Metropolis: Movin’ on down

Gwinnett Place Mall is like your aged but still sprightly aunt. There’s life in the old place, once the crown jewel of Atlanta suburban malls. But things are going downhill fast. Empty stores — both in the mall and, even more noticeably, among the out-parcel properties — scream the message of decay. And something else is going on besides the normal life cycle of a shopping center.</
Hector Guerrero is one indicator of that “something else.” The rich are fleeing, many to posh intown digs, leaving the burbs to folks such as Guerrero. Along with his wife and two infant daughters, he arrived at the mall on a recent weekday afternoon in his bright red 15-year-old Ford F-250 pickup. Happy to chat because, he says, “I came to the United States legally 20 years ago.”</
Guerrero is the new face of Gwinnett County. Estimates are that by the end of the decade, Gwinnett’s majority will be minorities. Just three decades ago, the county was 96 percent “non-Hispanic white.”</
Guerrero signals another fact about Gwinnett. His family, which also includes two older children, gets by on “almost” $40,000 year. “But not always that much, I have to tell you,” says Guerrero, who cobbles together his livelihood from a mix of lawn-care and home-repair work.</
The family lives in what was once an upscale Lawrenceville neighborhood near Beaver Ruin Road built in the 1970s. It’s no longer upscale. Most of the homes on his block, Guerrero says, are rentals. “I’m the rich man” in the neighborhood, he quips. “I work.”</
David Sjoquist, director of Georgia State’s Fiscal Research Center, calls the declining subdivisions on the outskirts of the city the “new tenements.” In other words, poverty is moving out of intown and into the burbs. It’s going to change your life, like it or not.</
Meanwhile, leaders – from governors to mayors to business and civic honchos – don’t want to pay attention to what’s happening to poor families, says Yanique Redwood, who manages a Georgia State project that is trying to preserve a mostly poor residential area near Turner Field. She says economics and development policies are driving the poor away from their homes in the city and into counties such as Clayton and DeKalb. “It’s time they [officials] wake up to what their policies are doing,” she says.</
The Brookings Institution recently published a wake-up report, “Two Steps Back: City and Suburban Poverty Trends,” which chronicles a seismic shift in America over a six-year period. In 1999, American cities and their suburbs had roughly equal numbers of poor residents – 10.4 million in the cities, 10.3 million in the suburbs. But, by 2005, the suburbs were far ahead (or behind) in the race, with 12.2 million poor compared with 11 million in the central urban cores.</
Atlanta mirrors the trends – notably our metro-wide poverty rate, as with other Southern and Midwestern metro areas, rose faster than cities in the West and Northeast.</
And we stood out, so to speak, in a few areas. Our suburban child-poverty rate was one of the four highest in the nation – 13 percent – compared with an overall suburban poverty rate of 10 percent.</
The causes aren’t hard to fathom. “The area around the city center is booming,” Sjoquist says. “People are tired of commuting. The notion of urban living has caught on. That creates fundamental economic imbalances. We’re tearing down older neighborhoods and building new housing for affluent residents.”</
It’s called gentrification. While its intown impact is obvious – new lofts, towering condos, swank apartments and mushrooming McMansions – what’s happening outside the Perimeter is harder to spot. Sprawl’s blanket can hide a lot.</
The standard mythology in Georgia – and the rest of “red” America – is that the poor deserve their lot because they made “bad choices.” A corollary is that the economy is booming – as long as you’re already wealthy. Thus, legislators have no qualms about denying health care to impoverished children, or proposing tax “reforms” that would enrich the already rich and grind those already ground down to almost nothing. These same folks – who would never admit to being evolutionists while in earshot of the Christian Coalition – are social Darwinists who see society as a savage battlefield where only the most avaricious have a right to survive.</
The well-heeled, while decrying the “bad choices” of the poor, ignore inconvenient facts such as that the most certain indicator of a child’s future income is the wealth of his parents.</
The gulf that divides the cultures of rich and poor isn’t bridged by the suburbanization of poverty. A Stanford University team studied the health of 8,000 poor people in 82 neighborhoods over a 17-year period. The conclusion was that the poor living in higher-income neighborhoods had death rates as much as 60 percent higher than the poor living in low-income areas. A similar study, by the University of California at Berkeley, found the poor living in affluent areas had death rates five times higher than those in working-class neighborhoods.</
“Just because you live near all of the things that go along with wealth doesn’t mean you’ll have access to those things, especially health care,” says Georgia State’s Redwood.</
For Redwood, the tragedy of poor Atlantans is that moving to Clayton or Gwinnett counties holds little promise and much despair.</
“When they tear down older neighborhoods, when the Atlanta Housing Authority demolishes public housing, the poor have nowhere to go but out of the city,” Redwood says. “Social networks are broken, and for the poor, these networks are essential. Suburban counties can’t provide services and transportation that are available in the city.”</
So what’s the future? An intown Atlanta back-to-back and belly-to-belly with affluent yuppies and empty nesters – almost all of whom shun transit, bring their cars and then grouse about the terminally clogged city streets. And suburbs, where the poor are isolated, cut off from transportation and social services. I guess for the very affluent there is a benefit – the suburban poor are harder to see.</
Overall, it’s not a pretty picture. Put another way, just how will the Piedmont Driving Club matrons survive when their maids can no longer afford a 25-mile trip to work?