Thomasville Heights is Atlanta
Last week I spent half a day in the Thomasville Heights community of Atlanta with my fellow Board members of The Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta (CFGA). The area is less than 10 minutes away from the Eastside Walk neighborhood I lived in for nearly two years, but it was not on my radar and I’d never spent time there before. Since I visited last Tuesday and listened to the stories of a few of the residents, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about what I heard and saw.
For those who are unfamiliar, Thomasville Heights is a majority Black neighborhood on the southeast side of Atlanta. It has been in the news a lot recently due in large part to the Forest Cove Apartment complex. Forest Cove is a condemned apartment complex owned and managed by Millenia, and is by all accounts uninhabitable. The problem is that there are still hundreds of residents living there, despite over a decade of promises to improve the conditions, and more recently to relocate them to safer housing. WABE has done incredible coverage of the conditions at Forest Cove and how the residents have been impacted, I encourage you to read/listen to the details they’ve uncovered.
While the reality of the inhumane living conditions hurt deeply to witness, another painful discovery for me was the fact that the issues with Forest Cove apartments are just the tip of the iceberg of the broken promises Thomasville residents have endured over the decades since the neighborhood was founded. This same area was once filled with Black homeowners, who were convinced by President Lyndon Johnson’s Urban Renewal Program to sell or donate their land to help further efforts to create affordable housing for Black people in Atlanta. That promise was never fulfilled. It’s hard to know the amount of wealth that was stripped from the families who prematurely sold and/or donated their land, but we know it’s a tremendous amount given the close proximity of this neighborhood to Atlanta’s city center. In addition, it can’t be overstated how impactful the lack of livable affordable housing has been to this neighborhood over the course of time. Even the neighborhood school is shutting down due to the ongoing housing issues.
There is so much to say about what has happened in the Thomasville Heights neighborhood, but my primary lingering thought is that the series of events clearly demonstrates what happens when generations of people are taken advantage of, lied to, seen as less than, and ignored. Thomasville Heights is like many other Black communities around the country in that way. It’s sad to know that a community like this exists in Atlanta, which is heralded as a place for Black prosperity and progress. I felt personally convicted for not knowing the history of Thomasville Heights and the hardships its residents have endured. I’m committed to doing what I can to ensure there is equitable, positive change in that community. CFGA has set out some concrete actions it will be taking over the next several years in the Thomasville Heights community through our TogetherATL initiative. If you’re interested in learning more or getting involved, let me know.
