Activists React to Glover’s Confirmed AHA Resignation
(APN) ATLANTA — On Monday, October 03, 2011, Renee Glover, CEO of Atlanta Housing Authority, confirmed a report published the day before, October 02, in the Atlanta Progressive News, and stated her plans and intentions to resign from AHA.
APN reported on October 02 on the previous week’s AHA Board of Commissioners meeting, where her employment appears to have been discussed in Executive Session and during a hallway conversation.
“The new Board members appointed by Mayor Kasim Reed have made it clear that they would like to have a change in leadership at AHA, which is fully within the prerogative of the mayor and the board,” a press release from Rick White of Alisias Group stated.
“As a result of the board’s will, Renee Lewis Glover, one of the nation’s pre-eminent social entrepreneurs and thought leaders in the transformation of concentrated urban poverty into healthy mixed use, mixed-income communities, is negotiating to close her 17-year tenure as CEO of the Atlanta Housing Authority (AHA),” the statement said.
“AHA has enjoyed tremendous success under Glover’s leadership and she feels privileged to have had the opportunity to serve the city of Atlanta and its citizens,” Glover said.
“Glover and the Board representatives have been working cooperatively on mutually acceptable terms of separation and an orderly transition,” Glover said.
APN has recently also reported on a new organization, Purpose-Built Communities, headed up by former Mayor Shirley Franklin, and funded by Warren Buffett, whose goal is to spread the Glover model of demolishing public housing and establishing charter schools, to other US cities.
APN has predicted that Glover will go to work for PBC; she has already participated in a PBC conference in Indianapolis earlier this year.
According to an article in the BTown Errant, PBC is partnering with a group called Strategic Capital Partners, on its plans for Indianapolis. SCP has an office in Indianapolis, which employs a former Mayor of Indianapolis, Bart Peterson, who supported charter schools while mayor. The group is seeking to establish charter schools and mixed-income housing in Indianapolis’s Avondale Meadows district.
The Alisias press release went on and on about what they perceive to be Glover’s accomplishments; however, some activists feel differently about Glover’s record.
“Ding dong the witch is dead,” Diane Wright, former President of the Resident Advisory Board and the Hollywood Courts resident association, told APN.
When told that Glover claimed to have ended “concentration camps of poverty” by demolishing all of Atlanta’s large scale public housing, “What concentration camps?” Wright replied. “No, she put them in poverty. Now they’re on the street. It’s a concentration of homelessness.”
“I’m so happy, I’m ecstatic. Hitler is gone, Hitler has left the building, thank you,” Wright said.
When told that Glover claimed to have given families hope, “If their lights get cut off and they come around and find out, they lose their vouchers. That’s not hope, that’s fear,” Wright said.
“I think the damage Renee has done to the City is going to be felt for years to come,” Joe Beasley of African Ascension, said.
“I still call her the Gentrification Queen, to remove Blacks from downtown Atlanta. Most of its was close to downtown. Grady, Techwood, even Herndon,” Beasley said.
“The people who hoodwinked her, saying there are too many poor people living in the City of Atlanta,” Beasley said.
“The far-ending ramification, I predict Kasim Reed will be the last African American mayor,” Beasley said. “You have to be a fool to take a knife and stab yourself in the back.”
Beasley noted that just because displaced families received vouchers, does not mean they remained in a stable living situation, noting that many foreclosures involved landlords who were accepting vouchers.
“She privatized all the units. The few that are let have got to be held on to for people who need them, homeless people being number one,” Anita Beaty, Executive Director of the Metro Atlanta Task Force forthe Homeless, said.
“Renee Glover presided over the destruction of public housing in Atlanta. It’s a very good thing that she’s leaving. It’s a bad thing that she was allowed to be there for so long,” Beaty said.
(END/2011)