“It was a beautiful place to live,” Gregory Williamson said while walking a flat, dusty plat he used to call home decades ago.
The array of 650 orange-brick apartments that once stood here remains etched into his memory. He raised his family in one of the apartments from the late 1980s to early 2000s. He still reminisces on the good times, coaching youth sports and recruiting the talents of neighborhood kids for his car wash across the street.
The community was called Bowen Homes, the last major public housing project built in Atlanta. Designed to replace a different housing community that fell into squalor, Bowen Homes would go on to face the same fate, epitomizing the pitfalls of how cities used to approach government-assisted housing.
Bowen Homes went through a decline Williamson saw in slow motion, where a project intended to safely house the city’s downtrodden deteriorated into a crime-ridden complex that was demolished in 2009…