On May 6, the City of Norcross approved Gwinnett Housing Corporation’s rezoning request for a 1.33 acre property on Medlock Bridge Road to allow 16 townhomes for students and their families facing housing insecurity staying in extended-stay rooms — typically motels.
The property is owned by Gwinnett County Water and Sewer Authority — a publicly owned utility — and is adjacent to Norcross High School. The property to be purchased by Gwinnett Housing Corporation currently sits vacant as “surplus land,” but when complete, it will effectively be using publicly-owned surplus land for affordable housing.
Lejla Prljaca, Executive Director at Gwinnett Housing Corporation, said the project dates back to 2019, when Gwinnett Housing Corporation co-led the city’s Georgia Initiative for Community Housing (GICH) program — a three-year program that offers technical assistance to municipalities in the areas of housing and community development with the goal being a community-specific plan to bolster housing.
Gwinnett Housing partnered with the Carl Vinson Institute of Government at the University of Georgia and the Latin American Association on the initiative and rebranded it as “Live Norcross.” Together, they produced a report in May of that year titled “When Extended-Stay Becomes Home” which researched families facing the decision to move into an extended-stay room, for lack of opportunity to rent or buy another place because of costs.
Prljaca recounted going door to door at 12 different extended-stays alongside a group of volunteers while researching for the initiative; she said they were shocked to find many units overcrowded and with school-age children living there.
“40 percent of the families who live there report that they had children in their rooms living with them, and we would witness them doing homework on the floor of a 200 square foot extended stay room,” Prljaca said.
Prljaca was previously on the board of directors at the Georgia Balance of State Continuum of Care representing Region 2. She said that because of an outdated definition of homelessness by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, many people homeless in the suburbs were not being captured in point of time counts — accountings that provide a rough estimate of homeless populations.
“The vast majority of homeless or precariously housed people in the suburbs are not going to be in the streets or shelters like most urban cores,” Prljaca said. “The vast majority of them are using extended-stay housing as a last resort.”
Now exactly five years later, actionable items from the report to aid this class of renters through the approved rezoning are coming to fruition. One of the recommendations out of that report was to develop housing, with another being to create a rapid rehousing program to get families out of extended stays and into permanent housing.
“If you add up the numbers of all the extended stays in the city of Norcorss, they represent — depending on the occupancy rate — between 8 and 12 percent of the city’s housing stock if you count them as a housing unit,” Prljaca said. “My daughter actually went to Norcross Elementary School, and just based on conversations with their teachers, sometimes 30 percent of the class would exit or enter within a single school year.”
The problem isn’t just a local one, either. A 2023 issue brief from the Legal Services Corporation Housing Task Force titled “Long-Term (or Extended Stay) Motel Rentals” shows how the problem has been increasing nationwide as rents climb higher and higher.
For the Norcross project, United Way of Greater Atlanta came aboard saying they wanted to expand their motel-to-home program. That program requires local governments to participate as well, so with the help of St. Vincent de Paul Georgia, the Gwinnett Housing Corporation was able to get the City of Norcross to approve $25,000 which was matched by United Way.
The homes will be available to families making less than 60 percent of the Area Median Income, and will be referral-based to start, with referrals coming from local teachers and counselors.
Citing the book “Blighted: A Story of People, Politics, and an American Housing Miracle,” Prljaca said that stable housing leads to better performing schools and favorable outcomes for its students.
“My daughter had an incredible experience there, but unfortunately, these schools get rated on the overall performance, and sometimes that performance score is not really indicative of the quality of the school, it’s indicative of the big social progress issues surrounding the school such as housing,” Prljaca said.
She added that program administrators will be capturing data at the entrance and exit of the program to monitor student progress.
“I’m hoping that this will help people understand how much pressure these schools are under [to solve socio economic issues], and that they need community support so they can be better and have better outcomes for the students,” Prljaca said.
She hopes that this effort to build permanent, affordable housing for students and their families living out of extended stay rooms will set a precedent and help transform communities in housing, especially using publicly-owned land.
https://crooksandliars.com/