A Voucher for Your Thoughts? Historicizing Athens, Georgia’s Subsidized Housing Issues

This project was created as my final paper for my class on welfare and race in America for Professor Rosemary Ndubuizu. I wanted to explore the history of low income housing where I grew up, in Athens, Georgia, and was able to uncover the mostly unreported tragedy of the treatment of low income people in Athens. Specifically, I discovered how those once brought in and encouraged to move to Athens were later forcefully pushed out by both the Athens government and University of Georgia. Our prompt was to explore modern examples of welfare being weaponized against America’s poor, especially people of color. I never imagined I would uncover as much exploitation as I did, and this project really changed the way I viewed welfare programs.