“This is the direct result of bad public policy” Atlanta shelter director on the homeless crisis

[Hannah Bell]

As conditions worsen for the working population, emergency shelter providers in Atlanta, Georgia, are confronted by a huge increase in need...

Anita Beaty, director of the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless...“I’ve been working for the Task Force since 1985,” Beaty said. “...It had just begun to emerge as a recognized, publicly visible problem in the mid to late 1970s because the HUD budget was cut so dramatically in that period, and at the same time medical institutions released a large number of mental health patients. There was no support network in place to manage those people...

Homelessness is not merely a ‘phenomenon’ of our society. This is the direct result of bad public policy. It is a deliberate, exclusionary public policy, removing the safety net—first housing and then health support—and creating a section of people who struggle harder than anyone for services, but cannot get what they need.”

"...In the last few years,” Beaty explained, “we’ve seen the city’s Housing Authority privatize all of the public housing. For all intents and purposes, we’ve lost some 5,000 units of public housing and 3,200 in the last two years—all of these were occupied.

“The way the housing authority has accomplished this goal is to allow the projects to deteriorate, and to allow all the basic services people depend on to fall by the wayside. And then the city points to these dilapidated conditions as a reason to tear it all down..."

Beaty told the WSWS that the concern of the city never lay with the well-being of its poor inhabitants, but rather in their permanent displacement. “The property the housing units were built on were being advertised for development before the demolition,” she noted. “Twelve public housing communities were pitched in real estate listings as ‘Atlanta’s emerging development market.’

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/oct2009/atla-o26.shtml

[Celebration]

1. Recommended

To counter the unrecommends.

[annabanana]

2. One of the biggest messes that the"trickle down" crowd left us with. . .n/t

[HamdenRice]

3. Who knows if anything in this "article" is true? WSWS are liars by nature.

WSWS are blatant compulsive liars, so there's no way to tell if anything in the "article" is true.

[Starry Messenger]

4. recommend

[malaise]

5. K & R

for the homeless