Atlanta - and America - Has Seven Social Classes

Last year, I gave an address to Leadership Atlanta. I'd like to share that with you.

Leadership Atlanta’s most recent class just graduated. Last March, I gave a talk at the hallowed halls of the Federal Reserve building in Atlanta, discussing the issues of inequality in the city. I’m posting that speech so you can see how far off I might have been. In retrospect, it puts the Cop City arguments we’re having today into some context.

Enjoy.

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Thanks for having me. So ... here I am, speaking to you on the same day you’re hearing from Maria Saporta, Shirley Franklin, Andrew Young, David Ralston and Bernice King. You know when you take a picture of something and put a banana in it for scale? I mean, usually I tell people I look like a baked potato with eyes. But today, I’m your banana.

It’s a tremendous honor, and I intend to make the most of it. We’re here to talk about power and influence, and as it happens I know something about that, both as a matter of academic study and as a journalist.

But I want to lay down a marker first about who I am, and who I think you all are, as context for our discussion.

Because I’m ... weird. I’m the biracial son of an African immigrant and a working-class white parent who split up when I was a kid. In my youth I lived in California and Hawaii. I was educated in Massachusetts and have spent much of my life in acts of public service. And I’m not the President of the United States of America.

My father is mildly disappointed.

My point is that I’m not the product of the Atlanta street. I did not grow up in poverty. Other than the superficial matter of my racial identity – partly – I don’t have much in common culturally with the people I’m writing about. Learning and reporting has taken effort for me. And if I am reading this room correctly, it’s going to take effort for most of you as well.

I’ve made mistakes. Frankly, I’m probably still making mistakes. Mistakes can be good, if they’re the product of actually doing something, and if you can learn. Here’s a good one.

You may recall that a couple of years ago, protesters burned down the Wendy’s over in Peoplestown, where an Atlanta police officer shot and killed Rayshard Brooks. I watched it happen in person. I’d been in the street for weeks reporting on the protests.

A week or so later, people were pinging me on Twitter, telling me that guys with assault rifles had taken over the street corner, and that they were stopping any white people from driving by. Frankly, I didn’t believe it. You see, alt-right agitators had been spamming social media with disinformation. I couldn’t trust what I was hearing. So on the spur of the moment I went out there. Alone.

I thought that five years in the Army, my public reputation from being a reporter in Atlanta in the street all that time – and the color of my skin – would have been enough for me to observe and report unharmed.

So, I went. I talked to a few people, briefly. I was asked to leave by a couple. And then they demanded that I turn over my cell phone. They wanted to be sure I hadn’t taken anyone’s picture. I refused. Five of them formed a semi-circle around me, and one put his hand on his pistol and said he would shoot me in 10 seconds if I didn’t give it up. I told him that I didn’t think he’d shoot a journalist in front of a crowd. He counted down and at five I said I was leaving. As I walked away, he ran in front of me and sucker punched me. A couple of the others started doing the same. I got away with some bruises and a black eye. I kept the phone for whatever that’s worth.

Now, they were gangsters. Literally: the GBI says they have identified the people who were out there as Bloods gang members.

But I’m telling you this story because I am standing in this room, in the presence of people who will ultimately be leading this city in one way or another. You are elected officials and business leaders, lawyers, cops. You’re wealthy and powerful. And unless we solve the underlying social and economic problems that drove people into the street, people not unlike the ones who attacked me and who went on to murder eight-year-old Secoriea Turner ... well, they’ll eventually decapitate all of us – including me, ‘cause I’m in this room too – and pike our heads on the 17th Street bridge.

They’ll be able to do it, because we’ll be outnumbered, and they’ll have nothing to lose.

Now, I know what I sound like when I say that. I sound like some unreconstructed tankie communist waving around a Little Red Book and calling for the proletariat to arm themselves. I’m really not. I have an MBA from Georgia Tech. I’m an entrepreneurial free market capitalist who does Black-Scholes venture capitalization calculations for fun. This is a risk assessment.

There’s a sociological idea called cultural power distance.

It’s a measurement of how much the less powerful members of a culture accept and expect unequal power distributions. Geert Hofstede, a Dutch psychologist and professor, studied this extensively and has ranked countries and cultures on an index of power distance. High power distance means the society accepts hierarchy easily. Low power distance cultures expect egalitarianism. Venezuela, China, Egypt: high power distance countries. Israel, Denmark, New Zealand: low power distance countries.

The United States, culturally, remains on the lower end of the power distance scale. The amount of inequality we see in Atlanta is incompatible with American culture. Eventually, as inequality widens, something will break.

This is rubbing up against a different social phenomenon, though. Because in my observations, people are generally reluctant to associate closely and regularly with people who are too far outside of their own social class, and the effort that people will go to avoid those interactions creates policy distortions. I think it’s because contact across class elicits deep discomfort, because it forces people to confront their egalitarian cultural values.

The power and influence that we possess depends on the social contract being upheld, generally. I’ve spent the last year reporting about violence in Atlanta. A lot of that reporting has also been reporting about poverty and race, because it’s all tied together. And I think most people in positions of power don't fully understand what’s going on among the dispossessed, because there’s just not enough contact between Atlanta’s social classes to give adequate signals.

So. Let me put some numbers up.

Atlanta has about 507,000 residents and a poverty rate of about 21 percent as of 2020 ... a number you should take with a bowling ball sized grain of salt given what’s happened over the last two years.

To your immeasurable shock, that 21 percent isn’t evenly distributed. On paper, the poverty rate for white people in Atlanta is 8 percent while it’s 30 percent for Black Atlantans. In practice the poverty rate is probably slightly higher than that for Black people because of census avoidance and slightly lower than that for white people because college students skew the numbers – about two percent of that 8 percent are full-time students living off campus.

There are different kinds of poverty. People can be poor in Atlanta for very different reasons. There’s a fundamental difference between the poverty of a white Georgia State college student from a middle-class family in Lawrenceville and a Black thirty-year-old who just got out of the state pen. They can expect to have different lives ahead of them. One is staring at opportunity. The other at despair.

The despair part is important, because that’s what’s driving crime in Atlanta.

There are different kinds of poverty. Three kinds, actually.

There’s a fairly persistent academic argument about how many people are living in extreme poverty in America – like, $2 a day poverty. That number has been estimated as high as two percent. I take a more conservative view of it, using homelessness and Department of Community Affairs figures and unemployment rates. In Atlanta, it looks like about 5,000 people. There are another 5,000 or so people who have incomes under $5,000 a year.

That is, there are about 105,000 poor people in Atlanta and 10,000 of them have more or less ... nothing.

How do you think those people are surviving?

Serious question. How do you think they’re getting by? Well, some ... aren’t. They’re homeless. They’re sleeping in a car, if they’re lucky enough to own one, or they’re crashing on someone’s couch if they’re lucky enough to have friends. Or they’re squatting in an abandoned house – and there are still thousands of abandoned buildings in this city – or they’re in a tent beneath an underpass a thousand feet west of this room. Some of them are bouncing in and out of emergency shelters, the Salvation Army or the Atlanta Recovery Center, if they can come up with the $10 for a bed that night.

That is one kind of poverty: absolute dispossession.

Now, mostly, that kind of squalor is a function of mental illness and drug problems. But some of them are people who have serious criminal convictions and a history of evictions that we have decided as a society means that they’re unemployable and unqualified to hold a lease. This kind of poverty exists because we’ve decided that this is how far people can fall.

This kind of poverty is a separate class of poverty from what I’ll call “regular poor.”

The distinction is important, because people generally only interact one step up or down from their own class. Folks who are experiencing absolute dispossession are like caste untouchables in India. People see this kind of poor as a gaping bundle of need that can’t be met, and that’s true even for other poor people, who see themselves as one or two steps away from the same fate.

Virtually all of the truly destitute in Atlanta are Black. Atlanta doesn’t just have the greatest degree of income inequality in the United States, it has some of the most racially-identifiable inequality as well. About 80 percent of Atlanta’s homeless population is Black, which is much, much higher than most cities as a proportion of its Black demography. Homelessness usually tracks closer with a community’s overall demography because mental illness and drug problems really don’t discriminate. Atlanta is ... special.

There’s no fix for this dispossession that doesn’t start with housing, and usually requires therapy and other support to get to the next-higher stage, which I’m going to call “regular poverty.”

Atlanta has about 272,000 households, and about 49,000 are in poverty. 40,000 of those households, have incomes of $15,000 or less. About 31,000 of those under-$15 grand a year households are Black.

$15,000 a year. $1,250 a month before taxes. In a city where the median rent for a two-bedroom apartment was about $1,400 when the census took these figures. How the hell do those 40,000 households survive?

Many crashed with friends and family, eight and ten to a house. Or they are living in illegal boarding houses which are all over town.

Most of those boarding houses are in a state of squalor that is barely distinguishable from actual homelessness. I worked for about a year for a housing startup called PadSplit that is trying to professionalize the idea of shared living spaces with competent maintenance and oversight and connections for residents to avenues of uplift. I did that because as a guy working on social problems I kept walking into illegal boarding houses and I’d come out thinking I’d just visited a favela in Rio.

The thing is ... PadSplit is right at the edge of what’s legal in Atlanta and potentially over the edge in other places. It doesn’t matter if PadSplit is run well: neighborhood groups complain about property values. Because, you know ... poor people. You get one social class up or down. That’s all.

But never mind PadSplit: It doesn’t take a lot of math to figure out that there must be thousands of perfectly illegal flophouses in south Atlanta.

HUD and the Atlanta Housing Authority served 26,500 households last year, virtually all of which had household incomes below $30,000 a year. But ... there are 40,000 households in Atlanta under $15,000 a year. The rest of those “regular poor” people played whatever game they could to keep a roof over their head.

Some of them are people who may own their own homes, and are living on social security or disability. About 12,500 people get a SSDI payment in Atlanta. SSDI pays $841 a month. You might get $250 a month for SNAP benefits too. The average social security check in America is about $1,650 ... but about 20 percent of beneficiaries receive less than $1000 a month.

Others are crashing on couches or surfing through startup specials in apartment complexes, stringing out evictions as long as possible. Pre-pandemic, one out of six households ate an eviction filing in the previous 18 months. That’s why.

The broad answer for this flavor of poverty is rent-stabilized housing, somehow. I would say it’s jobs, but too many of the people in this state of poverty are on fixed incomes and are unlikely to ever work again.

Contemplate the public policy mess all of this presents. About one out of ten households in Atlanta is either playing games with the landlord to keep from being evicted, or living in substandard housing that violates the city’s code of ordinances. How do you enforce the code in an unbiased way without raising your homelessness rate? How do you run your eviction courts? Your marshals’ service? Your housing authority?

All of this just got worse. And it’s starting to bleed out into the street.

I got into a stupid Twitter argument with a guy – because I’m a bonehead – over crime statistics. He kept on and on about how the murder rate had risen 41 percent this year. And it is true that Atlanta has had 41 percent more murders over the last nine weeks than it did over the same nine weeks of 2021.

It is a difference of eight deaths, after a year with 159 homicides. Given the month to month variation, it’s not a statistically significant difference. Atlanta’s violent crime rate appeared to hit a plateau in early October. The annualized homicide rate peaked in the weekly reports then and began to decline. And then, suddenly in January, it spiked back up.

Three things collided in January.

The average rent in Atlanta has been on a once-in-40-years rising run. It rose from $1450 a month in August to $1,700 a month in January. That’s a $250 increase, something I think can be attributed to the effects of a rush of corporate investment in single-family residential property. Buyers can’t find property at reasonable prices, so they’ve entered the rental market, driving rents up.

At the same time, the $300 a month child tax credit ended. January comes with a bunch of annual renewals for apartment leases, particularly with the HUD voucher renewals. And suddenly we start seeing these crazy news stories about people being randomly pissed off, seemingly for no reason, and shooting people.

It's not that any given person who picked up a gun and shot someone was getting evicted – although, I found at least one when I went looking closely – but that the general state of anxiety among people in poverty rose up a notch and it rippled out. It's a theory.

Let’s come back to the power distance thing for a second. American culture does not tolerate high degrees of authoritarianism. Society is, frankly, failing a lot of people in Atlanta in ways that create power distance. And that power distance is incompatible with the culture.

Three classes of poverty in Atlanta. The abjectly dispossessed. The “regular poor.” And the third – the working class.

They’re distinguished from the regular poor by income, and specifically by their eligibility for services. Fifty percent of annual median income in Atlanta is $43,101 for a family of four. For an individual, it’s about $30K. It’s a $15 an hour job. That job does not generally provide benefits. By and large it’s not enough to qualify for a home loan. But it makes you all but ineligible for help from the Atlanta Housing Authority. And PeachCare, the state’s public health insurance plan, cuts off at an individual income of $33,568, or about $16.75 an hour.

AMI, by the way, is trash for measuring wealth and poverty in Atlanta, because almost no one is at the median. Income in Atlanta is not a bell curve. It’s a U.

In no way is this a middle-class life. But about 50,000 households are holding their noses above the technical poverty line by their fingernails, trying like hell not to get sick or have a car break down or get evicted or get arrested.

There’s a plain answer here: jobs that pay a living wage and have benefits like health insurance and a 401(k), which is where I mark the line for the actual middle class of this city. That middle class mark, around the $55,000 income line, is also the point at which white people begin to outnumber Black people in Atlanta. That’s not a coincidence.

But let’s step back a moment. 21 percent of Atlanta is poor, and another 20 percent or so are near-poor. About 60 percent of Black people who live in this city are either destitute, poor or working class.

How can Atlanta be “the Black Mecca” while this is true? By that, I mean Atlanta as a shining beacon across America and the world for opportunity for Black people, attracting them here to go to school and to look for work and perhaps to start a business and buy a house: Atlanta as central to the aspirations of African Americans. Why?

And the answer to that ... is a projection of the influence of, well, a lot of the people in this room.

It is in the interest of business leaders and the media elite of Atlanta to project an image of this city as prosperous and vibrant and attractive, because that raises property values. It helps attract business deals. It increases the social capital of the people involved.

I’m going to invoke Robert Cialdini, who’s the leading academic expert in the study of influence as an idea. Here’s my dog-eared copy of his book. There’s a new edition. I think about this often, because as a journalist my bulls—t detector needs to stay finely calibrated.

Cialdini argues that there are seven effective methods of influence: [SLIDE 10]

• Reciprocation – I do something for you to get you to do something for me.

• Consistency and commitment – appeals to the idea that people will go out of their way to live up to their word and their self-image.

• Social proof – people are more likely to act if they see other people doing the same thing.

• Liking – a message delivered by someone attractive and complimentary and familiar.

• Authority – because the doctor or cop or professor or friendly neighborhood journalist said so.

• Scarcity – buy now, because this price isn’t going to last! When you believe something is in short supply, you want it more.

• Unity – we are more inclined to help people when we feel like we share an identity.

Not all of these apply to the selling of the Black Mecca, but some do. Social proof, liking, and even authority are at play.

Social proof and liking are powerful. National media is awash in images of financially successful Black Atlantans. Influence by liking is projected with images of beauty, style, cool. Atlanta’s Black culture is increasingly viewed as authoritative, a mark of Black authenticity.

Half the rap musicians in the top 10 charts are from Atlanta, blinged out, dripping in luxury brands while name checking Atlanta neighborhoods. Rihanna sings about visiting East Atlanta. Never mind Dynasty and Designing Women and Matlock: it’s Real Housewives of Atlanta and Growing Up Hip Hop and TI and Tiny and The Rickey Smiley Show. Reality television combines with relentless music promotion.

If you’re Black and poor and have picked up a criminal charge or are in the bottom half of the academic distribution, your career options are pretty limited because employer discrimination is endemic. A long-running study by the Federal Reserve shows that a white person with a recent felony conviction is more likely to be called into an interview than a Black person with the identical resume and a clean criminal record. That hasn’t materially changed in 30 years of study.

That’s one reason Atlanta’s music industry is particularly influential, in exactly the same way that Hollywood and New York has been drawing young ingenues for a century. On the surface, rap music careers appear to be egalitarian. Show up, hustle and get noticed, and it doesn’t matter where you’re from. Even skill isn’t all that important. It’s open. Right?

Of course, it’s not actually open. There are barriers to entry – studio time, promotional fees, personal connections. I have a working theory that I’m looking for data to validate or disconfirm, that a lot of the violence – I mean like, 20 to 30 percent of the violence and half the increase in violence – we’ve seen in Atlanta over the last two years can be attributed to gang-connected rap beef. Gangs appear to be using music industry connections and the promise of fame to recruit new members. There’s a murder case in DeKalb County involving a rapper called Yung Mal that should be enlightening here as it unfolds, along with the murder trial of YFN Lucci. I am awaiting the indictment of some very, very high profile rappers on RICO charges related to the targeted assassinations of rival gang members.

Please ... don’t misconstrue my view of this as some kind of Tipper Gore-style attack on rap music. Rap is great. Shooting people is not.

Rather, I’m talking about the music as a function of Atlanta’s influence, which is often at odds with reality.

Consider that, for purposes of influencing the rest of the world, Atlanta is not actually bound by the city limits of Atlanta ... all viral videos by the rapper Omeretta aside.

If you live in Cleveland or Los Angeles, Stone Mountain is Atlanta. Stonecrest is Atlanta. South Fulton is Atlanta.

Only about one in six people in metro Atlanta were born within 50 miles of here. Five times as many Black people in metro Atlanta live outside of Atlanta’s city limits as in them. Middle class Black people are coming to Georgia looking for Atlanta and finding ... Tucker. Or Smyrna. Because they are effectively locked out of the city itself unless they want to live amid poverty ... and, again, people generally avoid associating closely one social class up or down from their own.

The median household income for a white household in Atlanta is north of $85,000 a year. It’s about $30,000 a year for Black households. But both those figures rise when looking at the region. The median income in Fulton County is about $103,200 for white households and $43,600 for Black households.

That speaks to how power is increasingly being distributed within the city. The middle is disappearing. Remember, again: America’s core culture is egalitarian. We don’t actually tolerate inequality well.

I’ve described three classes of poverty. There are three classes of wealth in this city, too.

Most of you belong to the first tier, the professional class. You can call it the “upper middle class” if you like. I don’t, because there’s a massive difference in risk and opportunity between people in the professional classes and the actual middle class. Also, like I said earlier – people generally interact one social class up or down from their own, and professionals by and large have little to no contact with the working class of Atlanta.

You get into the professional class with an advanced degree and / or a professional license. Doctors, lawyers, real estate agents, engineers, some teachers, bankers, accountants, consultants. The lower bound on income is probably around $80,000 or $90,000 a year, but the distinction is a little softer than that because this class is also defined a bit by self-identity, aspiration and opportunities. In America, broadly, about 12 percent of the public is in this group. In Atlanta, it’s roughly 25 percent, which includes about two-thirds of white households.

If a household is earning this kind of money, they’re probably living in a house that is worth north of $400,000. Up until ... oh, six months or so ago ... I would have said that there’s no Black-majority zip code in Atlanta with those kind of home prices. Values are changing very, very rapidly. Incomes – particularly for Black workers – are not. The net effect is displacement, where Black people who don’t own their own homes will be pushed into outlying suburbs.

People in the professional class have a subsidized health plan from their employer or extra income to cover health insurance. They almost certainly own their home, unless they’re deliberately choosing to rent because they’re a short-timer on a corporate relocation.

They’re not running the same risks that people in the middle-class face. A $1,000 car repair or a broken arm is an expense, and not a catastrophic life-altering event. A job loss does not immediately threaten a mortgage payment. An automatic debit for paying the electricity bill doesn’t run a risk of cascading overdraft charges.

They have a match in their 401(k), and they may have stock options. They make too much money for their kids to score need-based scholarships, but probably not quite enough to eat private college tuition without sacrifices or big student loans ... but their kids are absolutely going to college, because those kids attended a good school and had all the opportunities for extracurricular enrichment – robotics team, Model UN, language tutors, “service mission” trips out of the country to help people who, frankly, need more help than their kid is going to provide in a weekend.

Their own lives are similarly careerist resume building exercises, meticulously constructed to get to the next-higher rung: independent wealth.

There’s a formal definition: accredited investors. Roughly 10 percent of American households – and something between 12 and 15 percent of Atlanta’s households – meet the SEC definition of a qualified investor, which is $1 million in investable assets or a family income over $300,000 (or an individual income over $200,000).

I also use an informal definition. Wealthy people can quit. They can tell other people to kiss their ass, because there’s no real risk to their lives or lifestyles. They have eff-off money.

They’re not aristocrats, the one percenters at the top of the pile. Those folks are the capital class with multiple millions in investible income, multinational connections and enough money to influence public policy by writing a check. Their primary concern is extending that influence, protecting their wealth from bad investments and from the demands of less wealthy friends and family, and self-actualization.

North Atlanta has wide swaths of wealth. Almost every census tract in Buckhead has a median income over $100,000. Eleven tracts have a median above $200,000. It is at this point that we see gates start to rise because the number of people that wealthy people are comfortable interacting with diminishes substantially. One class up or down ... and the middle class here is two steps down.

The only time people in this economic class interact with someone who is even working class is when that person is making them a $7 latte or nannying their kids or driving their Uber when they’re on a business trip. There is effectively no contact whatsoever with poverty. It’s Dickensian and it represents a solid 70,000 people in this town.

Fun fact: About two percent of black households in Atlanta make more than $100,000 a year. Fewer than five percent make more than $75,000 a year.

So ... I spent more energy than I would have liked to addressing the Buckhead separatist movement’s noise this year. I went on Nightline and described Bill White as a racist. I showed up at press conferences, I wrote lengthy think pieces and economic analyses.

Here’s the thing: the idea was going to lose as a policy matter. Politically ... I get why it happened.

During the protests of 2020, vandals kicked in the doors at Lenox and went on a five-finger shopping spree. Gucci, Prada, Apple Store. Peachtree boarded up buildings. And the very rich people who saw folks with a Fendi bag on the street the next week had to wonder if that bag was bought or stolen.

The power distance between the wealthy and the poor had been closed. And a lot of wealthy people didn’t like that one bit.

Not too long after that, we started seeing a spate of stories about how much more “dangerous” Lenox had become. Now, Lenox has not had a statistically significant change in the number of incidents of violence reported to the Atlanta Police at Lenox over the last two years. There have been reports to the contrary. Those reports are mathematically illiterate.

When small numbers change in absolute values, it creates large percentage changes. Lenox has crime that’s below the city’s average. It bumped up a bit more than the average for the city overall, because a few more incidents happened. But it still has a rate of crime that substantially lower than the city’s average. The media – and I’m thinking about my friend Doug Richards here – reported the percentage change without reporting the absolute number of incidents or the relative number to other areas.

Buckhead’s crime rate is the lowest in the city, by a long shot. It’s half as high as the next highest-zone. It’s one-sixth the rate of the highest zone. It is lower than areas with comparable economic demography in Fulton County, or Gwinnett County, or DeKalb County. Anyone saying Buckhead is unsafe is lying to you. In comes Bill White using all of the influence techniques.

• “Hey, look, I’m going to do run this project instead of doing all the other things I could be doing to make money. Give me, say, $5000 and if it works we’ll lower your property taxes by twice that much, forever. It’s a sacrifice, but I believe in it so strongly. Don’t you?” Reciprocation.

• “You’ve been a strong supporter of conservative causes in the past. Surely, if you have supported a stronger police force and lower taxes in the past, you’ll do so now ... right?” Consistency and commitment.

• “All your neighbors are signing up to help. Look at who has been donating! There are Buckhead City signs all over your neighborhood. Want one?” Social proof.

• “Did you see how mad I made the people you don’t like? It’s a riot. I know you’re enjoying this.” Liking.

• “I just went on Tucker Carlson’s show and he thinks this is an excellent idea! So does President Trump!” Authority.

• “We get one shot at this. If we don’t win this time, there’s a chance Stacey Abrams will win and make it impossible to try next year.” Scarcity.

• “We are all in this together. You don’t have anything in common with the rest of Atlanta. We have to take care of our own.” Unity.

So ... it didn’t work. Only, it kind of did.

The people who were freaked out by boarded up shops on Peachtree got the city to ignore the much bigger crime problems in the rest of Atlanta to redeploy police in low-crime Buckhead. It drew a lot of attention to their community from the rest of the city. And it distracted policy makers who should, rightly, have been calling for Buckhead to do more to reduce inequality.

Right now, when you see a Black person in a business office in Buckhead, they’re more likely to be cleaning the place or working reception than they are to be a professional employee or business owner. Buckhead’s business culture – well, America’s business culture, really – remains deeply discriminatory. If you don’t believe me, start picking some companies at random in Buckhead and look at their executive suite and boards of directors.

Keep in mind that metro Atlanta’s college-educated workforce has about 1.4 million people, and about 330,000 of them – about one in four – is Black. Somehow, we stopped talking about that last year.

Heads. On Pikes.

Two years ago, when people were smashing the hell out of the windows of the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce downtown, Atlanta’s business community started talking about how to reduce the inequality of race and class in this city. Political leaders made promises to address these problems.

Ask yourself what’s changed since then.

The pandemic is still out there, though it’s in a slump today. The unemployment rate is something like 2.5 percent, but the jobs available to more than half of Atlanta’s workforce don’t pay enough to cover the bills. Atlanta has had the highest rate of inflation in the United States, driven largely by housing costs. The average rent is $1,700 a month, up by about $250 over the last few months. That’s only affordable to someone earning about $34 an hour. The child tax credit is done. The eviction moratorium is over.

Nothing substantial has happened to provide options for upward mobility for the poor and the working class of Atlanta. I’m sure Katie Kilpatrick will be willing to talk to you about their ATL Action for Racial Equity initiative, but you should ask her whether it contains an actual mechanisms for holding corporate Atlanta accountable for hiring more people of color, since it sets no standards that the public can connect to an actual company.

The response of the Georgia legislature to the events of 2020 includes criminalizing discussion of racism in schools, making it legal to run over protestors in the street and to sue cities for protest violence. All those bills crossed over this week. It has directed no additional money for public housing, and made no real effort to reduce income inequality or workplace discrimination.

Cops get more money. I’m neutral on that, frankly. It depends on how the money is used.

Atlanta’s city council has tried to liberalize its planning and zoning policy to accommodate the construction of more affordable housing, but the neighborhoods around Atlanta are in open revolt against the idea ... because they don’t want those people in their neighborhoods. The metro area needs to increase its supply of housing by 30,000 to 40,000 units every year, basically forever, to accommodate growth, and it’s building a fraction of that.

Unless you view a broad-based protest as an insurrection to put down with force, Georgia hasn’t done much of anything to prevent the next crisis. And I’m at a loss for words.

It’s going to be up to you – the people in this room – to get it. It’s up to you to recognize that serious social disruption we will see in the future isn’t some unpredictable calamity we’ll have to weather: it’s a function of choices we’re making in our policies today.

With that, I’ll take questions. Let’s talk.