Larry Keating, PhD Writes Beautifully for the Beautiful Open Door

The Open Door Community in Atlanta, under the leadership of Presbyterian ministers, husband and wife, Ed Loring and Murphy Davis, has defended the cause of the poor and needy for decades. Loring and Davis and their community at The Open Door have stood unflaggingly against the municipal chambers and the states’ death chambers. Again, they have rendered a service to the poor by publishing Professor Keating’s, “Central Atlanta ‘Progress’ Is Poor People’s Regress.” It appears in the September – October 2010 edition of HOSPITALITY, which is published 11 times a year. You can thank Ed and Murphy at http://www.opendoorcommunity.org. Their Editor’s note reads: Larry Keating is a Retired Professor in the City and Regional Planning Program at the Georgia Institute of Technologies’ College of Architecture. He is the author of, ATLANTA: RACE, CLASS AND URBAN EXPANSION, published in 2001.

The following excerpts are quoted verbatim from Keating’s article:

“For more than 50 years, CAP has pressed state and local governments to rid Atlanta’s core of low-income black people, whether residents, or consumers or businesses serving a low-income clientele.

“Observed David Wardell, vice president for operations and public safety at CAP: “The old ordinance allowed for a 7-by-10-foot space, basically a table. There were complaints about stands blocking the sidewalk and blocking the entrance to the MARTA stations.” According to GGP, the third-party “street vendor management program and contract arrangement” is the first instance of the corporatization of street merchants in the country.

“CAP’s influence on the Atlanta Housing Authority is well documented. The most succinct declaration is that of AHA Executive Director Renee Glover, a former corporate lawyer. Just after the Olympics, at a CAP-sponsored conference on downtown housing partnerships, Glover declared that public housing in general, and Techwood and Clark Howell Homes in particular, “have to be a part of the downtown agenda.”

“Five months after Billy Payne announced in November 1993 that Centennial Olympic Park would be built downtown, a still stunned Mayor Maynard Jackson recalled, ‘Well, I found out through the newspaper. Even though I am the city mayor, I found out through the newspaper.’

Declararing War on a Homeless Shelter

“An exception to this pattern is an ongoing fair housing lawsuit that lifts the veil on a collaborative effort by CAP, city officials and elements of the business community to crush a homeless shelter in an economically ambiguous area between downtown and Midtown.

“The Peachtree-Pine Street shelter, operated by the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless, is on Atlanta’s iconic Peachtree Street, three blocks south of the intensively developing Midtown office and entertainment district and one block north of the 10 lanes of the Downtown Connector, which forms the northern boundary of Atlanta’s original downtown. The land uses along these four blocks of Peachtree Street are traditional, including an old, vacant 12-story office building, one-and two-story partly occupied shops, a couple of trendy restaurants and Emory Midtown (formerly Crawford Long) Hospital. CAP has prepared several plans to try to redevelop at substantial public cost. Realistically, it will be a long, long time before new development is attracted here. With most recent development going to Buckhead and the northern suburbs, the area around the homeless shelter is at least a decade away from development pressures.

Nevertheless, CAP has sought to push the Task Force and shelter out of the area since they moved into the former Atlanta Ballet practice facility in 1997. It wants to replace the shelter with a much smaller 16-bed facility to the east, which would refer homeless people to a network of shelters far from downtown.

“Not all of the tactics and strategies CAP has used in its 13-year campaign against the homeless shelter are publicly accessible, but the task force’s lawsuit has revealed some of them. CAP has colluded with its members and city officials to:

+ Undermine both public and private funding for the Task Force.

+ Enlist the city’s main newspaper, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, in a propaganda campaign against the Task Force.

+ Attempt to purchase the shelter’s mortgage.

+ Orchastrate a third-party purchase and foreclosure by one of its members when the mortgage holder refused to sell.

“Any doubt about CAP’s intention to force the shelter off of Peachtree Street was eliminated by testimony under oath by CAP senior officials in their long depositions in the fair housing lawsuit.

“One of the officials deposed was Richard Orr, senior projects manager of communications and membership for CAP. In the deposition Steven Hall of the Baker Donelson LLP law firm asked Orr, “So the answer to my question is, yes, Central Atlanta Progress has tried to bring about the removal of the task force from its location at Peachtree and Pine?” And Orr responded, “yes.”

“In another deposition, CAP President A. J. Robinson admitted under intense questioning that the actions he had taken regarding the task force were based on his wanting supporters, donors and governments to stop funding the shelter. When pressed as to problems the shelter might present for the surrounding area, Robinson could cite no crime data, police reports or other empirical measures. Pressed further, he argued that the key was that African-Americans or “any ethnic group who are down on their luck in a public area or on the street in a great number, people aren’t going to feel safe.” Because shelter clients do not mass on the street, race and class have to be CAP’s trigger issues.

Pressuring the Prominent

“CAP worked politically to pursuade the Tri-Jurisdictional Commission not to fund the task force. The commission is the regional conduit whose approval is required before the task force and other agencies and nonprofit groups serving the homeless can receive federal funding. Almost all government funding for homelessness is federal. The commission cut the task force in 2008, which was observed as a notable occasion in a CAP email to its members.

“CAP also pressured prominent Atlantans who had donated to the task force. These targets included Dan Cathy, president of Chic-fil-a and son of the company’s founder, executives at Whole Foods Market; and B Wardlaw of the Gertrude and William Wardlaw Fund, whose $1.4 million donation enabled the task force to purchase its interest in the Peachtree-Pine building in 1997. The effort to dissuade Cathy culminated in a meeting on July 3, 2007, in which Robinson, Orr and a bevy of other powerful business leaders evidently succeeded in pursuading Cathy to limit his support. The efforts to undermine private support for the task force even extended to lobbying other clients of task force lawyers to disparage the lawyers’ representation of the group.

“But the worst tactics have involved both overt and secret attempts to foreclose on the task force’s mortgage on the Peachtree-Pine building. The mortgage, from Mercy Housing, is for approximately $400,000. CAP set up a coorporate entity called “477 Peachtree” to use to purchase the note, had prestigious Atlanta law firm Troutman Sanders draw up a 25-page sale agreement, and at the beginning of 2009 approached Mercy Housing about buying the mortgage. But Mercy Housing said no.

“CAP then recruited one of its members, Manny Fialkow, to purchase the note. He was able to do so, and he then foreclosed on the task force. At this writing, the task force’s threat to include Fialkow in the fairhousing lawsuit and court action has suspended the foreclosure.

“Obviously the long fight between CAP and the task force is not over. The task force is seeking triple damages, and CAP wants to put the task force off of Peachtree Street and out of business. Stay tuned.

Note: Larry Keating has captured CAP’s history of hatred against poor people. This article from the scholarly Keating reveals these charlatans to be the cobras that they are. Our thanks to The Open Door and to Larry Keating for telling the naked truth.

James Wilson Beaty
Jeremiah 22.16
October 15, 2010