New workforce development initiatives at Atlanta Technical College, Goodwill of North Georgia and the Atlanta Department of Labor and Employment Services are getting a financial boost from the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation.
The foundation is giving nearly $4.5 million to the three organizations:
- $2.5 million to ATC for a program to offer training to 400 Westside residents in fields like electrical line work, transportation, distribution and logistics
- $1.5 million to Goodwill of North Georgia to train 250 residents in clean technology jobs, like working on electric vehicle charging stations, as well as other operations of the organization
- $486,000 to Atlanta’s labor department for a program for residents ages 18 to 30 that will offer paid job experience, skills training and job placement
Blank, a co-founder of Home Depot and owner of the Atlanta Falcons and Atlanta United, has committed to supporting community development and other initiatives as part of a deal with the city for hundreds of millions of dollars in public funding to support construction of Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
Since then, Blank, other civic leaders, companies and community organizations have committed tens of millions of dollars to workforce, housing and health care efforts for neighborhoods near the stadium. The city and civic organizations also created the nonprofit Westside Future Fund to help revitalize the area.
The Westside is a part of the city that is a microcosm of the history — good and bad — of Atlanta. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. raised his kids in Vine City in a house next door to where Atlanta’s first Black mayor, Maynard Jackson Jr., spent part of his childhood.
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
But the Westside was also home to the neighborhood of Lightning, Atlanta’s oldest African American working-class community, which was razed to make room for the Georgia World Congress Center and the Georgia Dome. Churches were displaced and homes demolished for the entertainment complexes.
Across the Westside, blight has crept in from years of neglect, depopulation and exploitation. But now a massive transformation spurred by the Beltline and Mercedes-Benz stadium is bringing fears that the area’s legacy residents will be displaced.
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
“Atlanta, like a lot of other urban cores around the country, is gentrifying,” Danny Shoy Jr., managing director of Atlanta’s Westside and Youth Development at the Blank Foundation, said during a Thursday tour of the Westside for media and the foundation’s partners. “I often say gentrification, in and of itself, is not a bad thing. It’s the displacement that happens if the change in community is not inclusive.”
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Since 2007, the Blank Foundation has committed more than $106 million to initiatives in the Westside. Two years ago, the foundation tweaked its strategy and decided to focus its resources in the Westside specifically on affordable housing, increasing incomes and workforce development in English Avenue and Vine City, two neighborhoods near Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
“The amount of interruption that we bring into the neighborhoods when we have games, when we have events here, it’s a way to give back and to call others to do the same,” Shoy said.
Last year, the foundation gave $22.4 million for projects to boost housing affordability and financial access in the two neighborhoods. Of that, $10 million went to the Westside Future Fund.
The WFF is currently trying to restore a property known to Westside residents as the Yellow Store, with the hopes of bringing fresh and healthy food back to the area, according to Rachel Carey, WFF’s chief real estate officer. It is also helping support the preservation of Jackson’s childhood home.
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
But there are serious challenges in revitalizing the area. On Monday, Mayor Andre Dickens and other city officials toured Vine City to highlight new initiatives to try to address the blight in the neighborhood.
In August, the Atlanta City Council approved the so-called “Blight Tax.” The new law, which goes into effect next year, allows officials to tax property owners 25 times higher than the current millage rate for abandoning or neglecting their properties. Earlier this month, the city adopted a resolution creating a blight condemnation program allowing officials to use eminent domain to take control of properties they want to clean up more quickly.
The WFF bought approximately 20 blighted structures just on James P. Brawley Drive and either demolished them or is in the process of rehabbing them, according to Carey.
“It’s a challenge, right? It’s a challenge to come in and build and sell a home to somebody who’s going to willingly live, you know, next to properties that look like this,” Carey said Thursday during the tour, pointing to a rundown structure on Brawley Drive.
But in the nearly 10 years since it was established, the WFF has developed more than 200 units of multifamily housing just in English Avenue and Vine City and sold dozens of single-family homes to residents who either work, study, rent or used to live in the area, bringing new life to the Westside.
- Matt Reynolds contributed to this report.
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