According to the University of Massachusetts report, Green Prosperity: How Clean Energy Policies Can Fight Poverty and Raise Living Standards in the United States, a $2.8 billion investment in "green jobs" in a clean-energy economy, including weatherization, would produce 31,658 jobs, over 17,000 for metro Atlanta workers with high school degrees or less, and cut unemployment by over one percentage point. Many of the green jobs are in construction. In Atlanta, construction jobs are expected to increase by 15 percent for the city and 52 percent for the metro area by the year 2014. In 2007, while most of the region was declining in the number of building permits issued, the City of Atlanta had a 12 percent increase, revealing a continuous demand for skilled construction workers.
However, just because green jobs, including clean energy and construction jobs, are available in Metro Atlanta does not automatically translate into jobs for Black Atlantans. A 2008 study, The Road to Good Jobs: Patterns of Employment in the Construction Industry, found that of the largest 25 metropolitan areas in the country found that African Americans were employed in construction at rates well below their participation in the overall workforce. If African Americans were employed in construction at the same rate that they are employed in the overall workforce in 2006, over 137,044 more blacks would be employed in construction in the twenty-five metropolitan areas. Atlanta had the largest gap (18 percent), followed by Baltimore, Dallas, and Houston.
Surviving Atlanta's Food Desert
One of the most important indicators of an individual's health is one's street address, Zip Code, or neighborhood. Residents who live on the "wrong side of the tracks" are subjected to elevated environmental health threats. Place matters. Place limits access to health care and residential amenities such as parks and green space, full-service grocery stores, farmers markets, and healthy food retail outlets. Atlanta's wealthier neighborhoods have more than three times as many supermarkets as poor neighborhoods, limiting access for many people to the basic elements of a healthy diet. When broken down by race, not just wealth, researchers have found that there are four times as many supermarkets in predominantly white neighborhoods as in black neighborhoods. Low-income residents also pay 10 to 40 percent more for food than higher income residents.
African-American neighborhoods are only 52 percent as likely to have a chain supermarket as white neighborhoods. Numerous studies have linked access to healthy food with lower risk for obesity and other diet-related chronic diseases. Only 8 percent of African Americans live in a census tract with a supermarket, compared to 31 percent of whites. Many of Atlanta's black neighborhoods are saturated with fast food outlets, liquor stores, and convenience stores that make their profits off junk food, beer, wine, and cigarettes. Convenience stores industry account for 27 percent of teen purchases of tobacco. Food redlining forces many poor black Atlantans to spend more money and time, and travel farther and accept lower quality and less healthy food. Food shopping at convenience stores takes its toll in higher prices in health costs. Convenience stores mark up food prices by at least 20 percent, amounting to a tax of $1,200 a year per family in higher food expenses for residents of "food deserts."
While Atlanta goes green, full service supermarkets are closing in black neighborhoods. A case in point is the closing of the Publix Supermarket in Atlanta's Vine City/English Avenue neighborhood on December 24, 2009, stranding thousands of black residents in a "food desert," an area where large-scale supermarkets have abandoned--leaving the entire community with little or no access to affordable, quality food. Atlanta's urban food deserts endanger the health of black children who are concentrated in low-wealth neighborhoods. Access to nutritious food is a matter of social justice and human rights.
Dismantling the Public "Safety-Net" Infrastructure for the Poor
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