On Atlanta Homelessness, Skepticism Over Claims of Progress

August 2nd, 2013

Atlanta city officials say progress is being made towards its goal of housing 800 homeless people by the end of the year. They say 320 homeless people have been housed since the spring, putting the city’s ongoing Unsheltered No More initiative just a hundred people shy of its goal.

But some are questioning the city’s actual impact.

“It’s a shell game,” said said Anita Beaty, executive director of the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless, the largest shelter in the city. “Saying you’re going to take 800 people is a drop in the bucket. It’s not a number of people who are homeless or consistently homeless. It’s an experience that more and more people who are losing their housing and losing their job have.”

The city has spent much of the initiative’s three million dollar Bloomberg grant on hiring a team whose primary responsibility is to set up partnerships and capitalize on existing resources.

Beaty says that was already being done.

“It’s just another group coming in to say they’re coordinating. I don’t know how much coordinating they actually did.”

She notes roughly 500 of the 700 people the city includes in the Unsheltered No More tally gained housing and long-term support services through a federal program for homeless veterans.

“VASH (Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing) vouchers are going to get to Atlanta anyway. I mean, the President has promised that. And there are all kinds of ways – politically as well as bureaucratically – to make sure those vouchers get to Atlanta without using the three million dollars to hire high-paid folk to do it.”

She says the city’s team is going over a lot of old ground, like creating new homeless registries – data that, Beaty says, has been around for years.

“There’s no mystery about what we need. There never has been. They’re just over and over again new iterations of administrative costs from the city and others to drain off money that needs to be spent on direct services and housing – housing first with services attached.”

City officials say they’re actively partnering with private, public, and nonprofit entities to find additional housing and long-term support services, but Beaty’s Task Force isn’t one of them. That’s due in part to several pending lawsuits filed by the Task Force over alleged city interference with its funding.

Nonetheless, Beaty has called for greater coordination between the Task Force and the city. Initiative leader Susan Lampley says the city has plenty on its plate as it is, adding she may reach out to the Task Force during its next registry drive in January.