It is a reality Mr. Palmer has embraced. He didn’t have much choice. But then again, who does?

“When times change,” he said, “you’ve got to change with the times.”

He grew up in Herndon Homes, another public housing complex nearby, in a neighborhood that had gone from white to black by midcentury. His father was a barber, and when he died, Mr. Palmer, who had never learned to cut hair, opened his first convenience store in the old barbershop, across the street from the projects. Before that, Mr. Palmer had done menial labor on the nearby campus of Georgia Tech, earning a pittance.

In his first weeks in retail, he said, “I was making almost $2,500 a week — like, $1,200 in food stamps and $1,200 in cash.

“I couldn’t believe it,” he continued. “I thought those times were going to last.”

They didn’t.

He was forced to move the store to a less advantageous location. The competition grew stiff. He quit the store and opened a game room, set among the project’s apartments. Then the city bought out the game room and all of Herndon Homes in anticipation of tearing it all down.

It was part of a larger project, now nearly fully realized, to replace the city’s traditional public housing. Many housing units have been replaced with communities that mix market-rate and subsidized units, in an attempt to break up what many saw as concentrated warrens of dysfunction and poverty.

In 2006, Mr. Palmer took the money the city had paid him for the game room and paid $5,000 for the old bread truck. He bought a generator and a refrigerator, and stocked it with perishables — milk, eggs, bread, meat. He took the truck through Herndon Homes, before they were knocked down, and rolled daily among the new apartments — clean, brick, rectilinear, blandly handsome — where Techwood Homes used to be.