Lower-income Black workers whose stagnant wages aren’t keeping up with rent prices are driving the growth in Atlanta’s homeless population, according to an annual count of the city’s unhoused.
The ranks of Atlanta’s homeless grew to 2,867 people, a 7% spike from the 2,679 homeless people counted in January 2023 in Partners for HOME’s annual one-night assessment of the unhoused population. Overall homelessness is down 30% since the group’s first count in 2016.
This year’s growth in homelessness was largely fueled by the increasing numbers of Black Atlantans being priced out of their rental homes, according to Partners for HOME CEO Cathryn Vassell. It also comes on top of a 33% year-over-year rise in overall Atlanta homelessness between January 2022 and January 2023.
“We have seen a disproportionate number of African Americans that have been impacted by homelessness in the city of Atlanta,” said Caprice Brown, chief program officer at Partners for HOME, the nonprofit responsible for conducting Atlanta’s annual Point-In-Time count of homeless people on behalf of the federal government.
The homeless census, conducted on Jan. 22, is a snapshot of how many people are living without housing in Atlanta and who they are. But despite being a moment-in-time look at homelessness, it still revealed disturbing trends for Black working class and low-income Atlantans.
Black people, who make up about 47% of the city’s population, represented 86% of Atlanta residents living on the streets, in shelters, or in temporary housing, a 3 percentage-point increase from last year’s census. These aren’t just people who have lost their jobs and fallen on hard financial times, according to multiple homeless aid advocates. A growing number of them are employed, working-class people who previously could afford to live in the city. In recent years, however, their incomes no longer cover a higher cost of rent.
“We do see that there are individuals that are working that, unfortunately, are not able to maintain the rental costs that are rising in the city of Atlanta,” Brown said.
Raphael Holloway is CEO of the Gateway Center, a homeless service center that runs four shelter locations in Atlanta with 600 total beds. He said he’s seen a lot more clients over the past year who are working people experiencing homelessness for the first time.
Some are warehouse employees and hospitality and food service workers who earn between $12 to $20 an hour. Others are teachers and even city government employees who work in Atlanta, but can no longer afford to live there.
“In the past, that hourly rate may have been enough to allow people to live independently and definitely have safe and stable, affordable housing,” Holloway said. “It becomes very difficult within the city limits to find affordable housing that they can have on their own.”
West Atlanta Progress co-founder Rodney Mullins said his economic development and housing aid nonprofit has also seen an uptick in homeless clients who are employed, something he described as atypical.
“You have the working class, a number of people living out of their cars [or] they’re couch surfing,” Mullins said. “A lot of people I talk to are living in hotels. … I see college students that can’t afford to live in Atlanta, so they’re living with friends.”
Affordable housing that’s unaffordable?
Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens has made combatting the city’s affordable housing crisis a top priority since his inauguration in January 2022. Last year, the city rolled out a rapid housing initiative to address its growing homeless problem.
Despite the mayor’s efforts, the number of unhoused individuals in the city grew for the second consecutive year.
Mullins and other housing aid advocates said city leaders could be doing more to help keep low-income people in suitable housing.
The mayor’s Affordable Housing Strike Force has built or funded at least 9,000 affordable housing units since 2022 as it works to achieve Dickens’s goal of creating 20,000 affordable units by 2030. But Mullins and others say many of those units are still unaffordable for many low-income Atlanta residents.
The city uses an area median income (AMI) formula to determine what an affordable monthly rental rate is in different parts of the city, meaning that “affordability” is largely a function of the incomes of those who live in a neighborhood. But Mullins said the AMI metric favors the middle class, because high-earning Atlanta residents have moved into lower-income neighborhoods, which in turn has resulted in housing costs rising.
“The needle is not going to move until they change the target audience,” Mullins said.
