Atlanta's Answer to America's Urban Transit Apartheid

[Joanne98]

Denuded of their manufacturing sectors, urban America is the scene of a new gold rush. Chambers of commerce and speculators are scrambling for the last goodies, many of which are literally nailed down -- the assets of her public transit, public health and public education systems, her tax revenue streams and the land beneath her remaining public housing. The "regionalization" and eventual privatization of these lucrative assets is high on the agenda of chambers of commerce everywhere, and protecting them is seems not even on the horizon of the black political elite.

In Atlanta state and exurban public officials and business interests have carjacked billions in transit assets the region's two majority black counties have taxed themselves to build and operate over a generation while the black political elite is silent or complicit. Leadership is emerging from the communities themselves, who have offered a concrete plan for the democratic development of the region, but will the black political elite prove an ally or a stubborn obstacle?

Atlanta's Answer to America's Urban Transit Apartheid

by BAR Managing Editor Bruce Dixon

The contours of urban apartheid in twenty-first century America are depressingly familiar. Where post WW2 government spending built the interstate highway system and the suburbs to fuel white flight from the cities, the dispensation for the new century involves massive diversions of public resources toward the objective of disempowering and expelling the black and poor from central cities.

Far from being a problem to flee from any more, the central cities now have what America's elite covet. Everything in the US runs on oil, but dense urban populations enable a far more sustainable transit infrastructure in this era of increasingly expensive fuel. The cities also have public assets in the form of public health networks and infrastructure, tax revenue streams, public education systems, public housing and public lands, all of which chambers of commerce nationwide are eager to privatize.

Given this agenda, any degree of democratic control over local resources by the current residents of inner cities is an obstacle to the goals of gentrification and privatization which are the intended future for the nation's cities. And while chambers of commerce are traditionally Republican bastions, Democrats, have often been enthusiastic boosters of handing the public assets of cities over to private control.

On the federal level, the cynically misnamed HOPE 6 (Housing Opportunities For People Everywhere) law, passed during the Clinton administration, enabled the destruction of tens of thousands of units of public housing nationwide, and the unmonitored dispersal of hundreds of thousands of their former residents into existing stocks of substandard housing by erasing the requirement that replacement housing be built when such units are demolished. Rather than protect residents of the cities who made their own careers possible, black Democratic elites in cities across the nation have more often than not been eagerly complicit in the looting of urban resources which accompanies gentrification. Communities looking to their local black Democrats for leadership, or just for useful information to protect themselves against dispossession and dispersal have been repeatedly disappointed and betrayed.

Corporate media do their part to ensure that the only voices heard in public discussion of how cities should be developed are members of their own chorus, lauding the virtues of the elite's economic plan for the cities, which in every case amount to moving poorer people out and richer ones in, giving the process names like “revitalization”.

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