In the early 1990s, the City of Atlanta began a wide-scale demolition project.

This is a day that many have dreamed of, and others feared would eventually come.

The first phase of demolition...

Some of the first buildings to be raised were part of a federal housing development called

Techwood Homes.

These apartments are very, very old, and they have to come in here constantly to keep them up.

It's a danger to the tenants, some conditions.

By the time these homes were demolished, they were considered bladed property.

It's an official term, it's still used today to describe uninhabitable or dangerous places.

And it wasn't just Techwood.

Federal public housing like it in Atlanta and across the country had deteriorated.

Broken elevators, broken lights, unreliable heat and hot water,

trash piling up in garbage shoots, boarded up apartment units, organized crime.

This kind of public housing, some said, it had been a nice idea.

It had offered hope.

I didn't want to miss the high-rise projects, and looking in from the outside, it seemed like a beautiful home,

a clean home, and an lovely place to live in.

But it just hadn't worked out.

But I live inside, and I know the atmosphere that I am living in.

So Nick, I bring up Techwood in part because it wasn't just one of the first to come down.

It was the first, as in the very first in the United States.

To go up.

...