Documentary filmmaker Joe Lavine asks Athens residents if they can imagine an Athens where everyone has a safe and affordable place to live. These residents give their thoughts on housing in Athens and describe what policies they’d like to see to improve housing affordability.
Lavine, the creator of “Below Baldwin,” is in the process of creating a new platform for journalism in Athens along with Chris Anani and Rasik Winfield — Athens Community Journalism. Athens Politics Nerd is assisting with this effort, as is Highlight Magazine.
The following is the article version of the video above from Athens Community Journalism.
Athens residents make their case for two affordable housing proposals
In Athens, like many places around the world, housing means different things for different people. For some, finding it can seem impossibly out of reach. For others, it’s a stable place to live. Some — both people and corporations — use housing as an investment to make money off of. And for many, housing is a reminder or a fear of having to move; of being displaced. But one thing that everyone wants is a safe place to lay their head at night, in a place that feels like home, with people that feel like a community.
Athens Community Journalism asked around, can you imagine an Athens where everyone has an affordable and stable home, safe from displacement?
“I don’t think they care,” said Keagan Long, who grew up in Athens but moved to Winterville for more affordable rent. “I can’t, I can’t see it, you know, and maybe again, I’m not paying attention to all the right things, but the progression that they seem like — just going back to my grandma, she’s 93. Like, who — [what are] these people supposed to do? They’ve been here servicing the community for — I think my grandma’s been here my entire life – for over 30 years. And, you know, her grandkids have to usher in and help her with certain things because they’ve increased the [rent and rental fees]. I just don’t see it happening.”
Christa Coulter-Scott, a Brooklyn neighborhood resident, responded similarly. “No, but that would be nice. It would be nice. I think a lot of Athens residents feel like we’re forgotten because of UGA and the priority of the students and their luxury housing and the resources and the investors that are allowed to come in and sully our beautiful city. You know, things like that really make me angry,” she said. “I wish we could keep this more local — Athenians making money instead of, you know, out-of-state investors and big corporations.”
“Well, yes—I mean, my dream is to buy a house, but right now, given the state of the economy, the houses seem—the prices seem—far too high [translated from Spanish],” said a resident of Highland Greens. “And well, with the wages I’m earning, I don’t think—I don’t think I could afford it; or if I could afford it, I’d constantly be under immense financial pressure from the mortgage payments.”
“I mean, I try. I try to imagine it,” said Danielle Gillmer, a Forest Heights resident. “I know it’s gonna be tough. I know it’s gonna be a long road. I know that I can be naive sometimes. I like to consider it just being hopeful.”
“You know, I bet people were asked similar, similar questions during the civil rights movement or pre-emancipation, you know, before slavery was ended – chattel slavery here in the U.S. And so, there were people that came together though, that could imagine a different type of future – a different way of being, a different way of existing,” said Broderick Flanigan, a visual artist and community organizer who grew up in Athens. “And it was those people that moved the needle little by little and kept chipping away and chipping away until those things came crumbling down. And so I imagine housing affordability for everyone being one of those similar type things, you know, where we have to address capitalism, we have to address the horrors of capitalism, the exploitation, the egregious things that happen under capitalism where people have this unchecked and unfettered ability to make as much money as possible when it relates to housing.”
“But we do need good, affordable houses,” said Edward Thomas, deacon at Hill First Baptist Church. Thomas grew up in the historic Reese Street neighborhood, which was once a predominantly Black neighborhood. Thomas said he is one of the only remaining Black homeowners in the neighborhood. “We got people out there on the street homeless and stuff like that. They need somewhere to go. And when I was growing up in the community, you didn’t have — see too many people on the street like that. We — people in the neighborhood would take them in, but you don’t have that now. People don’t look out after people like they used to do when I was coming up. You know, they always told me to take a village to raise kids and stuff like that. It’s not that now.”
“Well, it start at the top with your councilmen,” said Donald Champion, another deacon at Hill First. “You gotta go down there to them meetings. We gotta go down there and sit down with them and talk to them about it and get a good understanding with them and see what would it take. You know, we can talk about it all day long, but they the ones [who] control the zoning and how everything got to be zoned and this and that — because there’s a lot that go into that. You know, there’s a lot that people don’t know. There’s a lot. There’s a lot.”
ACJ wanted to look at possible avenues to making this dream a reality, so we talked with two Athens residents who have been putting in work to research, write and advocate for proposals to make housing in Athens more available and affordable.
Growing up in Athens, Flanigan lived in Nellie B, Rocksprings, Pauldoe and Bethel homes. He also lived in housing that his family owned — for a time. ACJ spoke with Flanigan in Newtown, where his grandmother, Teresa Flanigan, used to own two properties on Cleveland Avenue
“But yeah, she was definitely the matriarch of our family and kept everything together,” he said. “We used to have a lot of gatherings here at this home. We had a lot of family gatherings during the holidays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthdays, especially my grandmother’s birthday. We would come here and just celebrate family and everybody would congregate and come to this house.”
“And a lot of people actually lived here, too. People that were in precarious situations, struggling with certain things. They always had a safe haven here at Grandma’s house. I remember my family lived here at one point,” Flanigan continued. “We were being displaced. We lost our house. And then, ended up having to move to public housing. And then, we lost our apartment in public housing, and so, we had to end up living here with my grandmother on a few different occasions. And so, it was like a family house, where people could come when they were not in such a great situation. So, we wouldn’t be out on the streets.”
“But at an early age, I kind of heard the adults around me talking about how important property was and how important it is to have ownership,” Flanigan said. “How important it is to have somewhere to live and how you should value that land ownership. And so that kind of shaped some of my early foundations about how important housing is and how crucial and sacred it is.”
Danielle Gillmer is a wood worker for a small business and a realtor for first time home buyers, and also enjoys cooking and growing vegetables. As a kid, Gillmer and her family moved around from her grandfather’s basement to apartment to apartment. As an adult working in the restaurant industry, she continued to move around a lot, and at one point lived out of her car after the house she was living in changed ownership and she was given 30 days notice to leave. Gillmer described what changed for her when she moved to Athens in 2014 and was able to purchase a home.
“It’s hard to describe if you don’t own your own home or didn’t come from a home that was owned in the family,” Gillmer said. “It’s really hard to just describe but I can say that for someone like me that had moved around my entire life – I’ve had 28 known addresses – being able to purchase my own home gave me this sense of security, the sense of foundation, this root in the community, just so much that I did not anticipate being a thing from purchasing a home.”
“So after that I realized how important it is,” she continued. “What a big piece it can be to just build yourself up and to continue building on yourself once you have that safety around you.”
In 2020, Gillmer became a real estate agent to try to help other first time homebuyers get that feeling of housing stability, but she struggled to realize that goal in the transaction-based industry. Then, a colleague who saw Gillmer’s passion invited her to fill in on an affordable housing panel, and after that, Gillmer became more and more engaged. She attended community events to learn more and was later invited to be a part of the Athens team of the Georgia Initiative for Community Housing, which we’ll refer to as the GICH Committee.
“It just kind of kept building on itself. And I would like to say, because I’m okay with saying, I don’t know something. I’m okay with being curious. I’m okay with asking questions. So I’m not afraid at this point in my life to say, ‘Hey, I would like to know more. I would like to be a part of this. Is this possible?’”
Flanigan started paying more attention to local politics in 2014, when he noticed that decisions were being made about Black communities without Black people being present in the decision making process. Since then he has been a part of several efforts related to housing, including knocking on doors to encourage residents of inner east Athens to form a neighborhood association so they could have more of a voice on proposed developments. In 2022, Flanigan worked to support residents of Hidden Pines, Lexington Heights and Rosemary Place after an investment company from Florida purchased residents’ homes, increased the rent and stopped accepting Section 8 vouchers.
“We also had to help a few people move because after the investment company bought the properties, they stopped taking Section 8 vouchers and other vouchers,” he said. “And so there are many people who lived in the neighborhood for 20 years, almost — at least two people I could think of off the top of my head that lived in a neighborhood for 15 to 20 years — that had to move because they were no longer accepting their vouchers, that they had — their government subsidies. And so that’s what — those are the things that led me to doing the housing work and some of the ordinance — local ordinance work that highlights some of the things, that address some of the things I was just speaking to.”
Working with local non-profit Athens Anti-Discrimination Movement (AADM), Flanigan helped to gather community input and write an ordinance, a law that they are pushing for Athens-Clarke County Mayor and Commission to vote on, approve, and enact. The ordinance includes proposals for ACC to improve housing affordability for renters and homeowners, by doing the following and more:
- Establish a “second-chance rental assistance program” for renters with prior evictions or criminal history, using money from the local housing fund
- Invest in building more affordable housing by expanding use of the acquisition strike fund, low income housing tax credit and more
- Establish more protections for tenants
- Establish an emergency rental assistance sub-fund within the local housing fund for eviction prevention and wraparound services
- Provide more down payment assistance for first-generation or income-eligible homebuyers in historically underserved neighborhoods
- Support community land trusts
- Advocate the state government to allow local governments to use rent control to limit big, private landlords from raising the rent too high.
“I would probably say the rent control idea is one of the most important because it covers all facets of community,” Flanigan said. “There are renters from every racial demographic, every gender, every socioeconomic status. There are people who rent, and some people, you know, their situation changes and it goes up and down sometimes. And so people who are renting are always under threat of, like, living with the idea that they may lose their housing if their economic situation changes and vice versa, or if it gets bought out by somebody else and they raise the rent overnight.
“And so I think [rent control] is one of the biggest ideas. Again, that can’t happen by right at a local level,” Flanigan said. “And so we need a mayor and commission to sign on to [collectively] advocating at the state level.”
“And so I want us to be just as bold as the people who are proposing to put people in cages and to rip families apart,” Flanigan added. “There are people literally proposing policy that would allow, you know, these agents, unlicensed agents – you know, they’re deputizing them to basically destroy families, displace families, tear families apart, kidnap people, and policy – some policies – are behind that, you know. And so we want to of course stop those policies, but we want to be just as aggressive in terms of rectifying the harms that have been done to people in those situations.”
“And so that’s the Athens that I want to see, you know. And that’s what we need,” Flanigan said. “We need to be more aggressive with our policy that’s going to have a positive impact, you know, that’s going to challenge that status quo, that’s going to challenge that billionaire millionaire capitalistic mindset, you know.”
In addition to the tools and strategies outlined in AADM’s Affordable Housing Ordinance, zoning is another tool that can be used to create more affordable housing. But what is zoning, anyways?
“So at a basic level, zoning is how government regulates land uses and densities on private land in most US cities and suburbs,” Gillmer said. “That’s to say that zoning controls how big of a building you can build on a particular lot, and whether you can use that building for any given residential, commercial, or industrial use. The original purpose of zoning was to promote the health, safety and welfare of residents by separating residential uses from industrial or other noxious uses. So that’s kind of it in a nutshell.”
But throughout history, zoning was used as a tool for segregation. The 1948 Supreme Court case, Shelley v. Kraemer, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 made it illegal to segregate neighborhoods based on race. But white-majority local governments across the country found that they could still use race-neutral zoning laws to keep neighborhoods segregated.
“Zoning has pretty much — has been used since the early 1900s up until now to segregate minorities and to segregate lower income families,” Gillmer said. “It’s used in that way by saying that you can only build a certain size house on a certain size lot. And what they started to exclude was cottage courts, townhouses, quadruplexes, homes that were smaller than 1,200 square feet. So anything that was affordable became excluded from a lot of cities and suburbs in a way of segregating it without segregating it.”
During the January 13 mayor and commission work session, Gillmer and other members of the GICH committee proposed six zoning changes intended to make housing more affordable.
“Right now, if you were to build on a current — the minimum lot size, the minimum size house that is legal to build here in Athens, you’re going to be spending — any developer, contractor, any local person who’s building — is still going to need to spend at least $200,000 to $300,000. That’s just the scope and the size. You’re purchasing the land, you’re building the house,” Gillmer said. “So a handful of the proposals that we have are to reduce the minimum size of the home, to make it legal to build smaller, to build starter homes, and to reduce the size of the lot needed to build those homes on. So you’re already taking away two of the big top costs of building.”
The GICH committee also proposed to allow accessory dwelling units (ADUs), infill townhomes, manufactured homes, lot subdivisions and reduced parking minimums. The hope is that these changes will make it easier to build affordable homes primarily for the benefit of local residents, without creating an opportunity for student housing to overwhelm neighborhoods.
“Because what we’re trying to do with these six ideas is to make more housing of every variety, but more specifically of the type that is smaller and more of the type that folks here in Athens are going to choose,” Gillmer said. “When we talk about, what, the studentification of Athens, typically they have more money to spend. Typically they live, you know, four or five to an apartment or a house and want to live close to downtown.”
At the March 3rd Mayor and Commission Voting Session, commissioners approved a resolution to direct the planning department to review each of the GICH Committee’s proposed zoning changes. Planning Department staff are expected to turn each one of GICH’s recommendations into an ordinance for mayor and commission to vote on. You can access GICH’s full proposal here, starting on page 16, or read more about it in this Athens Politics Nerd article.
At their May 7 meeting, the planning commission discussed two of the proposed changes to the zoning code — minimum dwelling unit size and secondary dwelling units (or ADUs). The changes to the minimum dwelling unit size allow for housing to be built at the smallest scale possible — as long as the housing meets minimum health and safety requirements as outlined in the International Property Maintenance Code.
These changes are on the agenda for the planning commission’s June 4 meeting. There is an opportunity for public input at this meeting, which takes place at the Planning Department building at 120 W. Dougherty St., and written input can also be shared by emailing planning@accgov.com prior to noon on the day before the meeting. If the planning commission approves the proposed changes, the proposals would then go to mayor and commission for a vote.
AADM has launched a petition for people to show their support for their affordable housing ordinance. AADM’s ordinance is available in legal language, plain-English, plain-Spanish and via audio.
There are many tools and strategies our community can use to create more affordable housing and protect people from displacement, and many people and organizations working to make it happen. For now, how can we get more people organized and engaged?
“We can go out and voice our opinion of what we’d like to see done,” said Thomas. “I’d like to see all communities get behind this program, you know, and see, can we make it work.”
“Well, I think that we, as a community, need to inform ourselves more about the new laws — to see what changes are coming — so that we can prepare ourselves in some way [translated from Spanish],” said the Highland Greens resident.
“As somebody who is turning 50 this year and only getting really engaged in the last couple of years, it’s hard to know where to start,” Gillmer said. “All I can say is, if you’re concerned about it, if you’re worried about it, if you want to do something about it, talk to your neighbors, talk to your friends, talk to your commissioners. There’s so many amazing humans and organizations here in Athens already doing the work. Hopefully it doesn’t take long to just kind of plug into the one that really resonates with you. And just show up and be curious. I think the hardest thing for me for a long time was just feeling like I didn’t know what to do or what to say. It doesn’t matter. Just be in the room. Just listening, I think, is the biggest step.”
“I think government in its purest form – I’m not saying it operates like this today – but I’m saying in its purest form, it is designed, in theory, to balance things when they get out of whack,” Flanigan said. “When things are disproportionately affecting a certain community, that’s when policy is supposed to kick in. When things are unequal or not fair to certain communities, that’s when policy is supposed to kick in to rectify, to redress, and to make sure that those harms don’t happen to anyone else. And so, I can imagine a future where housing is accessible, attainable, sustainable and stable for families. And that’s the Athens that I want to help to create.”
As ACJ spoke with Winterville resident Long inside the View at NoDa (formerly Bethel Midtown Village), after he had just helped his brother move in, children ran around and played in the courtyard. ACJ asked Long if this is the type of development he’d like to see more of.
“Yeah, this is actually, this is really nice,” Long said. “Like, I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a space where the kids can actually play and not get hurt, you know. And for it to be low — I think it’s income based. Like I was telling my brother helping him move in, ‘Bro, this is nice.’ Like, this is somewhere I can see people staying, and, you know, it’s gonna give them a breath of fresh air. You know, they can get their finances in order if they just take a little time to – get the time to relax. And this seems like this is — I mean, look at it, it seems like this is exactly what we need. So the progression is there. The progression is there. It just, you know, takes a little time, a little longer than some people got.”
