25 Years of Poverty vs. Power
By Bob Cramer
Occupy Atlanta was recently evicted from Woodruff Park, the Atlanta Housing Authority’s CEO was evicted from her job and the Task Force for the Homeless is perilously close to being evicted from its Peachtree-Pine building. These three local events share historical roots and are part of an ongoing 25-year drama that is part soap opera and part tragedy.
The local linkage provides a vivid history lesson on poverty, low-income housing and, at times, abuse of power by Atlanta’s elite. It also takes us on a circular journey back to the late ’80s, when Woodruff Park served as a daily gathering place for vulnerable and homeless people. While clearly not the right place for such a facility, Woodruff Park was allowed to fill that missing role as an outdoor day shelter complete with medical care, job assistance and other human service offerings.
Homeless advocates, business leaders and city officials all agreed that a better solution was needed. The Task Force for the Homeless, founded by Anita Beaty and others after a rash of tragic street deaths in 1981, offered an answer. The task force miraculously ended up purchasing the long-vacant Peachtree-Pine building, next to a hospital, in a neighborhood where homeless services had historically been provided. Over the next 16 years, the task force would provide more than 2.7 million unit nights of sleep, housing more than 50,000 different people, and feeding and helping thousands more.
Around the same time, Atlanta, with one of the country’s largest and most mismanaged public-housing infrastructures, set out to remake and gentrify its housing stock. Under Atlanta Housing Authority CEO Renee Glover, Atlanta systematically wiped out 3,700 low-income public housing units, displacing 10,000 vulnerable individuals and families, and transformed a deeply damaged set of public assets into nicely renovated middle-income housing. For those able to stay in their units, it was a blessing. For those given one-year Section 8 housing certificates and ushered on their way, it was a very different picture, especially for the elderly cast out of their support systems. Even more shocking, the Atlanta community watched this epic transformation — or land grab, depending on your perspective — with few questions, public hearings and general apathy.
The task force, now owners of a mammoth but unfinished building, immediately opened its doors and took out a now-infamous $900,000 loan to begin renovations. Record numbers of men, women and children flocked in, clearly substantiating an unmet need. A well-orchestrated plan to bring in service providers from the Atlanta nonprofit community was thwarted by then-Mayor Bill Campbell. Contentious statements from the chairman of the Woodruff Foundation, who said that the Peachtree-Pine building should serve a “higher and better use,” also reflected the Atlanta power structure’s attitude at the time.
The battle lines drawn in 1996 have now escalated into a full-fledged legal war. With the loss of so much public housing, low-income Atlantans have few choices and little hope. With the possible loss of the Peachtree-Pine shelter, homeless people may once again need to use Woodruff Park as a refuge, perhaps standing shoulder to shoulder with Occupy Atlanta, perhaps to die once more on our streets.
History tends to repeat itself, and Atlanta, once heralded as the next great city, again may prove it is not up to the task.
Bob Cramer was chairman of the Task Force for the Homeless for 14 years.
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Bob Cramer is one of the most outstanding men I know. He has reinforced my belief in the basic dignity of all people, His timely op-editorial should cause this community to take a hard look at itself and it’s values.
Had his analysis of Atlanta gone back a mere 20 years he could have chronicled the days that if any African American had entered a public park in downtown Atlanta they would have been immediately put in jail! In fact, no African American were deemed capable of being a police officer in Atlanta. When Mayor Ivan Allen selected the first seven Blacks to be on the force they could not enter the police headquarters and had to put on their uniforms in the Butler Street YMCA, (the black Y.) Incindentially, they did not have the authority to arrest white people.
Atlanta has come a long ways but nothing has essentially changed. The 1 percent white elite still are calling “all the shots.” The bottom line scenero at Peachtree and Pine is the fact that 99 percent of the residents are African American poor men. Peachtree Street has never been friendly to Black people!
Mayor’s, starting with Bill Campbell, has avoided Peachtree and Pine as if it was a plague, order’s from the 1 percent. Shirley Franklin engaged in a “rackterring scheme” with the business community to close the facility down. The paper trail is available for anyone from the public who wish to read the sworn depositions.
Andy, Shirly and Muhammaed Kasim Reed are the authors of genterfication, orders from the 1 percent. Atlanta was the “Black Mecca” with a population of 70% plus during Andy’s term. Today, it is down to 50%.
When Muhammad Kaseem Reid sent “Atlanta’s finest” into Troy Davis Park to remove the peaceful protesters, who were exercising their constitutional rirights to assemble, he sealed his fate as the last African American to be Mayor of Atlanta! Happily he will have only one term.
[…] to me too; do I dare say I found a bigger and better outlet for some of my crafty writing (like my Nov. 25th piece on the editorial page of the AJC, which to be honest doesn’t have a readership that much bigger […]