Decaying public housing sits on prime Savannah real estate. Change is coming.

Their homes, public housing units built on the eve of World War II, are slated for demolition. The razing is overdue. Yamacraw is not so much aging as rotting. Doors hang from hinges. Broken appliances and furniture dot yards. Rusting clothesline poles — the units lack dryer hookups — lean drunkenly near back stoops.

Credit: Adam Van Brimmer

Credit: Adam Van Brimmer

The teardown is imminent, awaiting only the federal government’s blessing. Once the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, gives the go-ahead, the housing authority can obtain housing subsidy vouchers. Once those are in hand, Yamacraw’s 94 families will be relocated within 90 days.

Many, including Atkinson and Williams, will have the option to return once the neighborhood is redeveloped. But that will take years. And what they would return to is in question, as a renewal plan has yet to be unveiled.

As unattractive as Yamacraw is in its current state, it sits on seven square blocks on the edge of Savannah’s tourism-rich historic district. The real estate potential is so great the local housing authority petitioned HUD for flexibility in redeveloping the land. That could include selling the site to private developers, although the buyer would still be required to incorporate new low-income housing for current residents.

Credit: Sarah Peacock

Credit: Sarah Peacock

Yamacraw’s uncertain fate prompted Atkinson, Williams and several neighbors late last year to form a residents’ council, public housing’s equivalent to a tenants’ or homeowners’ association. The group is pushing the housing authority for greater protections and involvement in the redevelopment planning, with legal representation by the Georgia Legal Services Program and co-counseling by national nonprofits the National Housing Law Project and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

“It’s choice real estate,” says Ned Williams as he passes out treats at the Halloween party. “Just walk a few blocks from here and tell me what you see.”

Development knocking at the door

Elder Ned, as Williams is known, grew up in another Savannah public housing project. Now retired, he acts as an adviser to the underprivileged, such as Atkinson, Williams and other Yamacraw residents.

Standing amid the costumed crowd, Elder Ned can see Savannah’s Talmadge Bridge rising above luxury apartment buildings and the Savannah College of Art and Design residence hall, a few minutes’ walk north. And the smokestacks of the $375 million Plant Riverside District, a four-diamond hotel, dining and entertainment complex, less than a 10-minute walk to the northeast. Neighbors to the east and south include a maritime history museum, hotels and high-end loft apartments.

Credit: Sarah Peacock

Credit: Sarah Peacock

Yamacraw’s 22-acre footprint is immense from a historic district real estate perspective: For comparison, iconic Forsyth Park covers 30 acres.

Without a market report, which the housing authority has yet to commission, valuing Yamacraw’s property is conjecture. A property valuation website, LandSearch.com, estimates undeveloped parcels at $5 million per acre in Yamacraw’s ZIP code.

And multiple Savannah real estate insiders point to city government projections for a nearby historic district redevelopment site, the municipally owned Savannah Civic Center, as a guide. Those four acres are projected to fetch $25 million to $35 million if offered on the open market.

Mayor Van Johnson, who appointed the Savannah Housing Authority’s commissioners, favors a mixed-use redevelopment of commercial and residential, including some government-subsidized housing units.

Johnson said “putting all the poor people together in one place” would be a mistake at Yamacraw, especially given the location’s potential for a dense, socioeconomically diverse population that would attract retail.

“This is a huge opportunity, and I don’t want us to blow it,” Johnson said. “The fact that someone does not have as much income as someone else should not be a curse. There’s a way here to restore dignity to that area and create a new spirit for the new Yamacraw.”

The mayor’s utopia isn’t enough for Yamacraw residents, though. They bear the scars of an on-again, off-again demolition process that started in 2020 with cryptic notification letters from the housing authority and have seen the neighborhood shrink from more than 300 families.

Yamacraw residents live in barracks-style, two-story apartment buildings like those constructed across the country in the early years of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” housing program. Boarded-up units flank many of the occupied ones as the Savannah Housing Authority stopped re-renting vacant apartments in May 2024. Only three of the 10 apartments in Atkinson’s building have tenants.

Credit: Sarah Peacock

Credit: Sarah Peacock

The hollowing out accelerated the community’s decay. Atkinson and Williams both say they contend frequently with mold and vermin. One former resident, in a 2024 interview with KFF Health News, summed up apartment conditions by saying, “The walls sweat like working men.”

Yet Yamacraw’s remaining residents aren’t eager to move.

Location, location, location

Williams’ job commute involves just a handful of rights and lefts, and she never uses her turn signal.

She walks to a downtown K-8 school, where she works in the front office. She’s among an estimated 50% of Yamacraw’s adult residents who don’t own cars. Many of the others are employed in nearby hotels, restaurants and tourism attractions. Others walk to Savannah’s public transit center to catch a bus.

Several public housing communities border the historic district, including Kayton-Frazier Homes, where U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock grew up more than a generation ago.

Credit: Sarah Peacock

Credit: Sarah Peacock

But the Savannah Housing Authority isn’t guaranteeing displaced Yamacraw residents units in those nearby communities while the Yamacraw site is demolished and redeveloped. The more likely scenario is moves to privately owned homes rented with the aid of housing subsidy vouchers. The catch is Savannah is locked in a housing shortage, and landlords are not legally bound to consider vouchers as part of a rental applicant’s income.

The housing authority touts recent placement success: 75% of voucher recipients find new places to live within 90 days. Yamacraw residents are skeptical. The last independent study, done by New York University between 2018 and 2022, put Savannah’s number at 55%. Savannah’s population has grown by an estimated 8,000 people since 2022, with forecasts of only between 4,000 and 6,000 new housing starts over that span.

Meanwhile, a rental rate study by CashNetUSA found Savannah ranked 20th among the nation’s least affordable cities in 2024.

“There are no places downtown that will accept the voucher,” Williams said. “We are going to be … in the boondocks.”

Credit: Sarah Peacock

Credit: Sarah Peacock

Atkinson said she received a housing voucher in 2023, but it expired before she was able to move into a home.

“They say relocation is going to be easy, but it’s going to be hard,” Atkinson said. “Take it from someone who knows.”

Vouchers don’t work the same as leases in Yamacraw, either. Atkinson and her neighbors’ rents currently depend on their incomes — if they lose their job, have to take time off for a family emergency or suffer a serious injury that prevents them from working, the housing authority adjusts the lease terms.

Landlords have no such obligation, leaving voucher holders one tourism slump or sick kid away from eviction.

‘This is home’

The absence of a redevelopment plan in advance of demolition is unusual, according to Jaime Bordenave, a public housing redevelopment specialist who has led the renewal of 16 public housing communities across the country. Mayor Johnson agrees, saying demolition and redevelopment planning should be happening simultaneously.

Credit: Sarah Peacock

Credit: Sarah Peacock

The housing authority is due to receive special funding, known as tenant protection vouchers, a portion of which can be used to build and maintain replacement housing and to supplement redevelopment grants. The funding is based on the number of units occupied 24 months prior to the demolition approval — a tally that shrinks the longer the demolition process drags out, as Yamacraw occupancy has been in rapid decline in recent years.

The authority can use those dollars to build new housing anywhere within its footprint. Its only obligation at Yamacraw is to ensure 100 units of subsidized, income-based housing in the redevelopment, with the families displaced by the demolition given first rights.

A 100-unit apartment building could be constructed on a fraction of the 22-acre site. The coveted property’s zoning, meanwhile, gives development carte blanche: Hotels are allowed, as are numerous other commercial uses. Also permitted under Yamacraw’s zoning designation are education-related buildings, such as those used by one of downtown Savannah’s biggest real estate players, SCAD.

Local government and business officials wave off conjecture that much of Yamacraw could go to the highest bidder. One of the city’s most influential tourism officials, Michael Owens of the Tourism Leadership Council, a hospitality industry advocacy group, has called loudly for redeveloping the site around hundreds of mixed-income residential units, ranging in price from subsidized to market rate to luxury.

Housing supply, particularly in or near downtown, is a particular challenge for workers in his industry. Of Savannah’s 27,000 hospitality professionals — including housekeepers, restaurant servers and tour guides — more than 10,000 work in the historic district. Few can afford the rental market rates of $1,500-plus a month for a studio.

Yamacraw’s current residents would welcome such a solution. They want to live in a socioeconomically diverse neighborhood, one that can draw grocery stores, laundromats, beauty salons and other commercial businesses. They want a community center for their kids to connect with the children of their future neighbors. They’d like a decorative fountain in one of the green spaces.

More than anything, though, they want to be around to organize another Yamacraw Halloween party someday.

“Most of us have built our lives in this neighborhood, gotten accustomed to it,” Williams said. “This is home.”

Credit: Adam Van Brimmer

Credit: Adam Van Brimmer