New Melting Pots

There is a section of Atlanta called the historic Westend where African Americans are being priced out due to gentrification.

On any given day,  one will see neighborhood blacks, who dominate in population, frequent the mall, transit station, and red brick storefronts reminiscent of small towns in Georgia decades ago.  It is one of the many areas of the city claimed by African Americans when whites fled for the suburbs in the 50s and 60s.  Now they want it back.  Before the white flight,  blacks built proud neighborhoods, colleges, and small businesses alongside their white neighbors.  Despite this,  the elderly and misinformed may be forced to leave even though the last mayor,  who was African American, told them to hold on to their homes for the next generation,  while the present mayor,  a black woman,  is creating ways for seniors and the poor to stay in the houses they love.

However, she may hit a roadblock in her efforts to keep disadvantaged citizens in their homes in the Westend and other parts of Atlanta.  Home prices throughout the city have doubled or tripled following the housing slump due to a grave shortage of available new homes and a robust economy.  When real estate prices increase, it adversely affects property taxes,  forcing low-income residents to sell.

I moved to Atlanta's Westend three years ago.  I feared it beforehand.  Since then,  I have learned that it is sexy cool, and proper, like blacks in rural Georgia in the '60s and '70s.  Adair Park,  one of the area's best-kept secrets,  has become a haven for black high school reunions and other get-togethers just down the street from where I live.  The Mechanicsville and Pittsburgh neighborhoods, which survive as a testament to their middle and working-class roots before being hit by the crack and heroin epidemic of the eighties, are making a surprising comeback.

Martin Luther King, Jr. fought for the area in the sixties.  He and others dramatized its poverty and neglect.  He also praised its progress and bought a home near Morehouse College,  where he attended school.

Like the Westend, other areas of Atlanta exist where African Americans have lost their footing in recent years or where there has been an influx of well-to-do newcomers.  In the early 2000s, Kirkwood, Candler Park, and other communities on Atlanta's Eastside virtually flipped from majority black to majority white.  Neighborhoods in The Old Fourth Ward on the city's Northside soon followed suit, with many of the poor unable to remain in the homes they had lived in for generations.  It is a crisis the city must fix.

White and middle-class African Americans moving back to the inner city of Atlanta is o.k. as long as locals are not displaced.  It could help strengthen communities or provide more opportunities for a better way of life.  But the primary goal should be to keep these areas intact for lifelong residents and newcomers to enjoy.