The city-led team that relocated 188 households from the southside’s condemned Forest Cove Apartments placed over a quarter of them in complexes identified as “dangerous dwellings,” an Atlanta Civic Circle investigation has found.
The government-subsidized complex is owned by Ohio-based mega-landlord Millennia Housing Management, a company that’s drawn complaints of mismanagement from housing advocates nationwide.
Fifty-one of the Forest Cove families that the city of Atlanta and its nonprofit partners rehoused last year—after a municipal judge condemned the complex in December 2021, citing dozens of housing code violations, violent crime, and other safety issues—now are living in apartment complexes that have been similarly plagued by pests and mold, drug deals and deadly shootings.
Those 51 households are scattered across the metro region—from College Park to Decatur to Union City and beyond—in nine complexes that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution identified in its Dangerous Dwellings database, a vast catalog of metro-area rental complexes known for “serious crimes, lax maintenance, and other hazards [that] make these among the most persistently dangerous apartment complexes in the Atlanta metro area in recent years.”
The AJC published the list in December, two months after the city finally finished moving everyone out of Forest Cove.
Six of the nine “dangerous dwellings” where ex-Forest Cove tenants are now living have experienced frequent reports of crime problems, such as thefts and shootings. Five have been cited in the paper’s archive for substandard living conditions or fire damage. Three of the complexes were among those the AJC identified for both.
“We’re not only dealing with an affordability crisis; there is also a habitability crisis in metro Atlanta,” said Foluke Nunn, a community organizer with the American Friends Service Committee, a nonprofit…
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