HOUSING : Olympic Plan Could Help Erase Eyesore : Atlanta officials, tenants hope to rejuvenate low-income apartments.

Ever since Atlanta won its bid to host the 1996 Olympics, local officials have been vexed by questions of how to explain to visitors the unsightly, unsafe Techwood/Clark Howell Homes, a public housing complex located near where Olympic housing will be built.

And for many years, the residents of Techwood--the nation’s first public housing project, opened in 1936--have sought ways to upgrade their dilapidated homes and fight drug-related violence.

Now, both the officials and a majority of tenants who voted in a special redevelopment referendum say they have found the solution.

Recently, Techwood tenants narrowly approved a $70-million redevelopment plan that would tear down or renovate existing housing, extend Olympic housing for athletes from nearby Georgia Tech into Techwood, enlarge a park to include a police precinct station and build a community services center.

The ambitious project would draw on myriad sources of financing, including gifts, federal funds and new tax revenue from privately built projects.

Mayor Maynard Jackson called the plan “proof that Atlanta deserved the Olympics because we are too great and too loving a city to sweep problems of the poor under the rug.”

Nevertheless, the 428-363 vote demonstrates the division among residents, many of whom did not believe the deal could be as good as it seemed. In the end, the majority decided to put their faith in the Establishment.

Margie Smith, president of the Techwood/Clark Howell Tenants Assn., acknowledged that it was difficult to convince the majority of residents that they should trust officials to keep their promises, “but our situation was so bleak that we had no choice.”

She asserted that the area was going to be altered with or without the tenants’ involvement, so “we might as well have a say-so” in how it will be changed.

William Boone, chairman of the political science department at Clark Atlanta University, said it was possible that some of the 2,700 tenants would be displaced as “affluent people” are drawn to the area. Boone called the new plan a “microcosm” of the uncertainty surrounding the economic and social impact of the Olympics on Atlanta.

Indeed, officials at the Atlanta Olympic committee said they have not decided on whether or how much they want to expand Olympic housing into the housing projects.

Yet, optimism reigns. Leon Eplan, the city’s commissioner of planning and development, vowed that the city will find replacement housing for tenants while renovation takes place.

Eplan admitted that it is “very difficult to get people who have been at the bottom of the heap to have faith,” but he said Atlantans “want to begin to get our house in order” in time to show off for the Olympics.

Smith, a 14-year resident, hopes that is true. The single mother of a teen-age son, Smith remembers when the grass was green and shrubs abounded and it was safe to sit outside the 1,200 Techwood/Clark Howell apartments, and when gunshots were not common sounds. She is counting on the new plan to restore some of the old times’ safety and good looks. “I hope no one derails it,” she said.

The plan must be approved by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. And because the red brick buildings, ordered built by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the Interior Department must also approve the alterations.