provides developers, both for-profit and non-profit, with a subsidy for the rehabilitation of vacant and/or deteriorated houses to be sold to income eligible home buyers. NOT IMPLEMENTED.
  • Increase workforce affordable homeownership through the formation of a community land trust. NOT IMPLEMENTED.
  • Encourage the development of new for-sale housing product types in Decatur other than detached single-family homes. PARTIALLY IMPLEMENTED.
  • Encourage and exploit existing opportunities for additional infill of the Decatur downtown core. PARTIALLY IMPLEMENTED.
  • Create design guidelines that define appropriate design concept solutions to allow higher density mixed use infill in targeted areas, such as commercial corridors and the downtown core to be used in conjunction with overlay zoning. NOT IMPLEMENTED.
  • Preserve “the image of a traditional and intimate small-town center” to achieve the price points and quantities needed to fill the Decatur workforce affordability gap. NOT IMPLEMENTED.
  • Permit “granny flats” and other accessory dwelling units on existing residential parcels. IMPLEMENTED.

Source: Market+Main, Decatur Infill Housing Analysis (February 2014), pp. 6-7

 

The profile

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Decatur, Ga., resident Don Denard was stopped by Decatur police officers for “walking while black.” After having his racial profiling complaint dismissed by a Decatur Police Department internal investigation, Denard and his friends and supporters went to city hall. The video embedded above was compiled from the February 18, 2014 session.

decaturcityhall-2014-02

 

Recommended reading:

 

Moratorium

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October 2013 wasn’t the first time the Decatur, Ga., City Commission heard pleas from residents of the gentrifying Oakhurst neighborhood to halt the disintegration of their community. In February 2003 another group of Oakhurst residents asked the City Commission to “have their backs.”

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Antioch’s eyes (Updated)

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Antioch. They call it Hibernia now but it was on Atlanta Avenue. I watched my neighbors sell ice cream, fish sandwiches, having teas and dinners, sacrificing to buy the windows and to buy the bricks. I mean they were doing labors of love, you know, and trying to pass it on to the next generation. And when I pass by the building now, it almost breaks my heart because they were working the sweat of their brows, trying to establish a place for this generation. — Sarah Kirk, March 2012.

Former Antioch church facade, Jan. 2014.

Former Antioch church facade, Jan. 2014.

Sarah Kirk¹ recently drove by an abandoned brick church north of Hibernia Ave. in Decatur, Ga. The 75-year-old Decatur native had heard that the property had been sold. Built for the congregation in which her family had worshipped since the last decades of the nineteenth century, she was struck by the gutted edifice. The building’s last congregation, Decatur United Church of Christ, had acquired the property from Antioch AME Church, one of Decatur’s oldest African American religious institutions.

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Day zero: brown is the new green

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Daulton House, Decatur, Ga., 2011. Photo by author originally published by Patch.

Daulton House, Decatur, Ga., 2011. Photo by author originally published by Patch.

Over the past few years Decatur, Ga., builder Clay Chapman has erected a solid reputation as a designer and builder of baronial brick manses. One of his 2011 projects was built in Decatur’s MAK Historic District. It drew fire from the city’s historic preservation commission and local residents for being out of scale and character with the more modest neighboring historic homes built a century earlier. Continue reading →

Post-Apartheid South Africa v. Decatur, Ga.: race, class, and capital

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Gentrification is global. Decatur, Ga., resident Ted Baumann compares and contrasts gentrification and the politics of race and class in his adopted Georgia city and in a post-Apartheid South African suburb in a new two-part National Council on Public History post. From the History@Work post, “Race, politics, and property: Two cases of gentrification”:

My experience in Decatur has been different – especially the absence of any organised resistance in the low-income community to domination by gentrifiers and real estate interests – but remains eerily similar in some ways.  Many of those who drove the exclusionary MID agenda in Muizenberg considered themselves socially and politically progressive, just as many Decatur gentrifiers do, and reacted with anger at suggestions of racism.  As in Decatur, vicious personal attacks and slander were directed at me and other “treasonous” property owners who sided with the refugee/renter population.  And as in Decatur, it was largely impossible to raise issues of equity and social justice with people who reduce all social relationships to impersonal market transactions, regardless of their effects. Continue reading →

Decatur, Ga., protects trees, not people

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Last night the Decatur, Ga., City Commission unanimously voted to enact a 90-day moratorium on tree cutting and then voted to defeat a temporary moratorium on the demolition of single family homes. The city will protect trees and not people. The three commissioners who voted against the teardown moratorium abrogated their responsibilities to the city’s most vulnerable citizens. Continue reading →

Value engineering history (updated)

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I’ll make another comment about value engineering. It’s not just the numbers, but it is what we’ll be doing as far as memorializing a very important piece of history in the city of Decatur. And while there are opportunities for cultural gatherings and so forth, this will be a very specific one that has a very specific history and is someplace that needs to be noted as to what the Bottoms and the segregation of the City of Decatur and how far we’ve come. So thank you for your care in maintaining that piece throughout this project. — Decatur City Commissioner Kecia Cunningham.

The video is adapted from the March 18, 2013, Decatur City Commission meeting. For background information about the demolition of the Beacon property, read Separate and unequal: Preserving Jim Crow.

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Decatur, Ga., proposes single-family home teardown moratorium (updated)

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Street sign posted on Ansley Street advertising pre-teardown garage sale. Photo by author, March 3, 2012.

Street sign posted on Ansley Street advertising pre-teardown garage sale. Photo by author, March 3, 2012.

Decatur, Ga., City Manager Peggy Merriss released a memo today proposing that the Decatur City Commission consider establishing a temporary moratorium on the demolition of single family homes. The city manager’s memo comes eight months after I made the same request in a petition [PDF] delivered to the Decatur City Commission and more than 18 months after I first suggested it as a Decatur resident. Continue reading →

Separate and unequal: Preserving Jim Crow

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Equalization schools were the South’s futile attempt to cling to Jim Crow segregation. They were built throughout Georgia, South Carolina, and other Deep South states as a last ditch effort to forestall court-ordered public school integration. According to Georgia architectural historian Steven Moffson, his state had the greatest number of schools built to preserve the separate but equal doctrine that ultimately was dismantled under the 1954 landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision.

Decatur’s Beacon Elementary and Trinity High schools were among the hundreds of equalization schools built in Georgia after World War II. They were constructed in 1955 and 1956 on the site where the city had maintained its African American school, the Herring Street School, since the early twentieth century. In early 2013, three years after receiving a $10,000 historic preservation grant that should have led to the property’s protection, the City of Decatur began demolishing parts of the two schools to build a new police headquarters and civic plaza. Continue reading →