A lot of people are pretty happy that this is not another post from me about current American politics, no doubt.
I have to go into Collier Heights every day for work. The first time I went there I was pretty blown away by the amount of modernist architecture directly adjacent to the trap.
I'm a fan of the style. My mom says she wanted to be an architect when she was young. So, even though we didn't have a huge amount of disposable income, we had a few Frank Lloyd Wright furnishings. I grew up hearing how great he was. The Ken Burns documentary came out when I was a teenager. I painted this in tenth grade:
Architecture is not something I know a lot about but I can talk a little shop and prove I'm not completely ignorant. I know that FLW wanted a modular home building system to mass produce affordable housing for people. What we got in the areas I've lived in since 1994 or so is traditional building methods combined with slapdash quality that delivers varying degrees of affordability based on location, square footage and how shitty the contractor was. Something of an example: the floor plan in the house from 1994 I mention is virtually identical to the floor plan of the house my dad bought ~8 years later in a different state.
Seeing these beautiful old houses that aren't plantation-style McMansions or vanilla Lego bricks snapped into interchangeable subdivisions has me excited about the history of this general area. I was already curious about how this county got really fucked up in my opinion. There are areas of wealth hidden a ten minute drive from a notoriously bad part of Atlanta. And the eastern part has a reputation for producing some extremely entitled young people.
I just ran to the library because they had this book:
Which is mentioned in the further reading section of the linked article. The copy I have is in the exact library branch it should be given its subject matter and the location of the branch (in an area affected hard by white flight).