Georgia STAND-UP Atlanta Metropolitan Area Campaign

Georgia STAND-UP Atlanta Metropolitan Area Campaign The Atlanta Regional Campaign is a community-led infrastructure campaign to challenge the extractive economy and its disproportionate impact on low wealth communities and communities of color. Bloomberg says that Atlanta is the second most unequal city in the US. Middle-income jobs have all but disappeared over the years sending residents to either the low end or the high end of the spectrum. Metro Atlanta's wealth gap means our highest earning residents, the top 5 percent, make 20 times more than our bottom 5 percent. Income disparities remain directly tied to race and effect access to transportation, affordable housing, and jobs. Our campaign will address three issues: (1) transportation infrastructure, (2) affordable housing, and (3) access to jobs. Success will be achieved through active participation in policy implementation, educating affected communities, monitoring new policies and funding streams. In addition, success will be achieved by activating vulnerable communities to take advantage of new policies, ensuring that these policies don’t burden their ability to have access to transit, affordable housing, and jobs. 1. Transportation It has been stated that General Sherman may have burned mid-19th century Atlanta, but in the mid- 20th century policy in Atlanta took that reconstructed city and dissected and destroyed its center with interstate highways — until what remained of neighborhoods ended up being separated like little islands, all of them fairly dependent on cars for transportation. And after having been uprooted from those “gouged” neighborhoods, many black residents suddenly lost their centrally located homes near jobs centers. Transportation policy in Atlanta has had a history of destroying neighborhoods and cutting off access to jobs. So, in 1971, residents of Atlanta, DeKalb, and Fulton counties voted to support the creation of MARTA. Funded by a 1-cent sales tax, the new agency was supposed to operate buses and lead the construction of a rail network with support from the federal government. However, the referendum was thwarted by scare tactics from racist suburbanites, and was not expanded to Clayton, Cobb, and Gwinnett counties. While the transit system slowly expanded until 2000, and suburban Clayton, Cobb, and Gwinnett counties added bus service, a truly integrated regional transit system never materialized. Today, a system designed for the scale of the populated parts of the Atlanta region in 1970 has been supplanted by suburban growth. The now-48-mile heavy rail system attracts more than 200,000 people a day, ridership that is comparable to other southern cities. But only 8 percent of the population in the Atlanta region’s core counties lives within a mile of a rail station, down from 22 percent in 1970. The Atlanta Metropolitan region is experiencing monumental pressure on its transportation infrastructure and the demand for transit choices. The inequity in access to transit is directly attributable to wealth and racial demographics. The region’s northern areas have tended to gain jobs and affluence and remained mostly white, while the region’s southern areas have been largely bypassed by economic opportunities and have become mostly Black. Gentrification and displacement, combined with decreasing affordable housing stocks are pushing people of color and low-income residents out of the City of Atlanta into the suburbs. These disparities directly affect the daily commute. With commuters, facing long, cross-regional commutes and crippling congestion. Transportation has repeatedly topped the list of the “biggest problems”. Todays’ transportation system is not functioning well for the 10-county region’s four million residents. There are several referendums that have been designed to infuse money into improving transportation infrastructure. It is important to note that these referenda have been passed now that whites are moving into the City of Atlanta. Effectually, whites will be the beneficiaries of these improvements because the very neighborhoods where disinvestment presently resides are the neighborhoods to which they are relocating. Aggressive policies need to be created to ensure that legacy homeowners and renters can remain in place. In March 2016, more than eight in ten Atlanta voters approved two referenda authorizing the City to borrow up to $250 million in bonds to tackle the city’s infrastructure backlog without raising property taxes. The Renew Atlanta program focuses on repairs and upgrades to streets and sidewalks, citywide traffic signal optimization and construction of more than 30 miles of complete streets. The second major component of the Renew Atlanta program involves upgrades and urgent repairs to public facilities and the construction of the new Martin Luther King, Jr. Aquatic and Recreational Facility in the Historic Old Fourth Ward. The Renew Atlanta program is complementary to the City’s T-SPLOST, they have different focuses. 1. TSPLOST (Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax for Transportation) referendum: This four-tenths of a penny sales tax will generate approximately $300 million over a five-year period to fund significant and expansive transportation projects citywide. 2. MARTA (the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority) passed a half-penny sales tax for transit expansion and enhancements in the City of Atlanta. Over a period of forty years, this half-penny sales tax will generate an estimated $2.5 billion, allowing MARTA to make major investments in transit infrastructure, including introducing high- capacity rail improvements, building new infill rail stations within the City, purchasing new buses, adding more frequent service, and introducing new bus routes. a. The approval of these two referenda will implement high priority projects from the Connect Atlanta Plan, the City’s comprehensive transportation plan, and Concept 3, the Atlanta region’s transit plan, and more than a dozen neighborhood and community plans that have been adopted in the last six years, and features projects in nearly all of the city’s commercial districts, including: • $66 million for the Atlanta BeltLine, which will allow the BeltLine to purchase all the remaining right of way to close the 22-mile loop. • $75 million for 15 complete streets projects; • $3 million for Phase 2 of the Atlanta Bike Share program; and • $40 million for traffic signal optimization. • In addition, these projects include high priority sidewalk and bikeway projects connecting our neighborhoods to 80 Atlanta Public Schools and all of the Atlanta rail stations. 2 o Ninety-four percent of all Atlanta residents and 98% of the city’s jobs will be within a half-mile of a proposed TSPLOST, MARTA, or Renew Atlanta transportation or infrastructure project. 2. Affordable Housing Locally enacted federal housing policies have created the current landscape of housing inequality. These housing policies were discriminatory and contributed to the growth of sprawl. The Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) and Federal Housing Administration (FHA) created “redlining” which prevented federal support from reaching Black neighborhoods during the Depression, and became so ingrained in the housing finance industry that it affects lending decisions to present day. Some historians have called the federal government subsidy of white homeownership a “$120 billion head start” for white families, which created substantial wealth through homeownership that could be passed on to subsequent generations. Since Black families couldn’t get loans and had to secure housing through leases and land contracts, they didn’t share in wealth building. In the late 1950s, Atlanta embarked on its first attempt at “urban renewal”, which for many people at the time translated to “Negro removal”. Hundreds of homes were demolished by the city, and thousands of Black families in three neighborhoods (Turner Field—Summerhill, Peoplestown and Mechanicsville) were separated from each other when three interstates were constructed through the heart of their communities. The problem worsened in the mid-1960s when the city decided to build a new stadium to house a professional baseball team. A significant portion of the Summerhill neighborhood was wiped away. Whatever sense of community and connection had survived was reduced even further as businesses left and schools closed. Decades later, in preparation for the 1996 Olympics, an estimated 30,000 low-income Atlanta residents were displaced from their homes in order to make room for the new Olympic Stadium. Landlords in the area sought to raise rents to take advantage of the proximity to the Olympic venues. Present day economic and housing growth is threatening to have history repeat itself. The Atlanta BeltLine (BeltLine) is triggering sharp increases in home values in low-income and largely African- American communities in the southwest segment. Neighborhoods such as Adair Park, Pittsburgh, Mechanicsville, and Westview have seen median sale prices jump 68 percent from 2011 to 2015. Without policies that protect vulnerable renters and homeowners from rapid rent and property tax increases, gentrification comes at their expense. It also means that the benefits of gentrification will flow mostly to more affluent households moving in. In order to address the inequity, on November 20, 2017, the City of Atlanta passed an ordinance to revise the zoning laws that cover the BeltLine’s path and surrounding area. The legislation requires that developers building new residential

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