‘Katrina showed the system is broken’

The City of Atlanta, which has a national reputation for its attempts to criminalize homeless people, has officially welcomed tens of thousands of Katrina survivors from the Gulf Coast states.

Elected officials on the state and local level, public agencies and private organizations as well as countless individuals quickly responded to the human crisis as more and more people from the Gulf states arrived with literally nothing but the clothes on their back.

Atlantans donated millions of dollars, collected food and clothing, and offered to share their own homes.

Atlanta, despite its image of wealth and prosperity, ranks among the U.S.’s poorest cities because of the large number of residents who subsist on types of public assistance, including SSI and Social Security, and on the low wage scale that dominates the service industries.

This writer interviewed Anita Beaty, executive director of the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless and an outspoken advocate for the poor. The Task Force successfully sued the city of Atlanta over “quality of life” ordinances passed prior to the Olympics in 1996 that attemp ted to sweep the streets of homeless and poor people. More recently, Beaty and the Task Force were key elements in the struggle against passage of a panhandling ordinance making it illegal to ask for help in Atlanta.

WW: What conditions existed in Atlanta for poor workers and homeless people prior to Hurricane Katrina?

Anita Beaty: In the last five years, at least 10,000 units of affordable or publicly sponsored housing have been destroyed. Gentrification of in-town neighborhoods plus the actual tearing down of housing projects such as Capitol Homes, Grady Homes and the McDaniel-Glenn complex has created a desperate shortage of affordable housing within the city limits.

Money for Section 8 vouchers has been cut by the federal government and, since this is market driven, it is not a guaranteed source of housing.

Plus the city recently closed a 125-bed shelter for women and children despite a growing need for additional space, not less.

In early summer, Atlanta opened the Gateway Center with great fanfare as being a significant step forward in eliminating homelessness. Yet this rehabilitated jail has only 30 beds for women and children and 45 for men. People can only stay for two weeks before they are put out on the street again.

Atlanta, like most cities, is in desperate need of affordable, decent and safe housing. And by affordable, I mean low enough rents that make it possible for minimum-wage workers to live there.

The mayor of Atlanta, Shirley Franklin, has committed millions of dollars in assistance to provide housing, food, employment, health care and so on to Katrina survivors. How do these actions square with her record regarding Atlanta’s poor?

The open hospitality policy announced by the mayor demonstrates what Atlanta is capable of doing to aid those in need of the basics to survive. It is the response I would like to see for anyone who has no place to sleep or nothing to eat.

Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that the panhandling ordinance originated from the mayor’s office. The city has no housing policy except for gentrification. Developers are being allowed to build luxury housing where public housing used to stand with a very small number of units designated as “affordable.” It was the city that closed the women and children’s shelter on Milton Avenue.

Hundreds of homeless and poor people are arrested every week in Atlanta for jaywalking, for sleeping in public parks, for loitering and for public urination. There are no public toilets in Atlanta and the mayor has not seen fit to take on addressing this need.

What is revealed by Mayor Franklin’s policy toward those who survived Hurri cane Katrina is a differentiation between the “deserving poor”—those whose lives have been devastated by a natural disaster—and the “non-deserving poor”—those whose lives are devastated by illness, addictions, job loss, eviction, domestic violence, etc.

A man and his family were living in their car after leaving New Orleans. He was arrested for begging for money at Lenox Mall and spent the night in jail. The city dropped the charges when it was revealed that he was a Katrina evacuee.

A single mother was evicted from her apartment in an Atlanta suburb. She went to one of the centers set up to assist Katrina survivors and she and her son were given a place to live. Once it became known that she was not from the Gulf Coast, she was arrested and is facing felony charges.

United Way organized a job fair that was advertised as being for those unemployed by Katrina. More than 15,000 people showed up, forcing them to close the doors hours early. Most of those who came looking for a job were unemployed Atlantans.

The cruel irony is that Katrina uncovered what the real situation is for tens of millions of people. It revealed the underbelly of extreme poverty in the richest country in the world—and it did it on television for the whole world to see.

The movement has to meet this opportunity to demand that the conditions of poverty be addressed now and at all levels of government.

What demands should the public be mobilized around?

Any real approach has to include these demands: that there is a right to decent, safe and affordable housing for everyone. We need a universal living wage. This automatically links wages to the cost of housing and other basics. We need universal health care which insures that illness doesn’t lead to losing your home. And we need access to quality education for everyone. Of course, there are other issues, too, such as true public transportation that makes possible getting to jobs, schools, hospitals, libraries, etc.

So many other countries provide a better social structure for their populations. While the system has never been particularly effective in meeting the needs of people, Katrina reveals that it is broken. The concept that evacuation in the face of a natural disaster depends on private transportation illustrates its criminal inadequacy.

Relying on charity to meet these immense needs is insufficient. Katrina shows how generous people can be but charity is erratic and is often selective.

There needs to be a systemic policy guaranteeing housing, health care, education and income that covers everyone in society.