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i DEPARTMENT OF HOUSING ANO URBAN DEVELOPMENT PEACHTREE SEVENTH BUILDING, ATLANTA, GEORGIA 30323 Room 645 October 18, 1968 REGION Ill Housing Assistance Office ,• ' IN REPLY REFER TO: 3RD Mr. M. B. Satterfield, Executive TheHousing Authority of the City of Atlanta, Georgia 824 Hurt Building Atlanta, Georgia 30303 Dear Mr. Satterfield: This acknowledges your letter of October 16, 1968, enclosing a copy of Mr. Rodney Cook's letter to you of October 11, 1968, for our observations, since many of the points raised involve matters which eventually require approval of this Office. We are always encouraged when a man of Mr. Cook's stature gives as much time and thought to a program as is reflected in his letter. We wish to point out, however, several complications in his proposal that arise based on our local and national e xp erience with the Low-Rent Housing Program. The first matter that concerns us greatly is the fact that construction costs are at least $2,000 more per unit on high-rise than on low-rise structures. Further, if we constructed all our larger units in a project without an intermix of smaller units, we would e xpe rience an e x ceptionally high aver~ge cost per unit. Since the smaller units in a high-rise would cost us a t least $2,000 per unit more than normall y experienced, we could not even average two projects t(?gether to get an acceptable unit cost. In other words, this policy will result in an extra unacceptable construction cost to the Government. Of grave additional concern to us is the fact that concentrating the large families with their high density of children in projec~s such as proposed will greatly increase maintenance costs as well as management problems. We hav e found this true even when we concentrate the larger units in one section of a project. In fact, in project planning, we endeavor to intermix larger and smaller units to avoid this larger unit concentration. Wifh this type conc~ntration, increas ed juvenile crime and delinquency, increased frequency of juveni le gangs, increased peril to the personal safety of tenants, an increase in social problems an d difficulty in h a ndling them all become factors with which Management has to cope. The stabilizing effect of older families is lost under any system which involves up-rooting and moving them to high-rise proj ec ts. Many older ~amilie8 also do not like high-rise living and wou ld only move into the environment under protest. �2 Young families moving into the high-rise in turn would be requir e d to move when they began to have children. The practice of concentrating t wo-person or less families in one group and larger families in another group creates an unnatural type conununity. In the past, . we have altered unit sizes in existing projects only on a case basis where the market had changed. In some instances, we created more units by the conversion of larger units and in other instances we created fewer units by conversion of smaller units to make larger units. In most instances, this has been a costly process, justified only because a vacancy problem over a long period of time had developed. Further, because of the physical layout of existing units, the amount of conversion to larger or smaller size units that can be made is usually quite limited. ~t must also be realized that when you reduce the number of units in a proj e ct, you also reduce the rental income, while at the same time, as indicated above, you increase the maintenance cost. We could not agree to any such plan in Atlanta merely to relocate families in high-rise structures. There a-re instances throughout the Country now where, because of the high density of children and large families involved, consideration has been given to abandoning the projects to a different design concept. -The present polic y in public housing programming f av ors disbursing the units into smaller clusters and avoiding the large pro ject d e v e lopments. L a nd a n d construction costs in a l a rge city usu a lly prohibit the d e v e lopme nt of single family units under our program The plan outlined by Mr. Cook reflects serious and r e sponsible thinting and concern on his part; howe v er, it do e s not take into consideration some of the problems known to us th a t would make it una cc e pt ab le to this Ad min i s trati on. _;~~ut . Sincdere~/,; y - /, , / t / / · [.I (I./// / ;;.-~ -: > .. A. R. ½-IANSON. , Assist an t Reg i o n a l Adm inis tr a tor I for Ho u sin g Ass i st a nce �