Cornelius Taylor had been living outside for about 10 years and was well-known among housing advocates and others who lived at a homeless encampment on Old Wheat Street.
He liked to play cards, Spades in particular, drink beer and he always had a kind word to uplift others, said those who knew him.
Sometimes he had a canine companion with him.
He had just been hired for a new job on Jan. 15.
A day later, Taylor, 47, was killed when a Public Works vehicle struck his tent during a clearing of the encampment.
It was a tragedy that has now left many of us feeling uneasy about some of the city’s policies surrounding homelessness, specifically how and why we are clearing encampments.
The Atlanta City Council has called for a 30-day moratorium on sweeps, and a task force to review the policies and procedures governing those operations. The legislation was expected to be discussed Tuesday by the Community Development and Human Services Commission.
Mayor Andre Dickens said he supports the temporary moratorium but remains resolute about razing encampments around the city, stating the city must “safely and humanely close these encampments and provide housing and stability to our neighbors who have found themselves out in the cold.”
I’m inclined to agree with City Council members Liliana Bakhtiari and Antonio Lewis, who offered a separate resolution last week that would place a moratorium on encampment clearings until city officials can guarantee the removals are safe.
The resolution requires Atlanta Continuum of Care, a group of 170 nonprofits and stakeholders overseeing homeless services in the city, to report on procedures and practices for encampment clearings and make the report available to the public.
Last year, Atlanta’s homeless population rose for the second year, reaching almost 2,900 residents, an increase of 7% from 2023, according to the most recent Point in Time count reported in June.
Encampment clearings should prioritize the safety and health of all residents, not just those in the surrounding community. And anyone who is removed from a homeless encampment should have a clear path to permanent housing.
Shutting down encampments can push people from one location to another, disconnect them from resources and intensify their distrust toward service providers, making it more difficult to connect them to permanent housing.
In February, after multiple fires broke out beneath bridges, the city began high-profile sweeps of encampments — notably at Cheshire Bridge, between Buford Highway and I-85.
At the time, Atlanta Journal-Constitution housing reporter Matt Reynolds noted that the city refused to answer questions about which bridge encampments it was targeting or how many people would be displaced.
Not much seems to have changed.
Making this information easily accessible and available to the public would go a long way in garnering more support for the city’s efforts to address the issue of homelessness.
As far as anyone can tell, the sweep at Old Wheat Street was an effort to clean up the area for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend, not to address any risk or imminent danger to people living outside or in the surrounding community.
The city is engaged in an ambitious effort to end homelessness by moving quickly to create permanent housing options. City officials shouldn’t allow irresponsible or unreported clearings to blemish those efforts in addressing a complex issue.
Homelessness isn’t a problem with an easy solution but Dickens must demonstrate the one quality that is vital to ending it — believing it is a problem that can be solved.
“If your mayor thinks that homelessness is unsolvable, he or she may try to hide the problem by harassing people out of town with police sweeps or sticking everyone in shelters rather than housing them. And that sense of resignation can then flow down the command chain,” said Rosanne Haggerty in a recent interview with Columbia Magazine.
Haggerty, a national leader in homelessness and founder of Community Solutions, has instituted some of the most creative and data-driven initiatives that have ended homelessness among certain subgroups of unhoused people in small cities. Atlanta joined the organization’s Built for Zero Initiative in 2018 but there have been no status updates since that time.
In November 2023, I applauded the city’s development of the Melody, a 40-unit shipping container village on Forsyth Street designed to provide rapid housing to individuals who need it. The city has continued those efforts by allocating $60 million in funding for additional housing developments in Reynoldstown, Virginia Highland, Westside and Mechanicsville.
These are solid efforts to address homelessness in the city.
Now we need transparency from city officials on their policies and procedures for clearing encampments.
Every program and every strategy to address homelessness, including encampment clearings, should be measured by how effective they are in getting people housed and doing that without harm.
Read more on the Real Life blog (ajc.com/opinion/real-life-blog), find Nedra on Facebook (facebook.com/AJCRealLifeColumn) and X (@nrhoneajc) or email her at nedra.rhone@ajc.com.
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