“They had a lot of tricknology, AHA did. One minute it was one thing, next minute it was another,” Shirley Hightower said. The Atlanta Housing Authority had bulldozed her home several years earlier. Sitting in her daughter’s living room on the westernmost edge of Atlanta, she recalled these events with a mix of resentment and nostalgia.

Between 2007 and 2009, Hightower crusaded against the AHA in an attempt to save Bowen Homes, the public housing project where she had raised her children and lived for many years. She had hoped that the authority would redevelop the city’s projects without displacing the community. Instead, many of Hightower’s neighbors moved out into homelessness, unpredictability, and isolation. Nothing ever got built on the site of Bowen Homes. “It’s just pretty green grass.”

Tricknology is the word she used to describe how the AHA got its way. Hightower and her neighbors wanted to see an end to the stigma associated with living in public housing. They wanted the projects to become as they once were: stable family neighborhoods where “you didn’t know you were poor.” But the AHA had other plans. It had chosen to view public housing as unfixable.