East Lake apartment buildings, Atlanta, GA. Feb. 12, 1997. | Tim Huber

?East Lake Meadows? offers a complex, compassionate look at the former Atlanta projects ?My impression was they were going to be fine, because they were brand new?no reputation, they were not even filled up,? Lawrence Lightfoot tells the camera about the East Lake Meadows housing project in Atlanta. He and his family moved to the project in 1971 after a fire destroyed their house in another part of the city.
?I found out after a couple years,? Lightfoot went on, ?that they were not okay.? Within months of moving in, residents found that their water heaters were breaking, rainfall was eroding the land around their homes, and they had to fight the government for basic necessities like day care and healthy food. Less than a year after the project opened, it had already earned the moniker ?Little Vietnam.? Advocates and policymakers still disagree about how conditions in public housing projects like East Lake Meadows became so bad, but nobody disagrees about how bad they were. The phrase ?public housing? itself carries an extreme negative stigma inherited from conservative politicians like Bob Dole, who famously said the program made the government ?the landlords of misery.?
As a result, the federal government and most major cities have all but abandoned the practice of maintaining large, government-run apartment buildings in favor of subsidizing private apartments. The developments that dominated ma...