Big business leads attack on the poor

Atlanta homeless people and community activists packed City Council chambers July 18 to block an “anti-panhandling’ ordinance. Under pressure, the City Council tabled the proposed ordinance for more study and input from the community.

The ordinance before the Council would outlaw any form of begging or asking for help in an area encompassing most of the city's downtown. Someone convicted of this “crime’ could get 30 days in jail and/or a $1,000 fine.
 
“Neo-apartheid zone" is how Atlanta homeless activists describe the proposed "commercial solicitation" area.

The ordinance would effectively curtail the rights of speech, assembly and free association for poor people in this “tourist triangle.’
 
For two years Central Atlanta Progress, a powerful organization of business, banking, hotel and restaurant owners and loft-dwellers, has worked behind the scenes with Mayor Shirley Franklin to craft the ordinance.
 
Backers cite Atlanta Convention Bureau studies claiming convention goers have one major criticism about their stay in the city--poor people asking for spare change.

The response of the image-conscious money elites? Jail the homeless.
 
Estimates of Atlanta's homeless population range from 10,000 to 40,000. Many are men, often veterans. A growing number are women and children. Many people who are homeless have jobs that pay minimum wage, but not enough for rent and utilities in this increasingly expensive city.
 
Gentrification of in-town neighborhoods, and the building of stadiums, interstates and other big developments in working-class areas, have decimated the stock of affordable housing.

Public housing that borders downtown--Capitol Homes, Grady Homes and the McDaniel-Glenn projects--is being torn down to build townhouses and single-family homes priced beyond the reach of low-wage workers.

Only a small number of new units will be reserved for previous poverty-level residents. Hundreds of families, mostly young single mothers, will be desperately looking for shelter. The section 8 program that currently provides vouchers for privately owned housing has a waiting list of thousands.
 
Hundreds of people, including many homeless, have turned out to speak passionately against the proposed ordinance during the three weeks it has been before the City Council. Their eloquent and dignified statements have exposed the underlying racist and anti-poor bias of the proposed law.
 
Atlanta's "quality of life" ordinances criminalize the poor and account for at least one third to one half of people arrested each month. Police jail mostly African-American men for cutting across a parking lot, jay-walking or “looking poor.’ These same actions committed by well-heeled party-goers go unpunished.
 
Ordinance critics point instead to the lack of jobs that pay a living wage, the scarcity of affordable housing, the shortage of treatment facilities for alcohol and drug addiction, and the paucity of mental health services. They say these are  the real crimes in a city that proclaims it is "too busy to hate."