Summerhill

Olympic Test: For Atlanta Itself By Neal R. Peirce (13 MAY 96)

Nov 19, 2006

The moment their city was designated as site of the 1996 Summer Olympics, Atlantans began agonizing: What if the world comes and notices our dire inner-city poverty?

For decades, Atlanta let its close-in neighborhoods, places like Vine City, Mechanicsville, Cabbagetown and Summerhill ?— all within what?’s now the 3.5-mile ?“Olympic Ring?” radius of downtown ?— sink into misery and decrepitude.

In 1969, as the town was beating its chest about its towering new office and hotel complexes, boasting how it was ?“too busy to hate?” during the civil rights revolution, there were still 250 miles of unpaved road through these neighborhoods.

I recall Buttermilk Bottom, in easy view of the soaring new Atlanta skyline, with its unpainted shanty houses propped up on stilts of cinder blocks, surrounded by wrecked and abandoned autos, many streets infested with stray dogs.

And when the establishment wanted new freeway routes or stadiums, it demolished such neighborhoods with abandon, packing the occupants into public housing compounds that in time became their own hell.

The city of Atlanta proper lost 16 percent of its population in the ?‘70s and ?‘80s ?— while metropolitan Atlanta, with less than one million people in 1950, soared to almost three million, adding jobs at a dizzying pace, spreading out across the red clay Georgia countryside in an urban ooze of subdivisions, malls and strip malls.

In 1991, Dan Sweat ?— later to head Jimmy Carter?’s ?“Atlanta Plan?” to revive ravaged neighborhoods ?— told me: ?“We won?’t emerge in September of 1996 as a world-class city if all we?’ve done is build some stadia and staged good games and entertained the visitors of the world. If we haven?’t significantly improved the daily lives of the people at the bottom of the economic heap, we don?’t deserve world-class status.?”

So now that the Olympic flame is racing toward Atlanta, what of the city?’s poor?

They?’re still there ?— thousands of them, wedged into decayed houses and mean public housing projects.

Yet corporate Atlanta, in the ?‘90s, has begun to contribute millions to inner-city neighborhoods. Bank loans for housing have accelerated. Carter?’s project failed to stamp out poverty, but it stimulated ?— for the first time ?— direct contacts between local corporate chieftains and neighborhood leaders.

And Atlanta city government, abandoning its historically rank paternalism toward poor neighborhoods, invited all those around the Olympic Ring to write specific plans for long-term physical renewal.

Take Summerhill, once a working-class home to 20,000 Atlantans, selected as site of the new Olympic Stadium. The Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, built in the ?‘60s on another Summerhill site cleared of low-income people?’s homes, drenched the neighborhood with autos at game times; some landowners tore down houses for parking lots. By the early ?‘90s, plagued by abandonment and decline, Summerhill?’s population was below 4,000.

But Summerhill Neighborhood Inc., led by Douglas Dean, an ex-state legislator, wrote a comprehensive neighborhood plan and pounced on the Olympic planners, demanding multiple concessions. Summerhill people have received jobs (and training) during construction of the Olympic Stadium, to be retrofitted for Atlanta Braves after the Games (the older stadium will be demolished). New garages are being built, new regulations written to stop the neighborhood from being victimized by parking.

First Union and NationsBank lead the lenders in financing hundreds of new housing units in Summerhill, including higher-income homes to create more diversity. The neighborhood has organized to fight drug dealing and is taking over and rehabilitating a 50-unit public housing project.

In nearby Mechanicsville, a devastated urban neighborhood only four blocks from the Olympic Stadium, a new town square, complete with stores and homes sponsored by an active local community development corporation, is being built as a memorial to the late civil rights leader, Dr. Ralph David Abernathy.

And multiple improvements are underway in and around the campuses of Atlanta University, citadel of black higher education in America, but also imperiled by urban decay.

The critical question is: Will Atlanta maintain this momentum when the Olympics are over? No one?’s sure. But if the answer is yes, a more humane, inclusive, fine city may be emerging.

Atlanta Planning Commissioner Leon Eplan sees a parallel to 1893, when Chicago hosted the world-noted Columbian Exposition. Chicago?’s nadir had come 22 years before, in its famed fire. In two decades, Chicago rebuilt at miraculous speed, earning the accolades the exposition brought it.

Since 1990, Eplan notes, Atlanta has turned around its city population decline. It?’s begun to hear and repair its deeply wounded neighborhoods. It?’s building a monumental and user-friendly center city for the first time. It?’s reasserting itself as the true heart of a scattered metropolitan area, thus representing itself globally as a stronger region.

In short, says Eplan, the Olympics are the challenge and opportunity for Atlanta that the Columbian Exposition was for Chicago 103 years ago.

Call this a new Atlanta hubris if you will. If it comes true, all America benefits.

(c) 1996, Washington Post Writers Group

(Neal Peirce is a syndicated columnist who writes about local government issues. His columns do not reflect the opinions of County News or the National Association of Counties.)