| Atlanta's Olympic Legacy: More Poverty And Less Freedom The Salt Lake Tribune March 26, 1999 by Shawn Foster, THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE In many U.S. cities, being poor and living on the streets are enough to land you in jail. It only gets worse when the Olympics are in town. "Before the Olympics, the city of Atlanta passed six ordinances that essentially made it a crime to be homeless," said Gerald Weber, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia. "The city even offered free bus tickets to the homeless to leave the city." Weber and Anita Beatty, executive director of the Atlanta Taskforce for the Homeless, spoke Thursday night at a public forum at St. Mark's Cathedral in Salt Lake City. The gathering was organized by the ACLU of Utah, Utah Housing Coalition and Salt Lake Impact 2002 and Beyond, a coalition representing ethnic-minority and low-income communities. The pair listed a litany of ills that Atlanta's poor and middle-income families faced in the years before and after the Games. Beatty remembered that she could not believe the news in 1990 that Atlanta had won the bid to host the Olympics. "We couldn't understand why we would even go after the bid when we had the kind of poverty we did," Beatty said. "Thirty percent in Atlanta lives below the poverty line." But the Olympics did come to Georgia, and business leaders there wanted the world to see a sanitized version of their state. Although Atlanta's six homeless ordinances were eventually thrown out by the courts, in the year before the Games, Beatty said that 10,000 homeless men were wrongfully arrested. The Atlanta police, she said, had stacks of citations with "African-American male" and the charge pre-printed. And according to Weber, training manuals for Olympics security officers included instructions on who to arrest: non-white males. There were, Weber said, some successes for those interested in defending constitutional rights. The Atlanta Organizing Committee agreed to allow protesters in 14 areas around the Olympic venues. But the legacy of the Olympics in Atlanta, Beatty said, has been even greater poverty and erosion of freedom. Some Atlanta businesses, she said, have attempted to feed the Olympic "lock-em-up" mentality by pushing for more street sweeps of the homeless. Another result of the Olympics, was the loss of four shelters with 300 beds that closed when they were sold to make room for athletic arenas. Then there are the landlords who thought they could become millionaires by kicking out their tenants and renting out the apartments to Olympics fans. "We've lost 10,000 units of low-income housing beginning two years before the Olympics," Beatty said. "They forced middle-income people out. They forced low-income people into the streets. Then after the Olympics, no one wanted to rent the apartments. We've seen community after community destroyed." Atlanta is not alone among U.S. cities in its treatment of the homeless. And the Olympics are not the only cause for mistreatment of America's poor. A 1996 report from the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty examined how 50 city governments addressed homelessness. Researchers found that more than half of the municipalities had conducted homeless sweeps and 38 percent had initiated crackdowns on street people, even though the daily cost of keeping the homeless in jail is about 25 percent higher than the cost of providing shelter, food and transportation. Even so, Beatty warned, the Olympic organizers are a formidable foe for low-income advocates. "The punishment that is meted out for criticism is incredible," she said. "My organization has been audited by everybody who has a calculator." But Weber had a message of hope. Maybe the bribery scandal that has plagued the Salt Lake Olympic Organizing Committee will be a good thing. "It seems there is more willingness to look at possible problems {for the Salt Lake Olympics}," Weber said, "if only to minimize any more negative publicity." ____________________________ | 
