PBS' East Lake Meadows: A Public Housing Story chronicles the fall of an Atlanta housing project through its former residents

CityLab

Sarah Burns and David McMahon directed the PBS documentary released this week that Burns' famous father Ken Burns produced. East Lake Meadows tells the story of how a housing project declined from being a special place to a horrible place to live. "While Chicago has been the focus of much of the academic research and writing about public housing — certainly a theme is places like Cabrini Green — because of Atlanta’s history of being the first city that started building these federally funded housing projects in the ‘30s, and then being so aggressive beginning in the ‘90s with tearing it all down, it was actually a great place for telling these stories," says Sarah Burns. "We felt like in some ways we could have chosen any housing project and that we would have had stories from residents that we would have been able to explore many of these same issues."