Elegy For A Melody
The Melody is named for the subject of my examination into the failures of Georgia's homelessness strategy. It is a signpost marking tragedy ... and success.
Four months ago, Mayor Andre Dickens announced a plan to spend $4 million to build transitional housing in a city-owned parking lot near Garnett Station downtown. And I’ll be honest: I shrugged. I figured it would take a year or two and we would be talking about cost overruns and construction delays.
This morning, I walked into the shower on one.
“This is a major milestone in our rapid housing initiative and our holistic strategy to create and preserve 20,000 units of affordable housing,” Mayor Andre Dickens said at the ribbon cutting. “And we're just getting started, we've committed to producing 500 units of rapid housing on public land by the end of 2025.”
The site is called The Melody to honor the memory of Melody Bloodworth. She was the subject of an Intercept story I wrote in 2021, “Judge, Lawyer, Help, Case Dismissed,” which chronicled the problems in Georgia’s mental health delivery system.
A year later, Melody froze to death, one block south of this shelter, across the street from the Greyhound station and next door to Magic City and three heated buildings.
I look forward to a day when I will no longer be angry about that.
Each of the 40 micro-units was built from Georgia Emergency Management Agency shipping containers that had been converted into COVID-19 field hospitals. Each had an ADA-compliant shower and bathroom built into it when the city got them, which substantially cut down on costs and time. The units are tiny. A bed, a desk, a closet, a sink and a bathroom.
But still: four months for actual housing is largely unheard-of in Atlanta.
It helped that the city owned the land — a parking lot on Forsyth Street near Garnett Station. It also helped that the mayor put all of his political weight behind the construction project.
Zachary Souders, a project coordinator at The Beck Group construction firm, described the project’s planning more like a software scrum than a barn raising. He also said the city made extraordinary efforts to clear a path.
For example, it usually takes three to four months in the queue before the city’s watershed department can clear engineers to dig up a road to lay sewer lines. The shelter project required two weeks.
“I had to make a few phone calls. But I didn't have to threaten anybody or beat anybody,” Dickens said. “But I had to tell him about this top priority … I had to make a call and say, ‘Hey, listen water department, this is absolutely necessary. Do your inspections quickly. Do your estimations and, and make sure you break you know, do what you need to do and get it back ready so that these guys can do what they need to do. The other thing was finding the site itself.”
Partners for HOME, Atlanta’s homelessness nonprofit, will administer the site. It has already approved 22 people for housing. 13 are clients of Intown Cares, which specializes in placing people facing chronic homelessness into shelter. With staffing for counselors and security, it will cost about $900,000 a year to operate, said Cathryn Vassell, CEO of Partners for HOME.
“We need highly qualified, onsite supportive services that really understand how to work well with people with complex trauma, behavioral health, addictive disease and comorbid medical conditions,” she said. “We need the neighbors support when things go good and when things go wrong. And we need sustainable funding for the supportive services.”
There was an edge to the celebration that one had to know how to listen for. Dickens discussed future plans to build a similar project on city land near the water treatment plant on Northside Drive. That area of — look, I just refuse to call it West Midtown, but you get the idea — has been intensely gentrifying over the last ten years. Dickens is plainly anticipating a NIMBY fight over siting.
“I’m worried about it, because community people, you know, aren't accustomed to this,” Dickens said. “So we're going to make sure that we do it in a very responsible conversation and share with them the vision, let them come walk through this, understand that this is not going to affect their way of life, that these individuals actually are not going to be here forever. They're going to come in and gonna get the services they need.”
40 units is a great start. I hope it truly is just the start however. This morning, volunteering with For the Hope Partnership, we served a hot breakfast to a host of folks at the Edgewood location we serve from every Saturday morning.
I'm curious about the $900K yearly cost to operate the units. Do you know how that breaks down in terms of personnel and maintenance?
Yes. This seems like a great step in the right direction. Very glad to see.