Up against over 50,000 pounds of mustard-yellow earth-moving machinery, the Forest Cove Apartments — already rickety due to years of neglect — didn’t stand a chance.
On Wednesday, a wrecking crew finally started its long-awaited demolition — almost 18 months after the city of Atlanta finished evacuating and rehousing the nearly 200 low-income renters living at the condemned southside apartment complex.
An excavator pummeled the units in a two-story building beside the leasing office first, and then the office itself, marking the beginning of the end for one of Atlanta’s most infamous Section 8 apartment complexes. It is one of many owned nationally by Ohio-based mega-landlord Millennia Housing Management.
But for former Forest Cove tenants, the story doesn’t end with their old homes being reduced to rubble. Some residents found themselves rehoused in properties plagued by familiar issues, including rats, roaches, mold, litter, and violent crime. Many of them want to return to the Thomasville Heights neighborhood — if and when the city executes an ambitious neighborhood revitalization plan that promises new subsidized and market-rate housing, along with other mixed-use development.
“It’s great that Forest Cove is finally being torn down,” said Foluke Nunn, a community organizer with the American Friends Service Committee who’s served as a conduit between the renters and the city amid a tumultuous resident relocation effort. “This is the end of an era that was defined by trauma and hardship for many residents.”
But Nunn said the former Forest Cove tenants need some guarantee that they can indeed return to their former community, which included a public elementary school, recreation center — shuttered as the complex was vacated — and park adjacent to the apartments.
“We need the city to commit to a written, enforceable right of return to come back to Thomasville Heights if they wish,” Nunn said in an…
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