Homeless shelter threatened with foreclosure

Located on Atlanta’s prestigious Peachtree Street, which is home to many upscale condos and towering office buildings, the Task Force for the Homeless has operated an emergency shelter with beds for 700 men; a daytime facility providing space for hundreds seeking relief from rain, cold and heat; a 24-hour hotline that offers multiple services to men, women and children; as well as a resident program for some two dozen employed men, who receive counseling help.

When the Task Force first opened the shelter in November 1997, this stretch of Peachtree, just north of the downtown area, was somewhat rundown. In the last decade, developers have bought up old buildings and constructed fancy apartments and condos, while Emory University expanded its hospital just up the block from the shelter.

The city administration under Mayor Shirley Franklin, in tandem with this gentrification, openly declared its bias against poor people by enacting city ordinances that encouraged racial profiling and criminalized anyone appearing homeless.

Since its inception in 1981, the Task Force has exposed the root causes of poverty and demanded justice, not charity, for people who have lost their homes, jobs, health and families under the profit-driven system of capitalism. So fiercely has the Task Force defended the right of all people to access the city’s public spaces that it has been targeted by the business elite and its political mouthpieces for destruction. The Task Force has not backed down in its assertion that racism and class privilege underlie all the rhetoric about downtown “improvement.”

Public funding to the organization has been cut through the deliberate intervention of the city government; private donors have been pressured to end their support; and last week, the group’s mortgage on its building was abruptly sold to a mysterious company, which immediately foreclosed on them. They have until March 3 to repay $500,000, or the huge art deco building on the corner of Peachtree and Pine will be sold at auction.

Paradoxically, even as city leaders denigrate the work of the Task Force, homeless people are regularly brought to Peachtree-Pine from the multimillion dollar, taxpayer funded Gateway Center — the centerpiece of Mayor Franklin’s plan to “end homelessness” in 10 years. Likewise, private shelters and agencies depend on the services provided by the Task Force.

While the seriousness of this series of attacks should not be underestimated, the Task Force has been launching its own counteroffensive, filing a lawsuit that will be heard in federal court this spring. Through discovery, the group’s lawyers have uncovered evidence of a multilayered conspiracy, extending from business leaders to elected government officials and nonprofit agencies, to deprive the Task Force of funding until they are forced under.

These are some of the same forces that have brought about the destruction of Atlanta’s public housing, forcing thousands of people into the hands of for-profit, slum landlords in neighborhoods wracked by foreclosures. Many others have moved out of the city altogether and an unknown number are now living in their cars, under bridges and in abandoned buildings.

The privatization of Grady Hospital — a safety net for the poor since its founding more than 100 years ago — was orchestrated by many of these same business leaders. Their decision to cut outpatient dialysis care for uninsured patients has brought national attention to this very image-conscious city. This media scrutiny, in addition to the battle waged by health care advocates and the patients themselves, has at least temporarily forced an extension of funding for private dialysis.

While every poverty index is sharply up in Atlanta — from the unemployment rate and the number of bankruptcies and foreclosures, to the increased demand for food from pantries — the city government so poorly managed a $12.3 million federal program to rehabilitate foreclosed properties that it was denied a second program of more than $57 million. Housing advocates and neighborhood associations are outraged by this incompetence or indifference to the crisis facing poor and working families. This failure to use federal funds for affordable, low-cost housing is considered by many to be the result of a conscious policy to change the demographics of Atlanta, the famed city “too busy to hate.”

The Task Force lawsuit lays bare the blatant effort by business forces to contravene the public interest and to direct elected officials to substitute their narrow financial interests over the greater good. The need for all forms of solidarity, whether monetary or political, is immediate. For information about how to stand with the Task Force for the Homeless, visit www.homelesstaskforce.org.