Poverty, Atlanta-Style

 

Atlanta is a city unlike any other I have visited or lived in, at least when it comes to the visibility of poverty. 

Chicago has two complete “Sides” almost dedicated to the impoverished: The West Side and the majority of The South Side. People familiar with the layout of the city don’t find it difficult at all to avoid looking at the conditions under which far too many children are expected to survive. 

The same is true of Milwaukee – or at least it was when I lived there in the late 1960s and early 70s.  “Bad” neighborhoods (read: poor and crime-ridden) could be entirely circumvented with a little knowledge and a good road map. The only difference is which of the four “Sides” is which.

When I first came to Atlanta in 1993, I was almost amused by what the locals branded “bad neighborhoods.”  There are no tall tenement buildings, replete with gangways and pulley-operated clothes lines with someone’s underwear flapping in the breeze.  The “projects,” where many poor African Americans and Latinos were warehoused in structures like Techwood Homes, the nation’s first public housing complex opened in1936, were nothing like Chicago’s high-rise, cement structures, which seriously resembled the prisons many of their occupants’ sons and daughters would wind up inhabiting.  Atlanta’s were lower to the ground and sprinkled liberally throughout the city. 

When Atlanta Housing Authority CEO Renee Glover took over in the '90s, Atlanta had a higher percentage of its population living in public housing projects than any other U.S. city and it had more than its share of the crime that those projects attract.  Ms. Glover knew something drastic had to be done to stop the drug trafficking and gang violence that was rampant in the projects, so she followed the lead of other major U.S. cities and began demolishing the blighted complexes.  In 2009, Atlanta became the first major U.S. city to eliminated 100% of its public housing.

During the three generations of public housing in Atlanta, many cultural and policy factors combined to change the face of poverty inside the inner city.  White flight knew no class boundaries. Poor whites exercised what little privilege they had and relocated into newer public housing in outlying neighborhoods and suburbs.  As a result, aside from a handful of homeless, there are very few areas of the inner city where one can find poor whites.  And the word “poor” in Atlanta-proper (as opposed to the broader and more inclusive Metro-Atlanta) has come to be synonymous with “black.”

Which is also why the word “criminal” has become synonymous with “African American male.” 

The sad side of this story is the question, “Where did all those project residents go?”  Well, they moved into privately-owned slum dwellings concentrated in different parts of the same city.  The crime moved with them.  The front-end planning of Ms. Glover’s attempt at a solution was sorely lacking.

What makes inner-city living in Atlanta so unique, at least from my perspective, is the way pockets of severe poverty and pockets of affluence abut one another, at times with a drastic change in scenery after traveling only a few blocks.  To illustrate, the zip code I live in has the following statistics as of 2010:

Residents with income below the poverty level in 2010:

This zip code: 15.3%

Whole state:  16.5%

Median home value: $280,200

Less than three blocks away from my home is a different neighborhood with a different zip code.  This is where Martin Luther King, Jr. lived and worked.  It is where the MLK Center is located.  Here are its stats:

Residents with income below the poverty level in 2010:

This zip code: 29.7%

Whole state: 16.5%

Median home value: $229,786

It is nearly impossible to ignore the visible poverty in neighborhoods that ring multi-million dollar projects such as the Ted Turner Stadium, The Georgia Dome, Georgia Tech, and the Georgia World Congress Center; not to mention, the golden dome of the State Capitol.  When Atlanta won the bid to host the 1996 Summer Olympic Games, in spite of the piles of money spent on readying the parts of the city that would be easily visible by non-residents, some of the poorest neighborhoods just out of view were virtually ignored.

The Atlanta University Center, where the cities most prestigious historically black colleges – Morehouse, Spelman and Clark-Atlanta University – struggles on a daily basis with the crime that emanates from the surrounding impoverished neighborhoods.  Even the venerated Georgia Tech has suffered a rash of robberies and muggings at gunpoint.

City officials haven’t come close to eliminating the ubiquitous presence of the homeless.  Whether attending a performance at the Atlanta Symphony or queued up at the entrance of the latest night spot for young clubbers, it is a rare occasion not to encounter a street person.  Some are relatively well-dressed and well-spoken, some spin such pitiful yarns it makes you feel guilty to have the means to seek entertainment, and some are downright scary. 

The elaborate system of Interstate interchanges in downtown Atlanta have created a perfect spot for “urban camping.”  This man, known as “Geechie” finds the nooks and crannies under the overpass open enough to provide safety from other campers, but out of view a passing authorities.

 

 

 

 

In a slide-show story printed in Atlanta’s popular free newspaper Creative Loafing last November Geechie was described this way:

… a Charleston, S.C. native, has been homeless for about 12 years. He sleeps “on top of 15 blankets and under 15 blankets” in a little nook next to a bridge where he’s unlikely to be noticed.

In the next five years, Geechie said he’d like to have his teeth fixed, get his own apartment, and own a trucking company.

Those of us who have the wherewithal to access this post might sometimes think of ourselves as “poor.”  Next time I start feeling that way I am going to ask myself “Compared to what?”