ATLANTA, GA As Atlanta goes green and sustainable, the city's African American population finds itself left on the side of the road because of residential segregation, inadequate public transportation, location of major job centers, and persistent inequality. The State of Black Atlanta Summit 2010 raised a number of issues, challenges, barriers, and opportunities facing Black Atlanta, often hyped as the Black Mecca. During the one-day Summit, some of Atlanta's leading academics, analysts, planners, and advocates critiqued the dynamics of racialized place in shaping the city's transportation, land use, and environmental policies.
The smart growth movement aims to combat urban and suburban sprawl by promoting livable communities based on pedestrian scale, diverse populations, and mixed land use. But as illustrated in Growing Smarter, some "smart growth" initiatives largely failed to address social equity and environmental justice. Smart growth sometimes results in gentrification and displacement of low- and moderate-income families in existing neighborhoods, or transportation policies that isolate low-income populations. And if provisions and safeguards are not put in place to address social equity, many of Atlanta's "greening" initiatives will follow this same trend.
All Atlanta neighborhoods are not created equal. Some are more equal than others. If a neighborhood happens to be poor, working class, or a community of color, its residents generally have fewer choices and opportunities--on a range of residential amenities such as housing, schools, jobs, shopping, parks, green space, hospitals, police, fire protection, and transportation--than affluent, middle-class, or white residents.
Left Behind by Transportation Apartheid
Black Atlanta has been left behind by the region's sprawl development pattern. The region's job sprawl exacerbates various dimensions of racial inequality. The majority of entry-level jobs in metro Atlanta are not within a quarter-mile of public transportation. In 2006, only 9.3 percent of Metro Atlanta's jobs were located within a 3-mile radius of the CBD, 27.5 percent were located within a 10-mile radius, and 63.2 percent were located outside the 10-mile ring. American society is largely divided between individuals with cars and those without cars. The private automobile is still the most dominant travel mode of every segment of the American population, including African Americans.
The American society is largely divided between individuals with cars and those without cars, creating a form of "transportation apartheid" in many our cities and metropolitan regions. According to the 2003 national study, Moving to Equity: Addressing Inequitable Effects of Transportation Policies on Minorities, only 7 percent of white households own no car, compared with 24 percent of African American households, 17 percent of Latino households, and 13 percent of Asian-American households. Nearly 35 percent of Black Atlantans do not own cars compared with less than 10 percent of whites. Clearly, private automobiles provide enormous employment access advantages to their owners. Having a car in Atlanta can make the difference between employment and unemployment.
The economic isolation of Black Atlanta is complicated by inadequate public transit (limited, unaffordable, or inaccessible service and routes, and security and safety concerns), lack of personal transportation (no privately owned car available to travel to work), and spatial mismatch (location of suitable jobs in areas that are inaccessible by public transportation). Addressing transportation equity in Metro Atlanta will have positive impacts beyond improved mobility and access to opportunity, but will have added health benefits by reducing deadly air pollution, decreasing automobile dependency, and shrinking the region's carbon footprint mitigating climate change.
When the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority(MARTA) was conceived in the 1960s and began operation in the 1970s, many whites jokingly referred to it as "Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta." The system was originally conceived to cover five counties (Fulton, DeKalb, Cobb, Clayton, and Gwinnett). Only Fulton and DeKalb residents voted to join MARTA and pay the one-cent sales tax. Atlanta city residents pay eight cents on a dollar in sales tax: four cents for the state, three cents for Fulton and DeKalb, and one cent for the City of Atlanta's water treatment fund.
MARTA is the ninth largest transit system in the country and the only large system that does not receive any significant financial support from the state. Since 1998, MARTA has had to dip into its reserves almost every year to make up budget shortfalls. In 2007, MARTA received no state funding for its $455.9 million operating funds and only $2.7 million (2 percent) of the agency's $195.2 million total capital funds. MARTA is required to use 50 percent of these funds on capital projects and 50 percent on operations. As a result, $65 million in MARTA revenues the agency desperately needs to operate the system sits in reserve accounts.
Only Fulton and DeKalb County residents pay for the up keep and expansion of MARTA with a one-cent sales tax. The regular one-way fare on MARTA is $2.00, up from $1.00 in 1992. MARTA is projected to have a $588-$634 million shortfall over the next decade. The allocation of $25 million of 2009 federal stimulus funds from the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC) regional transportation projects allowed MARTA to temporarily soften the impact of some of the budget cuts. MARTA's FY 2011 budget has a $120 million projected operating gap, up from $109 million in FY 2010.
Because of this serious financial crisis, MARTA officials are warning of slashing one quarter of its service. Just this month, the Atlanta City Council passed a resolution asking Governor Sonny Perdue and the Georgia Legislature to take immediate steps to address the MARTA funding shortfall. Earlier this month, the Georgia Senate passed S.B. 120 which removed all restrictions on the use of the sales tax. The House passed a version that gives MARTA access to only 60 percent of the money. MARTA officials distributed to state lawmakers a memo raising the possibility that it would have to cut rail service on "either certain days or times, or entire line altogether" if the Legislature doesn't pass a bill that lets the agency use more of the funds raised by sales taxes toward operations.
The current MARTA Act of 1965 requires the agency to spend 50 percent for operations, and 50 percent for capital improvements. Such a repeal of the sales tax restrictions would give MARTA an extra $65 million toward closing the current funding gap. These drastic cuts would hit Black Atlantans especially hard. More than 76 percent of MARTA's rail and bus riders are African Americans and other people of color; and more than 63 percent of users have a household income of less than $30,000.
Ironically, many transit dependent and poor blacks from Atlanta's demolished public housing developments have been pushed into Clayton County. On March 31, Clayton County is scheduled to shut down C-Tran, bus service operated by MARTA, because of a budget shortfall of $1.3 million. More than half of C-Tran riders have no regular access to a car. Local residents take about 2 million rides a year on C-Tran. In 2006, Clayton County had an estimated population of 271,240, with a racial make-up of 20.4% white non-Hispanic, 62.9% African American, 5% Asian, 11.3% Hispanic or Latino, 0.4% American Indian or Alaska Naive, and 0.1% Pacific Islander. 1.5% were reported as multi-racial.
As MARTA goes broke and as Atlanta's black population shrinks, a $2.8 billion quasi-governmental organization known as Atlanta BeltLine Inc., is leading one of the largest redevelopment projects in the country that will create light-rail transit, green space, trails, and new development along 22 miles of rail segments that encircle the many of the city's historic urban core. When completed in 2030, the BeltLine Project is projected to create 1,300 acres of new parks, green space, and trail construction, and 28,000 new homes. However, there is a down side. In a 2007 report, The Beltline and Rising Home Prices, Georgia Tech real estate and community development expert Dan Immergluck found city and school property taxes on homes within an eighth-mile of the TAD along the BeltLine's southern side increased 68 percent since the project was announced (compared to 32 percent for a home located a mile from the TAD). In some neighborhoods property values skyrocketed as much as 174 percent, especially in heavily black Southwest Atlanta. Professor Immergluck warned that if the city does not set up tax breaks and incentives that support low-income homeowners to keep their houses, the BeltLine will "create a circle of wealth and an outer ring of concentrated poverty."
The BeltLine moved forward with the blessing of Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin and other city leaders despite a Georgia Supreme Court ruling in February 2008 that school property tax money cannot be used to help fund the massive loop of transit, trails and parks around the city's core. The project has fueled real estate speculation by developers eager to build upscale homes near the green space. It has also heightened residents' fears of displacement--even though no track had been laid. Houses that once appraised at $30,000 now appraise at more than $150,000. Such sharp increases hit elderly, low-income, and homeowners living on fixed income especially hard--greatly increasing the likelihood they will be pushed out their homes and their neighborhoods. Atlanta's black residents are finding themselves with drastically higher property taxes, or in some cases, on the verge of displacement.
Over the next 25 years, using a tax allocation district or TAD--known elsewhere as tax increment financing (TIF), Atlanta residents can expect to see an estimated $2.8 billion dollars of investment surge into the old railway line. The storm surge from Hurricane Katrina swept thousands of black families from their homes in New Orleans East and the Ninth Ward. The question in Atlanta is will blacks and low-income families be swept away in the surge created by the BeltLine Project?
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