Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens on Tuesday proposed a “historic” $60 million in public funding to address homelessness, and help people get into permanent homes. At a morning event at Woodruff Park in downtown, Dickens said he ultimately wants the city to tap into private and philanthropic investment to reach more than $120 million in funding.
Dickens will ask the City Council to authorize the public funding through a $50 million homeless opportunity bond, along with $10 million from Atlanta’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund, according to his office.
“I believe that the lack of affordable housing has reached a crisis level, not just here in Atlanta, but across cities all across the United States of America, and in every part of our region,” Dickens told the audience. “We must act with urgency to rehouse our homeless, to stop the displacement of low-income renters, and to (prevent) our legacy residents from being priced out of their homes.”
Frank Fernandez, president and CEO at Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta, said his organization had committed $10 million to the effort through Partners for HOME, the organization that coordinates the city’s efforts to address homelessness. Cathryn Vassell, CEO at Partners for HOME, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution the city could raise as much as $180 million in funding through public, private and philanthropic sources.
Dickens added that the city is building on its work in creating The Melody, a shipping container community in South downtown that provided 40 homes for unhoused people.
First, the Waterworks Rapid Housing Project will incorporate a modular design and include units for the unhoused. A second modular project on Cooper Street in the Mechanicsville neighborhood includes more than 70 townhomes alongside 100 units of permanent supportive housing, Dickens said.
He said the city wants to create 700 new units of housing, including 200 permanent supportive housing units, and 500 quick-delivery units by the end of next year. Through the city’s Rapid Housing Initiative, the units will offer on-site wraparound services, he added. Such services can include mental health and substance use treatment, along with educational and job services.
Vassell called the investment “unprecedented” and “truly historic.” She said in the last six years alone her group had rehoused close to 13,000 people or families experiencing homelessness.
“Despite this work, we also had unprecedented numbers of new people experiencing homelessness last year, and increasing numbers of first-time homeless people coming into our system,” she told the audience. “This is a crisis in our community. Until we get a hold of our affordable housing crisis, we will continue to have new people coming into our homeless system.”
The executive broke down how some of the funds would be used, noting that $150,000 in capital funding had been budgeted for each of 500 rapid housing units — a total of $75 million.
In an interview, Vassell said the funding showed how Atlanta was attempting to avoid the mistakes of other cities grappling with homelessness.
“As new corporations come to Atlanta ... oftentimes there’s the unintended consequence of driving up housing prices across our community, and so we want to get ahead of that,” she said. “We want to make sure that we’re being intentional around how we preserve and build affordable housing, especially at the deepest levels of affordability.”
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to correct the amount of money the city wants to raise through public, private and philanthropic sources after the mayor’s office initially sent out an incorrect figure.
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