Democracy and the Challenge of Affordability: Using Film to Raise the Issue of Housing Affordability
By: Harvard Ash Center
Tags: Housing, Challenge, Harvard, Democracy, Affordable Housing

This post is the seventh in a month-long series of blog postings on affordable housing as a challenge to the health of American democracy, and in particular local democracy in the United States. The series, edited by Harvard Kennedy School Assistant Professor Quinton Mayne, is part of the Ash Center’s Challenges to Democracy series, a two-year public dialogue inviting leaders in thought and practice to name our greatest challenges and explore promising solutions.

In this post, we invite documentary filmmaker King Williams to share the issues that motivate his filmmaking and what his film, The Atlanta Way, can tell us about the health of American democracy. In his piece Williams describes his efforts as a filmmaker to give voice to communities who very often are the voiceless objects of urban policy decisions. He also reflects on how he and fellow filmmakers can engage communities in political awakening, coalition building, and mobilizing action toward positive change.

By King Williams

Affordable housing has been central to both the realization of the middle-class American dream and to the long history of segregation and racial inequality in the United States.

Since the founding of the United States, federal initiatives from the 13th, 14th, and 15thamendments in the 1860s to the Federal Fair Housing and Voting Rights acts of the 1960s have helped expand basic rights and protections to African Americans and other people of color.

In housing, we have seen how impactful federal interventions like the passage of the GI Bill could be in jumpstarting the path to the American middle class. But federal government policy has mainly helped realize a white middle-class dream; it has been less successful in fighting the segregation and racism that has undermined equality of opportunity for African Americans in housing or elsewhere like the workplace.

This contradiction is felt most deeply at the local level. In too many communities like Atlanta, where I am from, the rules of the game militate against equality and social justice.

Atlanta was the first U.S. city to open a public housing development, Techwood Homes, in 1933. And as of 2011 it was also the first city to close all of its public housing. Throughout its tenure, public housing in Atlanta reflected what we call the “Atlanta way” of doing things — which has involved the shaping of policy by both black and white elites for well over 100 years.

Out of this system of ruling by gentry in Atlanta — part of the city’s collective DNA — grows the familiar concept of gentrification.

Origins of the film

I’ve always wanted to get into film since I was a young child. The summer before my senior year of undergrad I decided to make a movie about Atlanta that was something of merit.

In 2007, I put a status on Facebook asking if there was anyone who wanted to maybe work on a documentary, and the only person who answered was my fellow executive producer Zettler Clay IV. So officially the day after I graduated undergrad at Georgia State University (GSU) in Atlanta, I was sitting in the middle of the student center’s empty cafeteria with Zettler along with a core group of then students of GSU and SCAD, the Savannah College of Art and Design, detailing how we would do this documentary.

The author of this post, filmmaker King Williams (left) and The Atlanta Way producer Zettler Clay IV

Over time we’ve added some key personnel and upgraded our collective talents. For example, I worked as an intern for film director Spike Lee in 2011–12. All these efforts have made this film much better than anything that it could’ve been before.

We set out to make a documentary about the last days of public housing in Atlanta, to find out what happened to all of the people when it closed. To answer this, I first had to ask myself a simple question that no one could seem to answer; not my teachers, not my neighbors, not roommates, not even my own mother… that question is what happened to the people in East Lake Meadows?

East Lake Meadows was a public housing project on the east side of Atlanta that I remembered as a child. At one point it had the dubious distinction of being one of the largest public housing projects in the entire city of Atlanta. Additionally it was one of the most violent places in the United States, where crime was 18x the national average in the mid-1990s and the employment rate was at one point 9%.

My motivation to make The Atlanta Way has really been about making a movie about my city from the perspective of the people who actually live and work in it — people like the former residents of East Lake Meadows.

Watch an excerpt from The Atlanta Way: ‘Diane Wright & the last days of Hollywood Courts’

What happened to all the people?

In making the film, we learned that unfortunately many of the former residents of East Lake Meadows are no longer there. Many people of East Lake were relocated through housing vouchers based upon a list of eligibility criteria set forth by our Atlanta Housing Authority. These criteria as well as the wait listing of available new units caused a permanent and seismic change in the way Atlanta would develop.

Not everyone who formerly lived in East Lake Meadows received these housing vouchers, for various reasons. Even for those who received vouchers, there remained concerns as to how many people still live in low-income housing.

This (then) novel approach to housing redevelopment would dramatically change how the city addressed poverty. The ensuing years of subsidized voucher housing led to a mass exodus of people. It also led to the removal of public housing units which had been purposely neglected for years. The ‘Atlanta Way’ of housing deservedly had its share of press for the positive aspects it had to re-ignite the economic vitality of the city pre/post the 1996 Olympics.

The problem is that even as of 2015 the majority of the areas where those units once stood are no more than vacant lots. In those properties that have been renovated into the mixed-income model, not everyone who was voucher-eligible returned to live in these areas. What has happened is a systematic de-concentration of those who are impoverished. This approach is something everyone has championed, but the places where those people have moved to have not necessarily been an improvement in terms of moving people out of poverty.

So I’ve sought out numerous people who’ve either been studying the “Atlanta way,” or been directly affecting it, or who were affected by these relocations.

The data speak volumes to the system working, but many of its detractors argue that the reports are due to smaller, select sample. Also the means were not truly transparent in seeking to eradicate poverty; rather it simply reshuffles the deck for select individuals.

The Atlanta Way’s impact

The Atlanta Way, still in production, takes a look at mass scale gentrification in a way that has never been done in film before. The purpose of the film is to show how the ‘the Atlanta way of doing things’ makes Atlanta’s ongoing experience with gentrification unique and also to highlight the model that other cities are now following in the urban planning space.

As a filmmaker I think The Atlanta Way has helped tremendously in raising not only the issue of housing affordability but also other issues relevant to Atlanta such as race, class, respectability, self-segregation, and idealism. Importantly, the film highlights how housing affordability in Atlanta has a lot to do with the general lack of strategic long–term development of the city.

Former Mayor of Atlanta William ‘Bill’ Campbell is interviewed for The Atlanta Way. As mayor from 1994–2002, Campbell initiated Atlanta’s public housing reforms outlined in this post.

As with Andrew Padilla’s El Barrio Tours, the greatest impact of The Atlanta Way has really been at screenings and other events that provide an opportunity for people to actually talk face-to-face. With so much of our communications confined now to talking online via a screen, there are so many nuances, contextual cues, and general flow of conversation that are missed. During these screenings, I have been able to have in-depth conversations and actual dialogue with people on the issue of gentrification.

The film has become part of what I’ve seen is a growing movement of residential-led films such as El Barrio Tours USA and The Battle For Brooklyn, that have really been fueled by social media as a dialogue tool and by technology that lowers the costs of filmmaking.

Filmmaking as a force for positive change

The health of American democracy is definitely up for serious debate. In my opinion it is vastly in need of serious medical intervention. We’re seeing daily erosion of access to resources and services as well as reductions in overall federal programs, which vastly undervalue the poor, Latino immigrants, women, Blacks, and the LGBT community — basically the Democratic Party’s traditional supporters. Even further are challenges like the judgment of Citizens United, the NSA, Monsanto GMO regulations, and ALEC, to name a few.

All of these developments seriously suggest that democracy is for some rather than for all.

We’re living in the era of leaderless movements, and while social media gets all the glory it’s really non-traditional filmmaking that’s rapidly shaping and reshaping our more connected lives. I think film and filmmaking is becoming more malleable and accessible to people who’ve previously encountered barriers to access as a result of location, affordability, language, and traditional gate keepers. With the lower costs of equipment, as well as the increase in the number of people who have mobile devices and Internet connections globally, filmmaking has never been more prevalent.

To mobilize a populace without a leader and to do it effectively has really become a game changer for all whether or not we’re active participants. Just look at Twitter during the coverage of Baltimore, Ferguson, the Eric Gardner protests, the Gay Marriage and Arab Spring movements; filmmaking, journalism, and mobilization have arguably never been this good in our history.

Essentially anyone with an iPhone can make films and good ones too, just check out some of the fully narrative stories told on Vine and SnapChat. I see this as a trend continuing; as the people begin to speak out and up against issues of affordability, I see we’re getting more of an organized approach to this problem from people across the world who’ve never met before.

It’s now possible to see life events and the stories that shape them, in real time. This change has allowed for a number of vantage points that are often overlooked or ignored. The capability of citizen journalism and increasingly low barriers to entry for creating media could have serious implications going forward and we should all be taking notes.

King Williams is currently completing The Atlanta Way in anticipation of a fall 2015 release. Additionally he’s working on an accompanying handbook on gentrification as well as a podcast series on gentrification and city-related topics debuting later this summer. To stay updated about The Atlanta Way, gentrification handbook, or gentrification podcast series please sign up here. You can follow King (@iamkingwilliams) on both Instagram and Twitter.

Further Reading

CityLab from The Atlantic, By 2011, Atlanta Had Demolished All of Its Public Housing Projects. Where Did All Those People Go?, by Stephanie Garlock, May 8, 2014.

Creative Loafing, ‘The Atlanta Way’ documentary filmmaker discovers why ‘gentrification’ is a four-letter word, by Rodney Carmichael, May 22, 2013.

NextCity, Has the Shift to Mixed-Income Housing Created a Tale of Two Atlantas?, by Alexis Stephens, February 19, 2015.