When Atlanta hosted the centennial Olympic Games in 1996,
then-Mayor Bill Campbell predicted that it would just be another
step in the city’s progress as one of America’s leading boom towns.
“It will put us in orbit. Atlanta will never be the same,” declared
Campbell in the pages of Ebony just before the torch was
lit.
Fifteen years later, the torch
has burned out in more ways than one. Campbell is now far away from
the A-T-L in West Palm Beach, Florida, his career extinguished by a
2006 conviction
for
tax evasion. Meanwhile the City Too Busy to Hate has become the
Metropolis Struggling, falling far from its status as the economic
terminus of the American South.
The city’s unemployment rate has
hovered at double-digit levels for the past two years; the 11.3
percent unemployment rate for this past November (the most-recent
available) — higher than the national average — is double the
rate for the same period four years ago. Nineteen percent of the
city’s houses now sit vacant and ready for vagrancy and crime,
double the percentage 11 years ago. The collapse of the housing and
corporate real estate markets has also crushed the city’s
once-bustling construction sector; the number of homebuilding
permits granted in Atlanta alone declined by 86 percent between
2007 and 2009, according to the U.S. Census
Bureau.
The economic malaise is nothing
compared to the city’s woeful fiscal condition. The share of city
general fund spending devoted to its lavish public sector pensions
— which allows employees to collect annuities equal to as much as
81 percent of last working salary — doubled between 2002 and 2008;
it now accounts for 12 percent of the city’s $559 million budget.
The city’s current mayor, Kasim Reed, has forced city employees to
pay a bigger share of contributions. But he and other city official
must still wrangle with a $1.5 billion pension deficit and $1.1
billion in unfunded retiree healthcare costs.
Meanwhile the dysfunctional
Atlanta Public Schools has spent the past year embroiled in scandal
related to alleged cheating on Georgia’s battery of standardized
tests. The possible fraud (now being investigated by federal
officials), along with infighting among its school board members,
has led one school accreditation agency to put the district on
probation. The district’s superintendent, Beverly Hall, has
resigned her position, effective end of this school year; as a
result of the scandal, the U.S. Senate has
declined to confirm her appointment by President Barack Obama
to the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education
Sciences, the agency that oversees federal research on student
achievement.
The problems haven’t knocked all
of Atlanta’s shine. It still has the fourth-greatest concentration
of Fortune 500 companies, including the ubiquitous Coca-Cola and
Home Depot. As the home to cable networks CNN and TBS, it still
arguably has the largest concentration of media and entertainment
outside of New York, L.A., and Washington, D.C. And thanks to
musicians such as Ludacris and India.Arie, impresarios such as
Tyler Perry and Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds, and the studios of
Cartoon Network, Hotlanta remains the nation’s third cultural
center, often a more-dominant force in shaping music, movies and
television than its east coast and west coast
rivals.
But its glittering skyline and
can-do culture can no longer obscure the decades of urban decay
that has grown like kudzu. Nor can it truly call itself the
economic center of either in the South or its own metropolitan
area. This is a problem that lies more with the city’s atrophied
and scandal-plagued political leadership than with current economic
travails. Whether Reed and a younger generation of city leaders can
overcome this decline remains an open question.
SWAGGER AND RESURGENCE mixed
with élan and a dollop of Dixie has always been at the heart of
Atlanta’s mythology. That attitude — along with its original role
as a major railroad hub to Southern and East Coast locales —
partly explains why the city recovered spectacularly from William
Tecumseh Sherman’s burning of its city center during the Civil War,
and how it overcame such lowlights as the infamous race riot of
1906 and the unjust prosecution of businessman Leo Frank (who was
falsely accused of murdering a 13-year old employee of his uncle’s
pencil factory).
The city’s go-go culture —
epitomized by nightclubs in Buckhead and meetings at the Greater
Atlanta Chamber of Commerce — remains as vibrant now as it was
during the days of Margaret Mitchell and Robert Woodruff. As a
result, it has become a haven for college-educated go-getters —
who make up 47 percent of the region’s population. For African
Americans, Atlanta is a particular cultural and economic mecca.
After all, it is home to historically black universities such as
Morehouse College; and the birthplace of civil rights leader Martin
Luther King; and the hometowns of former mayors Maynard Jackson and
Andrew Young, whose successful tenures proved that not every black
mayor governs like Marion Barry.
But in neighborhoods such as
Bankhead and Center Hill, there’s a different kind of moving and
shaking: Drug crime and murders that have been a constant feature
of life in the poorest sections of the city. Jackson and Young
often downplayed the problem, to the city’s long-term peril. While
the number of reported murders has declined, Atlanta still has the
fifth-highest violent crime rate in the nation. Its property crime
rate of 6,213 incidents per 100,000 people is higher than that of
D.C., Portland, Oregon, Louisville, and Oklahoma City (which have
similar sized populations), as well as higher than that of New York
City, L.A., Chicago and Houston (its competitors on the national
economic and cultural stage).
The city’s biggest problem can
be seen just by driving along the heavily congested Downtown
Connector and equally-clogged I-285 surrounding the city limits, as
workers head out of the city into suburbs such as Dunwoody and
Stone Mountain. One million people moved into the Atlanta metro
area between 2000 and 2008, making it the second most-popular
relocation destination after Dallas. But most of those new
residents have all but avoided the city limits both in spirit and
fact; a resident in tiny Dacula can work, shop, watch movies and go
to a concert without ever stopping by the Georgia Dome. This is
also true for businesses. Corporate giants such as Rubbermaid,
First Data, and UPS are located in nearby Sandy Springs, while
Waffle House and NCR are even further outside the city in rival
Gwinnett County.
Atlanta’s decline as an economic
powerhouse can be blamed in part on Campbell, who’d been handpicked
by Jackson and Young to become mayor in 1994. During his tenure, he
antagonized the business community and some fellow black leaders
alike with antics such as handing over the
vending and marketing operations for the 1996 Olympics to one
of his former campaign operatives, Munson Steed III. His penchant
was for steering contracts to pals by using the city’s affirmative
action contract rules; by 2000, city businesses successfully
challenged those race- and gender-based preferences. By the time
Campbell left office in 2002 under the cloud of a federal
investigation, the city labored under an $82 million budget
deficit. Corporate chieftains, tired of Campbell (and decades of
race-baiting), decided to focus their energies
elsewhere.
His successor, Shirley Franklin,
managed to clean up the corruption, closed the deficit, and won
over corporate support. But during her tenure, she sweetened
pension benefits for city workers that led many of them to choose
early retirement; since 2001, 90 percent of the city’s police
officers and firefighters handed in their retirement papers at age
55 (10 years earlier than their private-sector counterparts);
actuaries expected the rate to be half that. The deals, along with
$650 million in investment losses, have created an unsustainable
burden. By the time Franklin left office in 2009, the city was
shouldering $144 million in pension costs, a three-fold increase
over the amount spent eight years earlier.
Current Mayor Reed — a former
state senator and protégé of Franklin and Congressman John Lewis
who won a close, racially charged campaign — has at least taken
some steps to address the city’s escalating pension problems. Last
week, a pension reform panel convened by the mayor offered some
steps to close the deficits, including enrolling workers in Social
Security and requiring future employees to enroll in
defined-contribution plans. But the city’s public employee unions,
already sore over being forced to contribute more to their
pensions, are spoiling for a fight; Reed may not get much help down
the street from the Republican-controlled legislature. Reed also
has to balance efforts at economic development with placating black
political and civic leaders who have spent the past two decades
complaining about racial and economic
gentrification.
Reed also faces an unexpected
challenge in the form of Atlanta Public Schools, which was
struggling academically even before allegations of cheating
emerged last year. Fifty-four percent of the district’s
eighth-graders tested
Below Basic proficiency on the math portion of the 2009
National Assessment of Educational Progress; just 65 percent of the
eighth-graders in the original Class of 2009 made it to senior year
of high school. With the cheating scandal, the disgrace of being
put on
probation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools,
and the increased scrutiny from new Gov. Nathan Deal, Reed could
follow the path of mayors such as New York’s Michael Bloomberg and
take control of the district.
Between the busted pensions, the
economic struggles and the dropout factories, Atlanta will need all
the resilience it can muster. This time, the blazes are coming from
within.
