As of me writing this article, residents of a suburban block near Turner Field wait apprehensively to find out if their houses will be torn down by city officials. As soon as the plans are reviewed by the city’s Office of Buildings, the residents will find out.
Creative Loafing reported on Sept. 14 that city officials plan to tear down the houses on a block between Atlanta Avenue and Ormond Street to make way for a retention pond to keep the area from flooding and double as a park.
But many of the block’s residents oppose the plan, since it would require them to sell their houses and relocate to different homes. As a response, the city is threatening eminent domain, a legal action that allows the city to claim the land for its own use.
The figurehead of the opposition is a 93-year-old woman named Maddie Jackson who sees no reason to move from her home, and has spoken openly about her reluctance to sell her house.
Residents have been offered sums of money by the Atlanta Department of Watershed Management for their houses, per authorization, but Maddie Jackson and other residents still don’t want to move.
Watershed’s communications direction Lillian Govus insists that anyone living within the block is susceptible to flooding, but those who disagree with the proposed demolition insist that it is unfair to relocate Jackson and the other residents from their homes.
The problem
It’s easy to get caught up in all the rhetoric surrounding the plan. It’s easy to either empathize with Maddie Jackson’s appeals or to sympathize with city officials’ concerns about flooding, but what’s missing in that is a good understanding of what’s really happening.
The issue is not “Look at this poor old woman, she’s going to lose her home.” If it was, it would be too easy to dismiss her, saying “What’s so bad about moving?”
The real issue is “How are all the residents on the block going to afford to move back into their own neighborhood?” And that question’s getting lost among all the other stuff.
The assumption is that Watershed will compensate the block’s residents well enough that they can relocate close by, but according to an article by MyAJC, the monetary compensation the city is offering residents is
“insultingly low.”
According to Atlanta Progressive News, Jackson hasn’t been able to find a house in the neighborhood for a price comparable to what the city offered her. And similar complaints have been voiced by other residents on the block.
That’s because areas around Jackson’s neighborhood are quickly gentrifying, according to the article. Gentrification, of course, makes things more expensive and displaces low-income residents.
And that’s why the city’s actions are unfair. They’re paying the residents the bare minimum amount that’s required by law, and taking their houses away from them.
It’s not news that eminent domain has been used to bully residents out of their houses for reasons much less important than flooding. An article by CBS News says that eminent domain can be legally employed for a number of vague reasons, all of which may fall under the category of “the public good.”
A justification as vague as that might as well read “for any reason at all, as long as the city says it’s a good idea.”
According to that same CBS News article, cities have used eminent domain to force people off their land so private developers can build structures with higher property taxes.
Similarly, it might be more than a happy accident that, on top of seizing the land for the retention pond, the city could have the added benefit of not having to respond to lawsuits every time someone’s house floods on that block.
So, Maddie Jackson’s appeals are only one part of the story. However, I don’t mean to downplay them.
Her role in the opposition is to embody the connection the residents have to those homes and to remind city officials to be less hasty in their decision to uproot a life that has been living there for nearly a century.
The rhetoric Jackson’s daughter employed was particularly cautionary: “If the city moves her, my mother will die.” While this may seem hyperbolic, there is an ardency to it, and it evokes a sense of weight to what would otherwise be a bureaucratic decision on the part of city officials.
But, again, the fundamental issue is that the city is giving the residents a bum deal on their paid compensation, on top of forcing them to leave their homes.
While the city might like to think they’re being lenient giving the residents time to sell their properties before threatening eminent domain, and that the monetary compensation is fair, the act is still inherently coercive, and the outcome does not look good for the residents.
A few Suggestions
Given the fundamentally threatening nature of imminent eminent domain, I strongly object to the city’s treatment of the residents of the city block. However, the block’s flooding is an infrastructural problem that does need to be dealt with.
I’m no civil engineer, but I would assume there would be a way to create a retention pond without destroying every single house on the block.
Perhaps it would be better for the city of Atlanta to propose (not threaten) and compensate relocation only to those with homes affected by floods, especially those who had sued for floods in the past.
That way, residents like Maddie Jackson who don’t see any reason to move won’t have to, and residents who are affected by the floods will most likely agree to the generous and mutually beneficial offer from the city.
If the entire block does indeed need to be destroyed, the responsibility rests doubly on the shoulders of city officials to make sure the residents are able to relocate to nearby residences, paying an actually fair price for
their relocation.
