INTRODUCTION
This reflection is about a place I know well, having worked there for the last thirty years of my teaching career before retiring in 2018. The place is downtown Atlanta, where for nearly half a century powerful groups have pursued a campaign to drive unhoused people out of the central business district and relocate them to lower-income, black neighborhoods on the south and west sides of the city. They have tried to do this by setting up shelters and related services in these relegated areas, by declaring downtown a special "sanitized" zone, by criminalizing activities associated with unhoused people such as panhandling and "urban camping" and by ordering the police to conduct street sweeps, especially in the runup to high-profile downtown extravaganzas such as the 1996 Olympics. None of these measures has worked. Homelessness seems right at home in downtown Atlanta.
What follows is divided into four parts.
In the first part, I use pictures and words to tell the story of how capitalist urbanization and the postwar suburban spatial fix transformed the built environment of downtown Atlanta. During this period the central business district was torn down and rebuilt in successive waves of what city boosters called "downtown revitalization." What emerged from this century-long storm of creative destruction was a built environment tailor-made for homelessness. The downtown governing regime of elected black officials and white business interests, spearheaded by the hotel-convention-sports-hospitality sector, failed to see that their efforts to revitalize the historic heart of Atlanta were actually devitalizing it. I am using this word in its literal sense, since depriving the unhoused population of "life, vigor and effectiveness," which is the dictionary definition of devitalize, is exactly what the regime set out to do. This was more than a failure of competence or commitment; it was a failure of the racialized, market-driven model of urban development which the architects of revitalization took as gospel.
The second part of the reflection combines pictures and words to reconstruct the political storm that raged around a now-shuttered homeless shelter at the corner of Peachtree Street and Pine Street in the downtown area (the top star on the map). This 100,000 square-feet building dating to the 1920s was a twenty-minute walk from my former office at Georgia State University (the middle star). Known simply as Peachtree-Pine in recognition of its strategic location on the city's most famous and privileged thoroughfare, the shelter opened in 1997 and was operated by the nonprofit Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless. Over the next twenty years business interests and their political allies at City Hall did everything they could, be it legal or illegal, to shut the shelter down and send the Task Force packing. They ultimately succeeded on both counts.
In the third part of this reflection, I will share with you an insider's view of the Task Force's response to the anti-shelter campaign. I joined the organization's board of directors in 2010 and served on it for seven years, resigning shortly after the Task Force agreed to an out-of-court settlement that required us to leave the building in return for a substantial sum of money. During this time, I grew increasingly convinced that while our lawsuits against the governing regime might keep the shelter open and the Task Force afloat for a time, they could not prevail in the long run against the political and economic forces arrayed against us.
The Task Force was learning the hard way that in any political confrontation with the power structure, nonprofit social service organizations were compromised by their financial dependence on wealthy donors, philanthrocapitalists and public-private partnerships dominated by business interests. The Task Force, in my view, should shift its mission from providing social services to advocating for the decommodification of housing. Armed with the settlement payout that guaranteed our financial independence for the foreseeable future, the new Task Force might become an agent of radical, anti-capitalist change. This was the argument I made to the board. Easier said than done.
In the concluding part of this reflection, I will let the pictures do the talking. These are portraits of a few of the men who lived at Peachtree-Pine. I took them in the shelter's dark room, weight room and bunk room. I don't know where these men are now or how they're doing, fourteen years after they posed for their photos. If they are alive and well, it's no thanks to those who run the city too busy to hate.
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT OF HOMELESSNESS
I have organized the photos in this section around four historical transformations rooted in the urban dynamics of U.S. capitalism after the Second World War, or even earlier if we take the story back to the dawning of the Automobile Age in the 1920s.
Parking: Photos 1-20 comprise a collective portrait of downtown Atlanta as a vehicularized built environment. The early battles over downtown mobility in the 1920s, which pitted established streetcars against upstart jitneys, did not involve the question of parking, at least not explicitly. But as high-priced neighborhoods cropped up beyond the reach of streetcars, especially in the privileged white neighborhoods of Ansley Park, Buckhead and Druid Hills, the advantages of privately-owned automobiles for those who could afford them raised another question related to mobility. Where were all these cars pouring into downtown Atlanta going to park?
This question became increasingly urgent in cities across the U.S. as the postwar suburban spatial fix took hold. In Atlanta, streetcars went out of business, leaving automobiles and buses to compete for the cramped spaces of downtown. City leaders feared that the central business district would go the way of streetcars if steps were not taken to make it more accessible to suburban commuters. The creation of the Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority in 1972 was a victory for the advocates of public transportation, but the politics of race guaranteed that rapid rail service would never reach the fastest-growing white northern suburbs. Today, more than 25 percent of the central business district has been swallowed up by asphalt parking lots and concrete parking structures, compared with an average 16 percent for the downtowns of other metropolitan areas with populations of over five million.
What does this have to do with the built environment of homelessness? Nathan Davenport, an Atlanta videographer and urbanist, explains that every square inch of the city's core encumbered by parking is a square inch lost to housing. While I applaud him for seeing the connection between the parking crisis and the housing affordability crisis, I would urge him to expand his concept of crisis, even if this means pushing beyond conventional explanatory frameworks of urban development. Both the parking and housing crises are connected not only to each other but to the homelessness crisis as well, and all three of them are anchored in the crisis tendencies of capitalism which no amount of well-intentioned urban policy and planning can fix. Check out Davenport's video "Atlanta's Parking (Housing) Crisis" at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dz0xmQi6U6s&t242s
Public Housing:
the demolition of public housing in the city, beginning in 1996, when Atlanta was chosen to host the summer Olympic Games, and continuing until the last public housing unit, Grady Homes, fell to the wrecking ball in 2010 (Circle);
Subprime and Recession: the crisis of black homeownership on the west side of Atlanta as the subprime mortgage crisis of 2005-2007 and ensuing recession of 2008-2009 ripped through these historic African American neighborhoods and left them permanently scared;
Gentrification: and, finally, the gentrification of the central city as the much-ballyhooed Beltline project produced significant displacement of long-time, African American residents and public housing sites were demolished, making way for mixed-use, mixed-income developments.
THE BATTLE OF PEACHTREE-PINE
My time on the Task Force's board of directors gave me a front-row seat on the conjoined crises of homelessness and housing which were engulfing cities across the advanced capitalist world at the turn of the century. It also immersed me in the world of nonprofit social service provision, a world that has been systematically co-opted by business interests operating under the cover of public-private partnerships since the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s.
At its peak Peachtree-Pine was the largest homeless shelter in the Southeast US, if not the entire country. When nighttime temperatures dropped below freezing, it could accommodate as many as one-thousand men, some sleeping in bunk beds and others sitting uncomfortably in an overflow area called the "garage" (Slide 2-4). This term was a holdover from the old days when the 100,000 square foot building housed a car dealership and repair shop. More than 90 percent of the men who sought shelter at Peachtree-Pine were African Americans.
The Task Force also took in women and children every night, including newborns and their mothers who had been discharged from nearby Grady Hospital with nowhere else to go (Square). In conformity with the law requiring women and children to be separated from men, the Task Force converted its reception room and offices into a nighttime dormitory, rolling out floor mats to accommodate single women, mothers and their children. The next morning, the mats were rolled up and put away so that the staff could do their work. The Task Force was able to maintain a homeless "hot line" and offer a full menu of placement and counseling services, thanks to the frontline staff and a dozen resident volunteers who were enrolled in its transitional housing program.
The shelter operated in the middle of an area primed for gentrification and upscale commercial development. Peachtree Street is the historic corridor of power and privilege in Atlanta—the "miracle mile," as the city's Chamber of Commerce proudly boasts. Emory University's Midtown Hospital was just across the street from the shelter. The glitzy Fox Theater was only a few blocks away, and beyond that lay trendy Midtown and exclusive Buckhead, the latter famous for its showcase mansions, state-of-the-art lawn care and the Georgia governor's official residence.
This spelled trouble. From the first day Peachtree-Pine opened its doors, the governing "regime," as sociologist Clarence Stone called it in his classic study of Atlanta politics, mobilized to shut it down and declared the Task Force persona non grata.
The regime was a biracial governing alliance that coalesced after the 1973 election of Maynard Jackson as the city's first African American mayor. In the years since that historic victory, the regime had operated under the umbrella of pro-business, Democratic black mayors and majority-black city councils. These officials constituted the public face of the governing regime, whose decisions were dutifully reported by the city's pro-business newspaper, the Journal-Constitution.
Behind the scenes were powerful white business interests spearheaded by the real estate and hotel-convention-hospitality sectors, which could count on a compliant black officialdom to promote their policy agenda in exchange for photo ops, campaign contributions and minority business enterprise concessions.
Stripped down to its essentials, the battle of Peachtree-Pine pitted poor black people against a pro-business black political class and a pro-business white power structure.
Welcome to the politics of class and race in the "city too busy to hate."
The Achilles' heel of the Task Force was money. Peachtree-Pine was a $2-million-a-year operation. To pay its bills the Task Force relied on a mix of public and private funding. The lion's share of federal money came from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. HUD required that all applicants obtain a certificate of consistency from the city's Department of Grants and Community Development stating that their grant proposals were in conformity with the city's long-term "consolidated plan."
The regime began its offensive against the Task Force by cutting off its pubic money. At the direction of the mayor's office, the mandatory certification requested by the Task Force was withheld, causing its public funds to slow to a trickle. The flow of federal money stopped altogether in 2007, due a decision made by the Tri-Jurisdictional Collaborative on Homelessness. This public-private partnership serves as the metropolitan gatekeeper of federal grants, ensuring that cash-strapped nonprofit service providers toe the regime line. Composed of regime loyalists who were appointed by the City, Fulton County and DeKalb County with significant input from the business community, the Tri-J judged the Task Force to be the least deserving of all the nonprofits applying for funding. The message was clear: no more federal dollars for Peachtree-Pine.
Next, the regime targeted the Task Force's private funding. To give just one example, Dan Cathy, heir to the Chick-fil-A empire and a major supporter of the Task Force, received a visit at his corporate campus south of the city from a vanload of downtown CEOs who advised him to bestow his Christian charity on a more deserving nonprofit. Inasmuch as Chick-fil-A was the sponsor of the annual Peach Bowl, a gridiron classic played at the downtown Georgia Bowl and an advertising bonanza for Chick-fil-A, Cathy had a strong financial interest in maintaining a cordial relationship with the regime.
In short order, the Task Force lost one of its biggest private donors. Another clear message: corporate moguls should steer clear of the Task Force if they wanted to do business in downtown Atlanta.
Finally, these same business leaders and their allies at city hall connived with the Task Force's mortgage lenders to initiate foreclosure proceedings, raising the prospect of Peachtree-Pine being auctioned off to the highest bidder on the steps of the Fulton County Courthouse.
In the face of this economic blockade, the Task Force struggled to keep its head above water. It fell further and further behind on its mortgage payments. It could no longer pay its staff on time or at all. Each month the stack of unpaid utility bills grew taller. Of most immediate concern was the water bill which hung over the shelter like a sword of Damocles. In 2008 the Department of Watershed Management made good on its threat to cut off the shelter's water, prompting the Task Force to obtain a restraining order against the city. During this temporary reprieve the outstanding water bill ballooned to hundreds of thousands of dollars until one day a financier philanthropist appeared from out of nowhere and wrote a check for the whole amount. But the debt jubilee was a short-term fix: as long as the blockade remained in place, the Task Force would never be able to pay its bills going forward, water included.
In the meantime, Kasim Reed, Atlanta's famously cantankerous mayor, showed no sign of backing down from his stated goal of emptying the shelter, padlocking the doors and running the Task Force out of town.
The Task Force organized protests, marched in the streets, turned out crowds for "Homeless Memorial Day" and formed human chains around the shelter, all in an effort to draw attention and to its cause (slides 5-8).
LAWSUITS AND NONPROFITS
The battle over Peachtree-Pine was a crash course in the dynamics of what the late geographer Neil Smith called "urban revanchism." The shelter was located in the vicinity of Midtown and the Old Fourth Ward, two neighborhoods undergoing rapid gentrification and displacement. From this fertile soil sprouted a new crop of crime-conscious neighborhood associations and law-and-order bloggers who claimed that Peachtree-Pine was a den of thieves, panhandlers, vandals, transgender prostitutes, crack heads, dope dealers, and the mentally ill. The Midtown Ponce Security Alliance spearheaded the revanchist offensive, going so far as to threaten a local Whole Foods, the hallmark of gentrification, with a general boycott should it host a fundraising event for the Task Force. Even the Centers for Disease Control got into the act with sensational and unfounded accusations that the shelter was a petri dish of TB, and as such represented a clear and present danger to public health from downtown to Midtown and the Old Fourth Ward. Even the stately mansions of Buckhead were not immune to the human disease vectors of Peachtree-Pine, the critics warned.
Looking back at this explosion of public anger and resentment, it's hard to think of a single social evil that the Task Force's enemies did not deposit on the doorstep of Peachtree-Pine. The prim-and-proper editorial board of Atlanta's pro-business press scolded the Task Force for not showing reasonableness and "community spirit," while at the same time doing its best to stir the pot of moral panic.
What gave this anti-shelter hysteria its lethal edge was race and racism.
This is a serious charge which you might be tempted to dismiss on the grounds of my partisanship. But I have hard evidence to back it up. In the discovery process of the lawsuits filed by the Task Force against the leaders of the campaign to close Peachtree-Pine, we stumbled upon a veritable armory of smoking guns: racist email chains and confidential communications among Emory's top brass who simply could not abide having to share Peachtree Street with black men they described as disheveled, diseased and dangerous. Those individuals who did not seem to fit the homeless profile on account of their nice clothes and fancy cars were described as "drug dealers." Damned either way, in the view of Emory's white corporate executives who never imagined that outsiders would one day get a peak at their racist correspondence.
On loan from a high-powered corporate law firm, the two attorneys who agreed to help the Task Force obtain its restraining order against the city stuck with us as the legal battle snowballed into multiple lawsuits against Emory, the City of Atlanta, DeKalb County, a downtown business organization called Central Atlanta Progress, and a particularly unsavory vulture capitalist who hoped to scoop up whatever pickings were available at our foreclosure. Our gifted legal team worked pro bono at first, and then shifted to a contingency-fee arrangement as the litigation dragged on for seven exhausting years.
Exhaustion was the defendants' deadliest weapon. Time was on their side, not ours.
We accused the parties arrayed against the Task Force of engaging in "tortious interference" with our business operations and, as I have mentioned, amassed enough incriminating evidence in discovery to guarantee a public outcry should it ever be revealed in open court. Few institutions in Atlanta are as mindful of their liberal and squeaky-clean image as Emory. The prospect of a full-fledged public relations disaster if the racist emails came to light persuaded the defendants to make a substantial out-of-court settlement offer in exchange for the Task Force handing over the keys, signing a non-disclosure agreement and going quietly into the night. Our lawyers gave us an ultimatum, “Sign it. If you don’t, we’ll pull out of the case and you'll be on your own”
Exhaustion had taken its toll.
You don’t need me to tell you that in David-and-Goliath faceoffs, the little guy almost always loses. The Task Force managed to keep the wolves at bay while its lawsuits ping-ponged between federal and state courts. But in 2017 the board of directors finally voted to sign the settlement papers.
Our executive director, Anita Beaty, the heart and soul of the organization since its formation in the mid-1980s, urged us to continue the fight until we finally won our day in court. Even if we lost there, she reasoned, we would have exposed the criminal wrongdoings of our foes and vindicated our good name. When the board voted to accept a cash settlement of almost $10 million (which was quickly whittled down to $3 million after settling accounts with the lawyers, bill collectors and past donors), she resigned. Her action was understandable. Honorable. Anita and her husband Jim were fearless, incorruptible warriors to the bitter end.
By this time I was serving as board chair. My own view was that the Task Force was trapped in a no-win situation. With municipal, county, state and federal authorities determined to bleed us to death, there was zero chance of the Task Force ever being able to resume the shelter services it had been offering since 1997. Even if our lawsuits somehow managed to reach a jury, a prospect which seemed more and more remote given the size of Emory's legal war chest and the skillfully deployed stalling tactics of its lawyers, Peachtree-Pine would by then be out of our hands and the Task Force reduced to little more than a name.
I also became increasingly convinced that nonprofit social service provision was a dead-end for any kind of progressive politics, whatever the outcome of our lawsuits. For years the Task Force had struggled to do its work in an institutional ecosystem dominated by Tri-Js, continuums of care, public-private partnerships and 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations. These interlocking, opaque forms of neoliberal urban governance had been thoroughly co-opted by the Atlanta regime working closely with its institutional counterparts at the county, state and federal levels.
There was no reason to believe that the balance of political forces controlling homeless service provision would change anytime soon. After all, the rise of the Atlanta regime was inseparable from the neoliberal reconfiguration of capitalism and the state after the 1970s. As geographer David Harvey argues, neoliberalism was first and foremost a class project aimed at reversing the decline in the rate of profit, breaking the back of organized labor and restoring capitalist class power. Jackson was sworn in as mayor in the midst of an urban fiscal crisis that produced the bankers' takeover of New York City in the mid-1970s and prepared the way for the neoliberal triumphs of later years. Gathering force under the Reagan-Thatcher governments of the 1980s, and brought to fruition by the Clinton-Blair governments a decade later, the neoliberal tide of privatization, marketization, financialization and austerity swept over every major city in the United States.
The defendants, attorneys and judges we came to know so well through our lawsuits were just the surface outcroppings of these tectonic shifts in urban political economy. Gentrification and displacement, urban revanchism, the criminalization of poverty, the twin crises of homelessness and housing, the vertiginous growth of inequality measured by any index you care to use--these had become defining features of neoliberal urbanization.
Not to put too fine a point on it: in fighting to keep Peachtree-Pine open, the Task Force was running up against the logic of capital accumulation in the Age of Neoliberalism.
The Task Force was in an ideal position to observe the micro-mechanisms of neoliberal power and co-optation at close range. Did other homeless service providers or faith-based community organizations rally to our support as the regime tightened the screws on the Task Force? No. Who could blame them for not wanting to join us on the regime's hit list? The new generation of nonprofit executive directors, black and white, whose résumés glittered with MBAs conferred by prestigious business schools had better things to do with their time than fight the power. For them fighting the power was old-school thinking, perhaps suitable for the bygone days of the Black Panthers and their radical community service programs but lacking in any understanding of the need for competitive, data-driven, value-added service provision. The nonprofit leaders who spoke this language were products of the neoliberal turn in organizational thinking. They had their own budgets to manage, efficiency standards to meet, grant proposals to write, bills to pay, payrolls to cover, families to feed, résumés to burnish, career ladders to climb, donors to schmooze. And most important, they had a governing regime to appease.
This helps to explain why the regime was so fixated on silencing the troublesome Task Force once and for all. Each day that the shelter remained open exposed another chink in the regime's seemingly impregnable armor, puncturing the illusion of omnipotence that it carefully cultivated. If the exercise of power can be likened to a theatrical performance, the regime seemed to be flopping in its staged showdown with the outgunned Task Force. In the view of white business leaders and black political leaders, this was a humiliation that could not be permitted to continue. While shutting down the shelter was the regime's immediate objective, neutralizing the threat posed by the Task Force was equally central to its long-term goal. The Task Force was to be an object lesson for any other nonprofit that might in the future have the temerity to test the limits of regime power.
These political realities, as I saw them, weren't going to change. In the foreseeable future, the Task Force would remain at the financial mercy of public and private funders who were deeply invested in entrepreneurial solutions to social problems. The Departments of Housing and Urban Development, Veteran Affairs, and Health and Human Services had effectively siloed the issues of housing and homelessness through their neoliberal commitment to market-driven policymaking. Millionaire do-gooders and philanthrocapitalists sprinkled their well-publicized donations on compliant charities that embraced the virtues of value-added service provision. The central assumption around which this funding system revolved was that business interests in partnership with leading "community stakeholders" could "solve" both the housing and homelessness crises.
In the real world of nonprofit social service provision, financial dependence and political independence were a contradiction in terms. Given the power structures that controlled the flow of dollars earmarked for homelessness and housing, all 501(c)(3) charitable organizations had to make a hard choice between service provision and political activism, fundraising and hellraising. In the Age of Neoliberal Capitalism, any nonprofit service provider that attempted to straddle the fence would either run afoul of the governing regime and suffer the fate of the Task Force or fall victim to political co-optation. The latter was the path of least resistance chosen by the nonprofit sector as a whole.
The best path forward, I believed, was for the Task Force to withdraw from social service provision altogether, cut its budget to the bone and use whatever remained of the rapidly dwindling settlement money to fund mobilization, advocacy and direct action for progressive housing policies along the lines of what Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Tina Smith set out in their recent call for social housing. A militant housing organization with three-million bucks in the bank might be a force to be reckoned with.
It probably won't surprise you to learn that Task Force's liberal, biracial board had no interest in such a radical makeover. I pitched my anti-capitalist, fight-the-power proposal because it made sense to me, not because I labored under any illusion that my heterodox ideas or modest powers of persuasion would carry the day. The Task Force continued to deliver stripped-down services until the settlement money ran out a few years later.
I was gone by then, having resigned in late 2017.
Nowadays, I do my best to avoid the empty building at the corner of Peachtree and Pine, with its padlocked doors, boarded up windows and tortured history. It now belongs to Emory, which was the plan all along. But there's no avoiding homelessness: it's everywhere you look in downtown Atlanta.
SHELTER PORTRAITS
