Atlanta residents: 'It's like a prison' on housing project

Engineering, Inc./Atlanta Civic Circle

ATLANTA, GA - Local residents critique the development design of the Southwest Atlanta apartment complex by saying it looks “like a prison.”

The progress picture was revealed by a member of Skip Mason’s Vanishing Black Atlanta History Facebook group. The project plan was to build 200 multifunctional buildings located in Campbellton Road, on top of 13,000 square feet of commercial space.

“Horrible! I thought it was an office building.” said one comment. “Looks like inmate housing,” “They are concentrating the ghetto in Southwest Atlanta.” said other comments.

Details of this five-story building called “Campbellton Apartments,” are barely sufficient according to permitting records. However, based on Atlanta’s planning commissioner, Tim Keane, the picture does provide a basic example of how the apartment is designed for the city and the meaning behind those projects in the landscape of Atlanta's community.

After receiving complaints from people about this, Keane stated that the design made by the local firm Prime Engineering will be revised. The architect for this project cannot be contacted for an interview.

Keane said that people are concerns if the apartment building would shift function into a "ghetto" place, and Keane along with the team intends to prevent that speculation from happening.

Keane said that there is no correlation between the design and the areas being "lower-income", instead he said, “I think it’s indicative of design everywhere, this is a national discussion about the poor quality of design for conventional and cookie-cutter apartments.”

Co-founder of urban design blog ThreadATL, Darin Givens said in an interview that the design doesn't have any specific intention, “it’s an early sort of proposal rendering, not a finalized rendering that you usually see.”

Givens also confirmed that projects in historically underinvested areas do not get the same amount of money and plan like in the expensive areas. Developers didn't have the pressure from investors to turn it into a big profit, resulting in those designs. Because better design obviously will cost more money.

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