Atlanta tearing down last projects

ATLANTA, June 20 (UPI) -- Atlanta, the city that built the first public housing project in the United States, plans to tear down its last one within a year.

The demolition is part of a 15-year effort to get rid of big projects, The New York Times reported Saturday. By the 1990s, the city had the highest percentage in the country of residents living in projects, many of them crime-ridden ghettos.

About 15,000 project apartments in 32 complexes are now gone.

"We've realized that concentrating families in poverty is very destructive," Renee L. Glover, executive director of the Atlanta Housing Authority, told the Times. "It's destructive to the families, the neighborhoods and the city."

Big projects are being replaced by mixed-income complexes with amenities such as YMCAs and even golf courses. Poor people, including those displaced from projects, are getting vouchers to allow them to find privately owned housing.

Critics predict some of the displaced will fall through the cracks.