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February 15, 1967
Dr. Albert M. Davis 239 Auburn Avenue Atlanta, Georgia
Dear Dr. Davis:
While reading reports of the NAACP's Housing Conference, I wondered if anyone had mentioned the importance of spreading low-cost public units throughout the city.
I mean spreading to a much greater degree than simply building another huge project in the Northside, for instance.
What I mean is the location, in middle and upper-class neighborhoods, of small units of public housing.
This would have the effect, I believe, of breaking up the ghettoes - white and black - that are created by the sprawling projects that exist in Atlanta and most American cities today.
While public housing does provide homes for low-income families, it also tends to segregate them economically, and that economic segregation means they are locked into the cycle of poverty that brought them into public housing in the first instance.
The schools that serve communities of low-income people are obviously not of the same quality as are schools in middle and upper class neighborhoods; the services extended by the city and county to neighborhoods of low income people - whether they live in public or private housing - is seriously lacking.
To scatter isolated units of public housing in Collier Heights, or Peyton Forrest, or in the block that Ivan Allen lives in would obviously displease a great many people, both white and Negro, but it would have the beneficial effect of breaking up the concrete slums that public housing becomes.
I hope you will consider this suggestion. I'd like to know what you think of it. To my knowledge, only one American city - Bridgeport, Connecticut - has ever seriously considered any such experiment.
Sincerely,
Julian Bond
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