The Black residents fighting Atlanta to stay in their homes – Al Jazeera English

Atlanta, Georgia Tanya Washington remembers moving into Peoplestown, a predominantly working-class and historically Black neighbourhood about two miles southeast of Atlantas downtown, a decade ago.

Across the street from her home was an old Black church, which residents say was at least half a century old. I moved in on a Saturday, recalls the law professor at Georgia State University, who is originally from Washington, DC.

She is sitting in the living room of her 100-year-old home, where she lives with her husband and two children, aged four and 18. A television plays muted footage of Black Lives Matter protests in the city; book-lined shelves add cosiness to the room decorated with framed family portraits on the blue walls.

On Sunday morning when I woke up, I heard the sounds of old spirituals like my grandmother used to sing in her choir when I would visit her in South Georgia, the 50-year-old recalls.

I was thinking What is going on? I thought maybe the Lord was calling me home; maybe I died and didnt even realise it.

Tanya Washingtons 100-year-old home [Lynsey Weatherspoon/Al Jazeera]She chuckles at this memory of a neighbourhood that quickly became her home. It was a beautiful church. I thought how incredible it was that I got to wake up and listen to this every Sunday morning.

But the scene she describes bears no resemblance to the cookie-cutter suburban houses that now sit across the street, where the old church once stood. The songs that spilled into Washingtons bedroom with the sunshine each Sunday morning have been replaced with silence.

About two years ago, the churchs owners sold the building to private realtors, who, driven by the citys development plans, have targeted Peoplestown over the past few years. The pews were moved out onto the lawn, from where they were sold, one by one.

Washington watched as the church was demolished and residential homes were built in its place. It was not an unusual sight in a neighbourhood where at least every other home has been sold off, renovated or demolished and replaced with a larger, more expensive house.

The newcomers trickling into Peoplestown to settle in these properties are more affluent, and often whiter, than the mostly working-class residents who lived in the neighbourhood for many decades.

The noises are different. The people are different. The whole environment of the neighbourhood is completely different now, Washington says.

New houses where the old church once stood [Lynsey Weatherspoon/Al Jazeera]It is a process of gentrification that has already transformed the city of Atlanta and major cities across the US intertwining with unresolved racial injustices built into the countrys foundations and resulting in mass displacement of low-income and Black residents.

Peoplestown is one of the last historically Black neighbourhoods to be targeted for gentrification in Atlanta, which has one of highest rates of income inequality in the US and was the fourth-fastest gentrifying city in the country between 2000 and 2014. But while it arrived later than in other parts of the city, when gentrification came, it came with force.

In 1974, Atlanta became the first major southern city to elect an African American mayor, and every mayor since has been African American. The city celebrates itself as home to scores of civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr and John Lewis. Its numerous Black-owned businesses and its strong Black middle and upper class have earned the city the title of Americas Black Mecca.

But this carefully constructed image clashes sharply with the bright red signs staked into the lawns on Washingtons block, where just four homes remain where once at least two dozen had stood.

Mayor Bottoms, stop displacing Black families, one of the signs reads, referring to Atlantas current mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms. Stop predatory use of eminent domain, is printed onto another.

Signs in the front garden of one of the homes still standing on the block [Lynsey Weatherspoon/Al Jazeera]In 2012, a series of storms resulted in severe flooding on Washingtons block, as runoff rainwater overwhelmed a combined water and sewage system built beneath it and caused a major overspill. At least six homes were damaged.

The city covered the costs of cleaning and repairing the damaged homes, at least one of which was flooded with several inches of sewage, as the citys failure to upgrade the system had caused the overspills. But residents say the city did not finish all the repairs and in response several residents sued.

About a year later, in 2013, the city offered to buy the damaged homes as part of a settlement with the families and in order to construct a pond on the location of the overspill to mitigate flooding in the neighbourhood. The city allegedly told the residents that if they did not accept the citys offer, they would end up receiving far less in the future and warned them the city was planning to eventually take the whole block of homes anyway.

While a few of the families settled with the city at this time and parted with their homes, most opted to refuse the citys offers and stay. In 2014, however, the city approved the use of eminent domain which allows the government to expropriate private property for public use to construct a pond and park at the site. In 2015, the other families on the block received letters from the city informing them it would need to acquire their properties.

The green area where more than two dozen homes once stood and where the city is planning to construct a pond and park [Lynsey Weatherspoon/Al Jazeera]In place of their homes, it planned to develop a $65m green infrastructure project that is expected to include a Japanese garden, gazebos, several retention ponds and bioretention areas to treat stormwater.

The decision altered the lives of the families on the block, most of whom buckled under the threat of the citys eminent domain ordinance and gave up their homes. Residents who settled with the city were made to sign non-disclosure agreements banning them from sharing the amount they had agreed on with other residents.

There is still no pond or park in Peoplestown, but the planned project has already transformed the neighbourhood. Washingtons and just three other homes remain; all the others have been demolished and replaced by open green space.

It just didnt feel right, Washington reflects. My house was never damaged from the flooding. How do you go from wanting to buy a few homes to suddenly needing to take an entire block?

She suspected the city was abusing eminent domain to drive private investment in the neighbourhood so, along with a handful of other residents, she decided to challenge it.

What followed offered them an insight, they say, into the institutional racism and alleged corruption that has shaped Atlantas gentrification.

Decades of discrimination, racial injustice, and systematic neglect of low-income and Black neighbourhoods may have sealed the fate of Peoplestown long before the 2012 flood, but the residents of these four homes are determined to stay put.

The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s when Black Americans challenged the system of segregation commonly known as Jim Crow that was designed to limit their rights after centuries of slavery was accompanied by a process of white flight from the inner cities.

It was no different for Atlanta, even as, from the 1950s on, it referred to itself as the city that was too busy to hate and local leaders worked to build an image of the city as one of economic prosperity and racial progress.

Tanya Washington outside her house [Lynsey Weatherspoon/Al Jazeera]According to Kevin Kruse, professor of history at Princeton University who wrote a book on the white flight from Atlanta during desegregation in the 1950s and 60s, when African Americans were permitted to expand from the congested neighbourhoods they had been consigned to into formerly all-white parts of the city, they were threatened by white supremacists and their homes were bombed. But when terror campaigns and pleas to public officials failed, white residents packed up, sold their homes and deserted the city entirely.

By the 1970s, white people, with the help of government homeowner schemes that were denied to African Americans, had abandoned the inner cities en masse and established communities in the suburbs, with the aim of maintaining all-white neighbourhoods.

Since the countrys inception, wealth disparities have been shaped by racial injustices and discrimination. In 2016, the net worth of a typical white family was nearly 10 times greater than that of a Black family, according to the Brookings Institution, an American think-tank. So when white people left the inner cities, capital quickly followed.

Giant figures sculpted on Stone Mountain, Atlanta, Georgia, show Jefferson Davis, the only president of the Confederate States of America with Confederate Generals Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson [File: Fox Photos/Getty Images]Tea Troutman, an urban development researcher and Atlanta-based community organiser, tells Al Jazeera that as capital moved to the suburbs, industries and jobs that working-class city residents were dependent on followed suit. While it was predominantly white people leaving the cities, affluent flight also added to the capital drain, as higher-income Black and brown residents also left, Troutman says.

Deindustrialisation happened at the same time as capital flight, turning cities into these destitute spaces, Troutman explains.

Austerity policies were then rolled out in the latter part of the 1970s and accelerated in the 1980s when former US President Ronald Reagan slashed federal aid to cities; this resulted in dramatic cutbacks to social programmes that scores of already marginalised communities relied on and exacerbated social and economic issues in the cities.

One of the new houses built in the neighbourhood [Lynsey Weatherspoon/Al Jazeera]Over the past several decades, cities have attempted to attract outside investment to transform urban neglect and decay into development and renewal by luring wealthier and predominantly white people to return to the inner cities in order to increase the citys tax base especially in the form of sales and property taxes, which are major sources of revenue for local governments.

But as has become clear to some residents of Peoplestown, urban development and economic progress often begets displacement, dispossession, and increased violence for Black and low-income city residents.

Peoplestowns residents are all too familiar with the unjust patterns of urban development.

When city officials wanted to link downtown Atlanta to the expanding white suburbs in the 1950s, three major interstates were constructed in Peoplestown, Summerhill and Mechanicsville, ripping through the heart of these long-established communities and separating the sister neighbourhoods from each other.

In 1957, the city conceived of another urban renewal plan and bought up about 600 acres of land in portions of Summerhill, Mechanicsville, and Peoplestown, removing thousands of Black residents and closing more than 100 Black-owned businesses in order to make room for housing, businesses, schools and parks that would attract middle-income largely white families.

According to Larry Keating, a professor of city and regional planning at Georgia Tech Research Institute, the project was designed to also create a buffer between the low-income Black neighbourhoods and the central business district in one of many attempts to keep Atlantas downtown a desirable location for middle-class white people by expelling Black residents from the area.

The Atlanta Stadium in 1966 [File: Fox Photos/Getty Images]The project, however, never came to fruition and the massive lot of land stood vacant until 1964 when Ivan Allen Jr, Atlantas mayor at the time, decided to build a stadium, now the Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. Keating says the plan was likely envisaged to thwart community proposals to use the land for building public housing for low-income Black residents.

The trumpets of urban renewal and economic growth once again reverberated through the city while more Black residents saw their homes demolished for extra parking spaces around the stadium.

In 1966, the body of Harold Prather, an unarmed Black man, collapsed along with the homes, after a white police officer shot and killed the 25-year-old in Summerhill. Prather was stopped on a traffic violation and informed of an open warrant for his arrest. The young man ran from the police, who responded by shooting him in the hip and side.

Frustrations in the neighbourhood, which was settled in 1865 by formerly enslaved African Americans, had reached their boiling point and days-long protests and rioting erupted. When Mayor Allen attempted to pacify the protests by standing atop a police patrol car and speaking to the angry crowd through a megaphone, he was met with bricks, stones and bottles. The crowd drowned out his pleas for law and order by chanting Black power! White devil!

Mourners waiting for Dr Martin Luther Kings funeral cortege to pass outside Moorhouse College in Atlanta, Georgia on April 9, 1968 [File: Keystone/Getty Images]This process was replayed in cities across the United States. James Baldwin, the celebrated writer and activist, put it bluntly in 1963: Urban renewal means negro removal.

Following the same trend, in the 1990s, as Atlanta prepared to host the Olympic Games, the city once again took to bulldozers and demolished its public housing. Atlanta was the first American city to introduce public housing in 1935 and by 2011 it was also the first to have demolished all of it.

When the renewal plans for Atlantas dilapidated public housing were introduced, the low-income Black residents were promised affordable housing units in the new mixed-income apartments that were to be built on top of the rubble of their former homes.

But stringent screening processes, which barred low-income residents from returning if someone in their household had a criminal record or they did not have full employment, made it so very few displaced residents were permitted to return. Others received Section 8 vouchers, which subsidise costs in the private housing market; but which also limit the areas recipients can live in depending on which landlords accept the vouchers.

Many former public housing residents who were not eligible to return were made homeless. According to Troutman, some parts of Atlanta where public housing once stood are now gentrified and are the most expensive parts of the city, while other areas still remain completely vacant since the housing was demolished.

Atlantas Olympic Stadium is shown under construction in 1995 [File: John Bazemore/AP Photo]In the years leading up to the Olympics in 1996, city leaders once again loudly touted economic progress and marketed Atlanta as the cradle of the civil rights movement, while promising enormous benefits for the community. At the same time, roughly 30,000 low-income residents were evicted or displaced from the city.

The city moved to clean the streets of anything that contradicted the glossy spectacle of an up-and-coming international hub that Atlantas leaders intended to portray to the world. Thousands of homeless people, most of them African American, were unlawfully arrested and thrown into the newly built Atlanta City Detention Center, where their poverty would not distract from the citys newly polished image.

The city allocated more land for the construction of the Centennial Olympic Stadium, located adjacent to the Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, adding more displaced Black residents to the thousands who were expelled decades earlier. Peoplestown once again felt the heavy burden of Atlantas development.

According to Haythem Shata, an Atlanta-based civil engineer, the area where the Olympic Stadium now called Turner Field was to be built was plagued by historic flooding, documented from at least the 1950s, as the location was the site of a stream through which a large amount of run-off drainage passed.

The city, therefore, constructed two culverts, or channels, from the two major interstates to redirect the run-off water into a junction box located underneath Peoplestowns now-contested block to divert flooding from around the Olympic Stadium, says Bill Eisenhauer, an Atlanta-based engineer and analyst from the Metropolitan Atlanta Urban Watershed Institute.

The junction box was already the site where at least 145 kilometres (90 miles) of combined sewer lines join, before releasing into a large trunk line that runs partly down Atlanta Avenue, where Washingtons home is located, and into a combined sewer overflow basin and eventually into a wastewater treatment plant.

According to Eisenhauer and residents who lived in the neighbourhood at the time, before constructing the culverts to reroute the streams to Peoplestown, the Georgia Department of Transportation had assured the communities that a relief trunk line would be constructed from the junction box in Peoplestown, through Grant Park a wealthier and predominantly white community located about two miles from Peoplestown, and into the nearby combined sewer overflow basin in order to relieve the pressure on the combined sewer and water system in Peoplestown.

But the relief trunk was never built. They [the city] thought it was better to disrupt the lives of the poor and Black neighbourhood rather than the wealthy and white neighbourhood, says Columbus Ward, a prominent neighbourhood advocate and longtime resident of Peoplestown.

Despite the dramatic increase of water flow into the junction box, the city did not build additional stormwater storage capacity upstream from Peoplestown or add the relief trunk, Eisenhauer explains, causing the system to get overwhelmed during storms the pressure of which results in the lids of the junction box and manholes popping off and sewage spilling out into the neighbourhood.

Since Peoplestown sits on a low basin, the more the city was built up after the Olympics, the more Peoplestown was inundated with stormwater runoffs from the concrete that smothers the ground of the city. We have all of this development happening around us, but we still have that same stormwater sewage system that was not made to accommodate this much growth, Washington explains. So we end up with floodings.

After the 2012 flooding in Peoplestown, Kasim Reed, Atlantas mayor at the time, had hired a national consulting firm to estimate the cost of constructing the relief trunk line, according to Eisenhauer. But nothing came of it, likely because the construction of the trunk line would be too costly, Eisenhauer says.

According to residents, the city also fails to adequately clean the drains, which has compounded the problem. The city has created a problem and then they use that problem to further gentrification and displace us from our homes, Washington says.

A large cement lid, where the junction box is located and the source of the overspills, is perched atop the expansive grass stretching across Washingtons block, and sits in the backyard of Bertha and Robert Darden, an elderly couple who have lived in Peoplestown for three decades. Their quaint brick house is adjacent to Washingtons on the other end of the Atlanta Avenue stretch of the block.

Robert and Bertha Darden in front of their home [Lynsey Weatherspoon/Al Jazeera]I knew right when I saw this house that this was the one; this was where I was going to raise my children and build a family, Robert, 70, tells Al Jazeera. His living room is blanketed in a patchwork of framed photographs of his children and grandchildren; it feels like walking inside a family photo album.

The neighbourhood wasnt as safe back then as it is now. But it had everything that I needed, adds Robert, who had worked as an engineer for the city for decades. His home is also located walking distance from the Greater Christ Temple Holiness Church, where he has attended service since 1975 and where he met and fell in love with Bertha.

Their home was one of the houses damaged in the flooding in 2012. Sixty-five-year-old Bertha immediately feared that forcible displacement might follow.

The Dardens, along with the rest of Peoplestown, have watched as neighbourhoods around them have transformed over the last decade and a half; each following the same trend: Black and low-income residents pushed out while wealthier and mostly white residents replaced them.

In 2005, the BeltLine was conceived and exacerbated this cycle of gentrification that was already on a runaway train, Troutman tells Al Jazeera. The multibillion-dollar megaproject will ultimately connect 45 neighbourhoods to a 22-mile (35-km) loop of multi-use trails, parks and eventual street cars that follow abandoned railroad tracks that loop around the perimeter and throughout the core of Atlanta.

A section of old rail tracks is preserved next to the Atlanta BeltLine as the midtown skyline stands in the background [File: David Goldman/AP Photo]The BeltLine, which is expected to be completed in 2030, is touted as a project to improve transportation, establish green spaces and promote development and has become a major driver of gentrification in Atlanta.

The canopies of trees along the BeltLine shade the winding trails that slither through parks, upscale residential neighbourhoods and commercial areas lined with craft breweries, restaurants, and luxury apartments; city residents can bike to work or around the city on the trail. The project has painted a picturesque and charming image for the young and affluent professionals the city wants to attract.

But it has brought another wave of displacement for surrounding low-income and largely Black communities, triggering sharp increases in home values pushing out low-income renters who cannot afford the jump in rent and homeowners who cannot afford the increased property taxes.

Old Fourth Ward, considered the ground zero of the BeltLines development, was an historic Black neighbourhood in the heart of Atlanta with a rich and vibrant history; it is the birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr and the home of the famous Ebenezer Baptist Church, where he served as pastor up until his assassination in 1968.

The neighbourhood, which is situated along the eastside trail, is now used as a precautionary tale for other Black neighbourhoods bracing for the hardships that follow in the BeltLines path.

While Old Fourth Ward was neglected for decades, nowadays large multi-storey homes, townhomes and condos are built alongside old shotgun houses, while some of the citys most popular restaurants and bars are located in the area. Street art is splashed around the neighbourhood, with a mural of George Floyd painted onto the side of a building and, just down the street, another building has Black Futures Matter: End Mass Incarceration etched across its length.

Like other neighbourhoods around the BeltLine, the Black population in Old Fourth Ward has steadily declined, while the white population continues to increase. In 2000, 76 percent of the 12,444 residents in the neighbourhood were Black and just 16 percent were white.

In 2015, however, the population had increased to 14,321 people, but the Black population had shrunk to 49.5 percent and the white population rose to 39 percent. Over the same period, median household income had more than doubled, from $19,614 to $42,627.

A pedestrian walks along the BeltLine, a transportation project being built within the old rail corridor which will eventually connect 45 neighbourhoods with public use trails and a light rail line, in Atlanta [File: David Goldman/AP Photo]Along the Southwest segment of the BeltLine, which the city broke ground on earlier this year, surrounding neighbourhoods, which includes Mechanicsville, saw median sale prices jump 68 percent between 2011 and 2015. Peoplestown is also located on the south end of the BeltLine.

According to Troutman, the housing market collapse in 2008 added gasoline to the fire that was already ripping through Atlanta. The city, which has a strong legacy of Black homeownership, was hit hard. About a quarter of a million residents lost their homes to foreclosures and many others were targeted by private investors who swooped in to take advantage of the crisis.

You saw a lot of people being approached to sell their homes around this time, recalls Ward, the neighbourhood advocate. And this was when a lot of people were vulnerable to selling their homes because they could no longer afford them.

We also saw a lot of city code enforcers coming around at this time, he adds. They would tell people who already couldnt afford their taxes and bills that they had to paint their houses or install a new roof. It almost seemed like everyone was just coming together for the sole purpose of kicking people out the neighbourhood.

But nothing prepared Peoplestowns residents for the drastic changes that were about to take place.

Many of the residents of the contested block in Peoplestown had initially vowed to stick together and fight the city, Bertha says. But after 2015, residents buckled, one by one, settled with the city and moved out.

A lot of the residents in Peoplestown are senior citizens, Bertha, an evangelist minister, explains. They didnt have the energy or the resources to fight the city and they gave up and left.

It was really hard for us, she continues. You would leave in the morning and a house would be there, and then youd come back in the afternoon and the same house would be demolished into rubble.

Robert and Bertha Darden with their family in front of their home [Lynsey Weatherspoon/Al Jazeera]The rest of the neighbourhood, meanwhile, was aggressively pressured by private realtors to sell their homes, the prices of which are expected to dramatically jump in value after the construction of the pond and park. Residents continue to receive phone calls several times a week, regular emails and even real estate postcards that display pictures of their own houses, urging them to sell.

Youre being targeted in this predatory process, and at the same time the neighbourhood is changing around you, says Troutman, who has worked with the community in Peoplestown. Theres something that weighs on your soul and spirit when you look up and everything you loved about your community has dried up whether its the people you knew for years who are being displaced or the places you frequented that made the community a home for you.

But overwhelmingly its the pressures of being poor and the pressures of being trapped in an undervalued and underserved community that lead people to sell their homes, Troutman adds. Private realtors will then flip the properties, selling them for sometimes double or triple the amount, residents say.

According to Robert, families in Atlanta are experiencing intergenerational displacement, and some of the residents who have recently been displaced from Peoplestown had settled into the community after gentrification pushed them out of Old Fourth Ward.

Robert and Bertha Darden with their family in front of their home [Lynsey Weatherspoon/Al Jazeera]Bertha and Robert knew they had to make a decision to pack up and leave or stay and fight. They had no reason to believe they would have a chance at winning and challenging the city would inevitably cause financial and mental hardships during what were supposed to be their golden years.

We didnt have the answer so we turned to God, Bertha says.

They prayed for direction. God spoke to my heart one night and told me to stand still, Bertha says; she did not know that Robert had prayed and received the same answer that night.

The next morning Robert came to me and held my hands and told me: Were in a fight and in order to win we got to stay in the fight. We need to stand still, Bertha recalls. I was shocked. God had spoken to us and we were told clearly not to move.

The Bible verse that convinced Robert and Bertha to stand still [Jaclynn Ashly/Al Jazeera]Bertha pauses from her story to grab a Bible from her living room table; she sifts through the pages until she finds the scripture that she and Robert had both read. Smacking her finger onto the page, she reads out loud: And Moses said unto the people, Fear ye not, stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord, which he will shew to you to day: for the Egyptians whom ye have seen to day, ye shall see them again no more for ever.

The Lord shall fight for you, and ye shall hold your peace. And the Lord said unto Moses, Wherefore Criest thou unto me? Speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward.

This scripture is from the Book of Exodus in the Old Testament and describes the ancient Israelites deliverance from centuries of enslavement in Egypt.

God told us to stand still. So why would I ever consider selling my house now? Robert says. He speaks in a low, matter-of-fact tone. I dont care how much money they offer, Im not selling. My father is already rich in houses and land. Thousands upon thousands of hills belong to Him. Their money means nothing to me.

The decision to stay and fight the city has not been easy for the Dardens. In 2016, the city sued the residents and condemned three of the homes. The perpetual anxiety of possibly being evicted and having their most cherished possession taken from them at any moment has weighed heavily on the couple.

Its been eight years of this now. Its been up and down, Bertha says. But God comforts us through this, even though we have moments that make us want to lie down and cry.

Robert and Bertha Dardens home [Lynsey Weatherspoon/Al Jazeera]The Dardens and Washington tell Al Jazeera the city has also systematically harassed them since they refused to leave the block. In a repeat of what Ward described during the Great Recession, city code inspectors targeted the Dardens home. After being visited by code inspectors several times, Robert posted an officially stamped letter confirming their house had already passed a city code inspection onto the front door in the hope of warding off future inspectors.

The city also sent a company to both the houses to shut their gas off to prepare for demolitions. We all just happened to be home that day. But imagine if we werent? Bertha says, incredulous. They didnt send us a letter or call us to warn us that this company is coming over to turn our gas off so our home can be demolished.

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The Black residents fighting Atlanta to stay in their homes - Al Jazeera English