Why Affordable Housing Advocates Worry Atlanta's Unhoused Population Is Growing

Yahoo

31-01-2025

It's been about three years since Janice Ruff reported her former landlord to the Atlanta Police Department's housing code enforcement division for refusing to make repairs to her old apartment. That landlord received an estimated $3,500 fine, according to Ruff, who said he evicted her a short time later for having a 'smart mouth.'
She's been homeless ever since.
Capital B Atlanta spotted the 62-year-old Ruff using a walker to travel down Cleveland Avenue on Wednesday. Advocates say she's one of a growing number of unhoused Black Atlantans struggling to get back on their feet who list the higher cost of rent and lack of affordable housing as their biggest obstacles.
'It's real hard out here,' Ruff told Capital B Atlanta. 'You can't find no low-income apartments. … You got to have enough income. You have to have enough [security deposit] to be able to get an apartment.'
Atlanta's homeless population appears to be on the rise for the third consecutive year, according to experts who say low-income, often Black, city residents who've lived here most of their lives make up the majority of those dwelling on the streets, in shelters, and in extended-stay hotels.
The homeless aid group known as Partners for HOME and its affiliate partners in Atlanta Continuum of Care conducted their annual point-in-time census count of the metro area's unhoused community this week from Monday through Wednesday.
The count is submitted annually to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to determine the number of people experiencing homelessness across the country.
The federal government uses this data to allocate resources to local aid providers. The official homelessness count total won't be released until later this year, but aid group leaders say they anticipate another surge.
The homeless count conducted in 2023 revealed a 33% year-over-year rise in the number of unhoused people living in the Atlanta metro area. Last year, their ranks grew by 7% to nearly 2,900, enough to make Atlanta's homeless population the 25th largest in the nation, according to U.S. News & World Report.
Black people, who constitute about 47% of the city's population, made up roughly 86% of the city's homeless population last year, according to Partners for HOME.
'My guess is that we will probably see, at minimal, a 7% increase yet again, if not more, but what that number would be is really too early to tell,' Raphael Holloway, CEO of the Gateway Center, a homeless service provider that manages four local homeless services locations, told Capital B Atlanta on Wednesday.
Holloway and other homeless aid advocates stressed the need to wait for their full count before precise deductions can be made, but based their preliminary conclusions on their own observations over the past year.
Multiple aid workers said tent cities have grown larger, more visible, and harder for public officials to ignore downtown near Atlanta City Hall, the Georgia State Capitol, and the headquarters of the Gateway Center, which manages roughly 600 total beds in the city.
The problem appears to be worsening, according to Tracy Woodard, program manager for InTown Cares, a nonprofit that specializes in working with unhoused residents who've been homeless for extended periods of time.
Woodard expressed confidence that this year's final homeless count will 'definitely increase' and said more than half of the unhoused people she encounters regularly are 'Grady babies,' legacy Atlanta residents who are overwhelmingly Black and often low-income.
Woodard said the greatest cause of their displacement is the high cost of rent. The median rent price for a one-bedroom apartment in Atlanta reached nearly $1,700 this month, according to Zumper.com, up 10.7% from 2019.
Rent prices in metro Atlanta leveled off last year since peaking in 2022, according to an Atlanta Regional Commission report, but rates have remained higher than they were prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
'Before the pandemic. I would work with these people who were getting a Social Security check, which is $750, $800 a month, and I could find them a room for maybe $500 a month,' Woodard said. '[Today], you can't find that within 50 miles of Atlanta.'
One of the more distressing realities of Atlanta's problem with homelessness is the growing number of unhoused people who are gainfully employed but still don't earn enough to afford rent in the city where they work.
Woodard estimates half of the unhoused people with whom she works have full-time jobs. She said many work in food service, hospitality, and service sector industries that used to pay enough to live in Atlanta before low-income housing vanished. She said policymakers concerned about maximizing real estate profits need to consider who's going to do lower-paying service industry work in a city where many low-income residents don't own vehicles.
'They're making $15 an hour. Where are they going to stay?' she said. 'Are they going to drive two hours each way? … No. You need to have something that's in the city so that you can keep the city running.'
Both Woodard and Holloway praised Mayor Andre Dickens for prioritizing affordable housing construction, but they also expressed concern that the many units being built are priced too high.
Those housing costs also affect folks who help the unhoused, according to Holloway, who said many homeless aid workers are leaving the sector because it doesn't pay well enough to keep up with the cost of living.
'You have this dynamic of the individuals that are providing the service also now going through struggles to work in this space because of the cost of living and the impact inflation is having on their lives,' he said. 'It's becoming more and more difficult to even draw people to want to work in the homelessness space.'
Increasing funding for substance abuse and mental health training is one of the main proposals recommended by Holloway and Woodard in addition to building more low-income housing and adopting 'Housing First' aid policy initiatives.
Ruff said most of Atlanta's so-called affordable housing units aren't affordable for people like her.
'Help me find a low-income apartment, and I'll bet you I pay my rent every month,' she said.
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