Atlanta's poor and homeless population have been under attack for years. A recent report in the Atlanta Progressive News reveals that the City of Atlanta and Central Atlanta Progress (CAP) engaged in a multi-faceted conspiracy to sabotage the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless, including cutting off public funding, various lobbying efforts, approaching private donors and partners of the Task Force, an extensive media campaign, and actions to push the Task Force into foreclosure. In September 2009, the Task Force sued the City of Atlanta over it actions to close the downtown Peachtree-Pine shelter. Central Atlanta Progress manages the affairs of the Atlanta Downtown Improvement District (ADID). The message to Atlanta's poor and homeless, "you're not welcome on Peachtree Street, and not in Downtown Atlanta."
Since 1995, Atlanta has bulldozed about 15,000 units, spread across 32 housing projects, including Techwood Homes (rebuilt as Olympic Village in preparation of the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games), the nation's first housing project built in 1936. Many of the demolished units were replaced with "mixed-income" housing. The buzz-words "mixed-income," "in-town living," live-work-play" have become code words for gentrification and displacement of Atlanta's public housing project residents, of which more than 95 percent are black and poor. City officials hail the Atlanta Housing Authority's dismantling of public housing as a "success story." Most of the displaced families end up in 10 of Atlanta's poorest ZIP codes and only about 20 percent return to their neighborhoods once the mixed-income development are built. Other former public housing residents have been pushed in suburban neighborhoods in Clayton County and Cobb County, where transit is inadequate or nonexistent. The Atlanta Public Housing Authority is playing a "shell game" with the tenants. "First you see poor people, then you don't."
A number of Atlanta's public sector services are underfunded, including health care. According to the Georgia State University Fiscal Research Center, in 2004, Georgia spent $2 billion on health care. A 2009 Georgia State University policy brief, Georgia Revenues and Expenditures: An Analysis of their Geographic Distribution, found that Metro Atlanta, which contributed 51 percent of that amount, but got just 28 percent of that amount in return. Atlanta's public infrastructure has been under attack in recent years, including its public housing (Atlanta Housing Authority), "safety-net" hospital for the poor and uninsured (Grady Hospital), and public transit (Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority). Grady Hospital, where more than 75 percent of the patients are African-American, 11 percent being Hispanic, and less than 10 percent white, is in financial crisis in spite of being privatized in November 2007. Nearly 1.7 million Georgians, about 20 percent (1 in 5 individuals), are uninsured. There are more than 800,000 individuals without medical insurance living in metro Atlanta. African Americans are two times more likely to be uninsured than whites.
Conclusion
For more than four decades Atlanta has served as a magnet attracting African Americans from throughout the United States. As the "cradle of the modern civil rights movement," Atlanta built a mystique around its growing black middle-class, business class, and political elite. The idea of a "Black Mecca" was championed as more public relations and image management than reality. Atlanta continues to attract large numbers of African Americans seeking opportunity and a better life. The region is still able to keep many of the young African Americans college graduates who are attracted to city for school.
However, Atlanta is no "mecca" for a large slice of the African American community--families stuck in concentrated poverty with few prospects of escape, students dropping out of high school at an alarming rate, teenagers entering adulthood without ever having a job, workers cut off from suburban employment centers because of inadequate public transit, low-income public housing residents dispersed into neighborhoods where support services are inadequate or nonexistent, health care for poor and uninsured families threatened by closure of the "safety net" hospital, neighborhoods targeted by predatory lenders, food deserts created by supermarket redlining, and land speculation and redevelopment projects that have spawn unchecked gentrification, displacement, and potentially driving families from their homes and their neighborhoods.
Green Atlanta has largely bypassed Black Atlanta. It is unlikely that Atlanta can become truly sustainable without addressing its legacy of racial and economic inequality. Black Atlantans should be demanding more equitable development from their government, especially when their tax dollars are being used to fund, support, and subsidize public-private smart growth, new urbanism, and green initiatives.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
