Atlanta’s homeless under siege

By Dianne Mathiowetz
Atlanta

On June 22, when temperatures soared into the mid 90s during a heat wave, Atlanta’s water department turned off the water at the city’s largest homeless shelter.

Photo: Art4TheHomeless

The Midtown facility, which is operated by the Task Force for the Homeless, houses some 700 men every night. Its 24-hour helpline also gives daily assistance to hundreds of low-income women, men and children.

Community activists quickly responded to this crisis. Calls for water went out over the radio airwaves and to e-mail lists. Cars, pick-up trucks and even the Georgia Peace and Justice Coalition’s bio-fuel bus, “Rosa,” pulled up to the shelter’s doors to unload cases and jugs of water. Port-a-potties and pallets of ice were donated. Alternate shower and bathroom facilities were made available.

The shelter stayed open despite city officials’ threats to padlock the doors.

The next day, Task Force lawyers and supporters won a temporary injunction and restraining order from Fulton County Superior Court Judge Ural Glanville, who ordered the city to restore the building’s water service.

Moreover, the judge authorized the Task Force to pursue legal actions to prove “tortious interference” by the city administration. He ordered the city to turn over documents referring to the shelter. Task Force attorneys will take depositions from city officials with the aim of revealing any city collusion with business interests to defund the shelter’s operations.

While local media reported the court’s order to restore the building’s water, there was no coverage of the ruling that the city should stop its interference in the shelter’s funding operations.

From its founding in 1981, the Task Force for the Homeless has gained a reputation as a fierce advocate for the right of all to decent and affordable housing and for human dignity. Unlike many other agencies that provide only emergency shelter, food, medical care and clothing for low-income and homeless people, the Task Force has also been a political voice, championing their rights and demanding policy change, not charity.

This adamant position has often brought the Task Force into open and public opposition to powerful political and economic forces, especially since the run-up to the 1996 Olympics, when the floodgates were opened to large developers and corporate interests.

At that time, the Task Force filed suit against the city challenging an ordinance banning "urban camping"; it criminalized sleeping or lying in public places, i.e., parks. The organization has also effectively challenged other so-called “quality of life” ordinances which criminalize being poor or homeless and encourage racial profiling.

The city has supported the removal of all public housing projects, beginning with the destruction of Techwood Homes in the mid 1990s to build housing for Olympic athletes. This policy has displaced thousands of low-income families.

However, the Task Force, working with tenants at Bowen Homes—the latest project to be bulldozed—has kept affordable housing on the political agenda. It has mobilized for City Council meetings, pushed through resolutions calling for a moratorium on foreclosures and evictions, challenged the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s policies, and demonstrated at national meetings and conventions.

The first U.S. Social Forum in 2007 used the Task Force building; the participation of homeless people and housing advocates was an achievement of that gathering.

Over the last 15 years, the number of homeless people has grown, given the lack of affordable housing and the low-wage service economy. They’re living on the streets of Atlanta, under bridges, in abandoned buildings, in their cars and in parks.

In 2003, Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin announced with great fanfare a plan to end chronic homelessness in 10 years. Millions of dollars were spent to rehabilitate an unused jail. The Gateway Center was opened two years later, not as a shelter but with 270 spaces for men and 30 for women who enter into programs geared to address the underlying reasons for their homelessness, such as unemployment, addictions, mental illness or domestic abuse. Those who do not participate are labeled “non-compliant” and are refused services at other agencies linked to the Gateway funding apparatus.

As other private and city-funded facilities have closed, the Task Force facility has become the shelter of last resort. The Gateway shuttle bus drops off homeless people there in the middle of the night. Homeless patients released from Grady Hospital arrive there still in their hospital gowns.

The Task Force is legally prevented from offering bed space to women and children in the same facility as men. However, on many nights its lobby is crowded with dozens of women and their children sleeping upright in folding chairs.

Critics throw scurrilous charges at the Task Force for its alleged “lack of results.” They accuse the facility, by its very existence, of encouraging people to remain homeless. Debi Starnes, a former City Councilmember and the city administration’s “homeless czar” is the leading voice in demonizing the shelter’s residents as “criminal elements” in the Midtown area. She falsely blames the Task Force’s funding cutbacks on “ineffectiveness.”

When Starnes told the media that housing was available for everyone staying at the shelter following the recent water cut-off, the Task Force challenged the City to provide it. No housing was forthcoming.

The Task Force’s lawsuit seeks the documentation that would show that Starnes’ actions and those of other city government officials and business associations led to the blocking of federal, state and private funding to the shelter. The facility was legally eligible for the funding and had complied with all requirements.

The city has refused to approve an annual $100,000 federal grant which the Task Force has been in line to receive for the last three years. The mayor’s office has even sent letters urging the grant be denied. Despite the judge’s order of June 23, that the city administration stop interfering in the shelter’s fundraising efforts, the mayor’s office, once again, urged the grant be denied.

The Task Force says it has lost nearly 50 percent of its annual budget due to interference by political and business interests which seek to gain the land occupied by the shelter. It is across the street from Emory University’s private Crawford Long Hospital and within blocks of newly built million-dollar condominiums.

The facilities’ operations—keeping it clean and functioning, providing security, staffing the offices and more—are largely done by current residents and formerly homeless people. The building houses an art gallery and studio space where homeless artists can paint and express their creativity.

A projected coffee house and community gathering place awaits the full restoration of water to become an ongoing performance venue. Already, at a weekly open-mike night, spoken-word artists and musical performers from among the homeless population and the community gather to share their talents. Programs teach computer, photography and video skills and bicycle repair, and there are literacy and voter registration campaigns.

Anita Beaty, the Task Force’s director, stresses that the coordinated attack on the shelter is not the central issue, even though it is an important facet of the struggle. The presence of thousands of homeless women, men and children, mostly African-American, on the main street of Atlanta, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthplace, and the home of the Civil Rights Movement, makes it clear that “the city claims a history of progressive social change that it does not want to live.”

Task Force supporters are gearing up to pack the courtroom when its lawsuit against the city goes to court on Sept. 21.

And the water crisis continues. On July 15, unless another $8,000 is paid, the city once again vows to disrupt service. The Task Force for the Homeless is soliciting donations of water and money. For information, call 404-230-5000 or see homelesstaskforce.org.

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