Remember the science fiction show about creatures from outer space who came to earth with a book entitled "To Serve Humanity"? It was a cookbook! And the main dish was humanity! The city of Atlanta's 10-Year Plan to End Homelessness is a recipe of the same sort. Its real design is to attack the homeless, to exclude and drive out a population that is no longer needed or wanted.
How do you end homelessness? Homes for all! But the city's plan is, while calling for an end to homelessness, to destroy all remaining public housing, to allow the developers to greedily gobble up this prime real estate and build luxury homes and playgrounds for the rich. Of course the poor have to go.
Atlanta over the past 5 years has received over $40 million dollars for its anti-homeless program, and about all it has to show for it is something called the Gateway Center. Gateway expelled several hundred women and children, saying "We are not a shelter." Not one unit of new public housing for the poor has been constructed.
Standing in outspoken opposition to this is the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless. They were there when the homeless women and children were driven out of Gateway, demanding that something be done. They were there when the Atlanta Housing Authority initiated the Olympic Legacy Program to begin the first phase of the demolition of public housing in Atlanta. They were there when the city, at the urging of Central Atlanta Progress, an alliance of downtown corporations, began to pass ordinances to criminalize and imprison the homeless.
Now the Task Force for the Homeless is a leader in the fight to prevent the last standing public housing in the city from being demolished, and in exposing the sham program to end homelessness. So the corporate/government alliance is now targeting the Task Force. They have embarked upon a campaign to deny funding and to shut down the shelter the Task Force operates at Peachtree and Pine.
Why are the homeless and poor despised so by the corporate/government leaders? As Anita Beaty, director of the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless says, "The city has taken the direction from the downtown business community that the redevelopment of downtown depends on clearing poor and homeless people out of the way. We are perceived as an obstacle to that." Dr. Gloria Bromell-Tinubu, former City Council representative from the district that includes Peachtree and Pine, and now a member of the board of the Homeless Task Force says, "Slavery is the worst thing and homelessness is the second worst thing that can be visited upon anyone. To be homeless, to be victimized again and criminalized again, is unconscionable."
The homeless need homes, food, clothing, health care, and for a government to fail to provide for the needs of all of its citizens is unconscionable. It has to go, not the poor. "To serve humanity" must be a recipe not to devour the poor, but to provide homes for all, health care for all, to end hunger for all, to provide for all of the needs of all of the people. The Homeless Task Force at Peachtree and Pine has taken a stand, and it must prevail.
