By Manager Request: The Impact of Racial Surveillance on Eviction Rates in Early Atlanta Public Housing

• In Event: Governing Space

Abstract

While public housing has often been viewed through the lens of structural constraint and racialized immobility, less attention has been paid to the discretionary power of housing managers in shaping tenant trajectories. This paper investigates how housing managers functioned as key street-level bureaucrats whose judgments, interventions, and administrative decisions profoundly influenced exits from public housing in the City of Atlanta. Drawing on archival materials, administrative records, and historical Census data, this study traces the institutional logics and racialized assumptions that governed housing management practices from the 1930s to the 1970s. Previous research has documented the role of internal and external factors on Black public household mobility such as discriminatory home lending policies, racial zoning and redlining, and structural wage disparities in Black and white labor markets. Policies and regulations at the local housing authority, state, and Federal levels were not uniformly applied across households, and we find great variation in how housing managers administered public housing policy over time. We build on those findings in this paper; rather than treating exits from public housing as indicators of upward mobility or personal failure, this article critically examines the role of managerial discretion in structuring those exits. It highlights how managers relied on moral assessments of tenants’ worthiness, domesticity, and perceived self-sufficiency to determine who could stay and who was pushed out. These decisions often served as a proxy for administrative discretion, embedding racialized and gendered surveillance and exclusion into the everyday administration of public housing. By foregrounding the role of housing managers as political actors in the urban governance of Black poverty, this paper contributes to a deeper understanding of how bureaucratic practices within public housing shaped, and constrained, the possibilities for Black social mobility and belonging in the City of Atlanta.

Authors

• Prentiss A. Dantzler, University of Toronto

• Akira Drake Rodriguez, University of Pennsylvania