Review: 'East Lake Meadows' Examines the History of Housing and Race

critic’s pick The PBS documentary “East Lake Meadows,” from the executive producer Ken Burns, tells a complicated and melancholy story of race and public policy. The makers of “East Lake Meadows: A Public Housing Story” probably would not have chosen to premiere their documentary (Tuesday, on PBS) in the midst of an all-consuming global crisis. But as it turns out, their admirable, melancholy film syncs up well with Covid-19 anxiety — in part as a reminder that for some Americans, social and economic devastation in daily life is a pre-existing condition. Written and directed by the spouses Sarah Burns and David McMahon — they previously collaborated on “The Central Park Five” with Burns’s father, Ken Burns, who is executive producer of “East Lake Meadows” — the film recounts how Atlanta destroyed a housing project in order to save it.

Residents were promised a new and improved place to live on the same site; it was built, but few of them got to live there. The long, complicated and shameful history of housing and race in 20th-century America — redlining, restrictive covenants, white flight — is told quickly but cogently, as context for the story of East Lake Meadows, built on the edge of Atlanta in 1970. The 650-unit behemoth was initially seen as a step up: “It was just like heaven to us,” Beverly Parks, a former resident, says. In just a few years the story changed into the one we’re familiar with from decades of sensational reporting and scaremongering about housing projects.

The film doesn’t shy away from the realities of gang violence and the crack epidemic — residents vividly describe the horrors of living in a place known as Little Vietnam. A grainy nighttime film clip shows flames rising from the firebombed home of Eva Davis, the longtime neighborhood activist who is the film’s unquestioned heroine. But “East Lake Meadows” also details years of government neglect and penury, and the corrosive effect they had. Newscasts and home movies offer alarming, sometimes sickening images of sewage floods, uncollected trash and cockroach infestations.

Beginning in the 1980s, the politically driven, nakedly racist stigmatization of welfare recipients deals further blows to public housing; we see House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s infamous broadside against “a drug-addicted underclass with no sense of humanity, no sense of civilization and no sense of the rules of life in which human beings respect each other. ” The film marshals a fine roster of scholars and journalists to talk about the politics, and the sociology, of public housing. Its heart, though, is in the reminiscences of the former residents. Even the ones with the most harrowing stories have a palpable affection for what was, in most cases, their childhood home.