CASE STUDY ON HOMELESSNESS: ATLANTA 1996 SUMMER OLYMPICS

“Unfortunately, in the case of Atlanta, community groups such as the Metro Task Force for the Homeless did not mobilize until after the city was awarded the Olympics in 1990.”
(Inside the Olympic Industry, p. 133)

The announcement in September 1990 that Atlanta was to host the 1996 Summer Olympics was met with immediate protests from a coalition of community groups and service providers, including the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless, Open Door Community, Empty the Shelters, Concerned Black Clergy, and others.
An Olympic Conscience Coalition was formed, comprised of clergy, homeless activists, service providers, and residents of mostly poor neighborhoods. The group began to conduct research into the impacts of previous Games on communities. The Coalition had more than 300 organizations sign on, calling on the city to protect housing, civil rights, and social services for the poor and vulnerable.
“The actions of the task force… and other advocacy groups were not limited to lobbying and legal interventions. They organized numerous protests in response to the various city ordinances that targeted homeless people...”
(Inside the Olympic Industry, p. 140)

Empty the Shelters were youth organizers. They also established a Copwatch that helped gather evidence for a later federal lawsuit against the criminalization of the poor. They also devised an anti-Olympic mascot called ‘Spoilsport’.

“In September 1992, when the Olympic flag arrived, five thousand protesters assembled to draw public attention to the costs of hosting the Games… the organized labor movement also marched in protest at ACOG’s [Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games] failure to make a commitment to use union labor for construction of venues…
“In December 1992, about a hundred members of the Atlanta Olympics Conscience Coalition… held a protest inside the ACOG offices, and left with promises of regular community consultations… This coalition, together with Atlanta Neighborhoods United for Fairness (ANUF) and the Metropolitan Atlanta Task Force for the homeless, were the most active protest groups from 1992 on.
“The huge number of homeless people on Atlanta streets and in shelters, along with the poor state of existing low income housing, made this a central concern for advocacy groups. At the time of the bid, 30 % of the population lived below the poverty line and estimates of the number of homeless people ranged from 22,000 to 28,000…”
(Inside the Olympic Industry, pp. 134-135)

“The task force on homeless proposed that the homeless be provided with safe accommodation: emergency shelter during the Olympics and permanent low-income housing out of the athletes and media villages afterward… Atlanta Olympic organizers ignored all of these… Four shelters were lost, and church basements formerly used by the homeless were converted into backpacker accommodations during the Games. Human service organizations were offered financial incentives to convert their services for two weeks to accommodate tourists rather than low-income people, and some agencies accepted offers of free Olympic tickets and other benefits.”
(Inside the Olympic Industry, p. 136)

“From the outset, controversy surrounded the $209 million Olympic Stadium to be built in the suburb of Summerhill, one of the oldest Black neighborhoods in Atlanta… Summerhill neighborhood groups, some of the earliest organized Olympic critics, mobilized as soon as the venue was announced in 1990…”
(Inside the Olympic Industry, p. 137)

Joining in this campaign was an alliance of Black Democrats & Republicans, led by Martin Luther King III, who criticized ACOG for its elitism & greed, as well as its exploitation of his late father as a symbol to sell Atlanta.

“A trend that Task Force for the Homeless leaders termed ‘the criminalization of poverty’ showed clear signs of escalating shortly after Atlanta won the bid. Atlantans already had experience with ‘street sweeps’ during hallmark events; the task force documented the jailing of homeless people for 3-6 days during the Super Bowl, the Democratic National Convention… City ordinances adopted in 1991 criminalized a wide range of common survival strategies of people living in poverty: ‘aggressive’ panhandling, loitering, ‘camping’ in public, ‘remaining’ in a parking lot without having a car parked there, being in an abandoned building… urinating in public… A bylaw prohibiting lying down on a park bench was repealed in 1993 as a result of the efforts of the task force. Park benches were then renovated so that an arm every three feet prevented people from lying down…
“In 1993, there was an unsuccessful attempt to criminalize poverty at the state level: the ‘Trash Bill’ would have made it unlawful to remove any item from a county-provided trash container, with a fine of up to $100…
“A 1994 measure passed by Georgia’s general assembly empowered police to enforce the county loitering ordinance by arresting violators on site; formerly, police had simply cited violators… the arrests of more than nine thousand homeless African American men—who not coincidently made up about 90 % of homeless people in Atlanta—under these ordinances were recorded by the task force.”
(Inside the Olympic Industry, p. 138)

“The criminalization of homelessness was a key feature of the 1996 Atlanta Games: 9,000 arrest citations were issued to homeless people in Atlanta in 1995 & 1996 as part of the Olympic Games ‘clean up’…”
(Fair Play for Housing Rights, p. 113)

“Police in Atlanta were revealed to be mass-producing arrest citations with the following information pre-printed: African-American, Male, Homeless. The citations were left blank for the charge and the date and the arresting officer’s name.”
(Fair Play for Housing Rights, p. 124)

“In another official ‘cleanup’ initiative in 1995 and 1996, Atlanta police implemented the city’s goal of driving homeless people out of town. Hundreds were taken by truck to the outskirts of the city and threatened with six months jail if they returned. In a sinister cooptation of community groups, Project Homeward Bound provided between $500,000 and $750,000 to nonprofit organizations to bus homeless people out of town if they certified that they would not return. As Beaty explained, the official ‘euphemistic’ rationale was ‘to return homeless people to their original support systems’.”
(Inside the Olympic Industry, p. 139)

Despite the large and vocal opposition to the Atlanta Olympics that began after the bid process, the city’s poor and homeless were hit hard.
“There was… widespread displacements, approximately 30,000 poor families and other individuals, forced from their homes by Olympic gentrification, the demolition of public housing, rental speculation…”
(Fair Play for Housing Rights, p. 113)

“Throughout Atlanta, many landlords also refused to renew leases, or cancelled agreements and raised rents in a speculative move to cash in on the Olympic Games housing potential. Increases in rents were recorded… with landlords displacing thousands in order to rent to Olympic Game visitors.”
(Fair Play for Housing Rights, p. 123)

Anti-Poverty Committee (APC)
www.apc.resist.ca

PIVOT Legal Society
www.pivotlegal.org

Sources

Fair Play for Housing Rights; Olympic Games & Housing Rights, Centre on Housing Rights & Evictions, www.cohre.org

Inside the Olympic Industry; Power, Politics and Activism, by Helen Jefferson Lenskyj, State University of New York Press, Albany NY 2000