Olympic benefits disputed

An Atlanta housing activist is questioning why her mayor chose to glorify the Olympics while on a recent trip to Vancouver.

Anita Beaty, executive director of the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless, told the Georgia Straight she "could not believe" Atlanta's mayor Shirley Franklin was in town. A few hours before Beaty called from the Georgia state capital on May 8, Franklin gave a speech at a Vancouver Board of Trade breakfast in Canada Place. Near the end of the speech, Franklin said that if she had the chance to host the Olympics all over again (after Atlanta in 1996) she "absolutely" would.

Beaty said Atlanta has an Olympic legacy that is forgettable.

"There were thousands of people displaced, and the housing market in Atlanta will never be the same," she said. "The Olympics steamroller destroyed, and will have destroyed, all of our public housing. The destruction began with the Olympics and she's finishing it off now.í¢â‚¬ ¦I don't know what possessed you-all to go for the [2010] bid."

These comments were made the same day the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games released its 196-page business plan and games-budget document, which includes an operating budget of $1.63 billion to host the Games and a venue-construction budget of $580 million–the latter having increased 23 percent from the 2002 venue budget of $470 million. The newly unveiled operating budget represents a 20-percent increase over the original figure of $1.35 billion.

"Our objective has been to produce a balanced budget with a healthy contingency and we have delivered that plan today," VANOC CEO John Furlong said in a news release.

Franklin said Atlanta has the "third-largest concentration of Fortune 500 companies", including Atlanta-based Coca-Cola Ltd., sponsors of the board of trade event and a major sponsor at Atlanta 1996. "Coca-Cola and the city of Atlanta have grown up together," Franklin said. "And 1996 was one of our proudest times." The beverage maker first sponsored the Olympic Games in 1928.

Before being elected mayor in 2001, Franklin worked with the Atlanta organizing committee. She claimed she revived the city through "public-private partnerships" and engaging the private sector, helped reduce crime, and reinvigorated Atlanta's inner-city areas, including Eastlake.

"That was an area known as Little Vietnam in the '80s," Franklin said, with no response from the crowd.

However, Franklin also acknowledged there were tough issues, such as homelessness and the creation of temporary housing, as the local authorities and the organizing committee sought to relocate those losing their homes.

"Anyone who was dislocated, including pets, found housing supported by the organizing committee," she said. "However, we didn't transition temporary solutions to a permanent [housing] solution."

Beaty said she does not see Franklin's purported rejuvenation of Eastlake, something akin to Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, as a success story.

"They turned that public housing into mixed-income housing and they displaced 600 families, of whom very few have been allowed to return, even at the same income level," she said. "It is truly interesting what happens when, first of all, the folks who put these large projects up in the '40s, '50s, and even '60s were doing that to keep poor people–in Atlanta, mainly African-Americans–out of white neighbourhoods. The projects were chosen because they weren't generally in residential communities, and so those could be concentrated in those communities. Now she [Franklin] boasts that we've concentrated poverty. But the concentration of poverty was done by the very same people who want that land."

She added that like Vancouver, Atlanta is moving toward "in-town housing" and densification, something Mayor Sam Sullivan has already branded as ecodensity.

"Suburban people who have good incomes don't want to fight the traffic, which is murderous in Atlanta," Beaty said. "So in-town living has become very popular since the Olympics. In some ways it worked, but suburbanites don't want to rub elbows with those dirty poor people. So next time we have a census, I don't think the African-American majority will prevail. She [Franklin] has presided over the gentrification of the city and the whitening of the demographic."

The next VANOC board meeting takes place May 16.