This story was produced in partnership with Canopy Atlanta.
Columbus Ward, a longtime resident of Peoplestown, has watched storms sweep through his neighborhood for decades, carrying sewage and stormwater into streets and homes.
He said he remembers when Atlanta rerouted major sewer lines ahead of the 1996 Olympics due to the construction of the Centennial Olympic Stadium, which today is now Center Parc Stadium, as promises were made to prevent flooding in the Black neighborhoods located nearby.
But Ward said the job was never truly completed, leaving his neighborhood more prone to flooding events in the long run.
“The city is responsible for the flooding that’s in Peoplestown because of them not doing the proper infrastructure they need to do in order to alleviate the flooding,” Ward told Capital B Atlanta.
That sentiment, the city not tackling stormwater in a comprehensive way, is the root of Ward and other residents’ frustrations with Atlanta’s current plan to address the flooding in Peoplestown as the city is currently constructing a massive storm and sewer water vault 30 feet underneath their neighborhood.
That vault is the centerpiece of the city’s $156.5 million Custer Avenue Capacity Relief Multi-Benefit Project — dubbed by critics as “Poop Park.” Designed to store 20 million gallons of combined stormwater and sewage beneath a new park, the project is meant to satisfy the city’s federal consent decree obligations to clean up persistent sewage issues.
But for Ward and many neighbors, it represents another round of broken promises, displacement, and the ongoing public health and environmental justice issues that have plagued Black neighborhoods over time.
Atlanta’s flooding problem
For decades, Atlanta has struggled to rein in flooding and sewage overflows caused by its aging combined sewer system, a burden that has fallen most heavily on historically Black neighborhoods like Peoplestown.
A combined sewer system carries stormwater and sewage in the same pipes, a design that becomes dangerous during heavy rain. When storms overwhelm the system, sewage can back up into homes or spill into nearby waterways.
Due to a 1998 federal consent decree over Clean Water Act violations, the city began a long campaign to modernize its water infrastructure. While the city has built out pipes to separate the flow of stormwater and sewage in portions of the system, large areas of downtown and southeast Atlanta, including Peoplestown, still rely on the combined sewer system.
Peoplestown’s geography compounds the problem. The neighborhood sits downhill from major developments and highways, including Center Parc Stadium and Georgia State University’s campus. All of these areas create an urban setting layered in impervious surfaces, like concrete and asphalt, that don’t absorb rainwater during storms.
“[The city] didn’t force Georgia State or the Atlanta Public School system to retain their stormwater on site. Instead, it gets dumped in the storm sewer, which is mixed with sewage, and then it rolls downstream,” Jacqueline Echols, president of the South River Watershed Alliance, told Capital B Atlanta. “And the lowest area, after all of that development, is Peoplestown.”
Over time, the flooding has damaged homes and exposed residents to untreated sewage, reflecting a broader pattern in Atlanta where Black neighborhoods are more vulnerable to flooding during extreme weather.
As climate change persists and severe weather events increase, the strain on Atlanta’s sewer system becomes even greater and makes the threat of flooding more consistent.
Echols said that South River Watershed Alliance, community stakeholders, the city, and residents like Ward worked together in 2020 to develop a plan that aimed to address how the city tackles stormwater management.
The plan aimed to tackle flooding upstream before it collects downstream. It included requiring private and public property owners to contain the stormwater on their own sites, and laid out ways the city could update how stormwater was routed throughout targeted neighborhoods in Atlanta.
Ultimately, that plan didn’t move forward, and the city’s Custer Avenue project is currently under construction. Echols said the project is the city’s “path of least resistance,” not what’s best for Peoplestown.
“The community and I think this is such a ridiculous notion. … It’s a park with no trees because there’s no dirt,” she said.
What is “Poop Park”?
The 20 million gallon underground storage vault will temporarily store combined stormwater and sewage during heavy rain events. A park will sit above the vault.
The estimated total cost of the project is $156.5 million, funded through water and sewer rates and federal assistance via the Environmental Protection Agency’s Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act program.
City officials say the project addresses the “root cause” of flooding by increasing underground storage capacity.
“The Custer Avenue Multi-Benefit Capacity Relief Project is designed to provide large-scale underground storage to temporarily hold excess flows, which will reduce flooding, sewer backups, and overflows during storms while also creating new community greenspace,” a spokesperson for the Department of Watershed Management said in a statement to Capital B Atlanta.
But residents and advocates argue the project treats the symptoms, not the source, of Peoplestown’s flooding.
“They haven’t done anything to capture the stormwater at the source, they just let it flow all the way down to Peoplestown,” Ward said.
Environmental advocates say that the project’s approach prioritizes regulatory compliance over community protection.
“The city is under the consent decree, and they’re trying to meet the consent decree requirements based on the available best technology they claim to have,” Yomi Noibi, former executive director of ECO-Action, an environmental nonprofit, told Capital B Atlanta. “They think this plan is what is going to make it work, but people like me feel there are some alternatives.”
For Noibi, who also worked on the 2020 water management plan with Echols and Ward, the question the community is asking is if this project will actually reduce flooding and protect public health.
The nickname “Poop Park,” Ward said, dates back to early design proposals that included detention ponds for sewage and stormwater.
“They were talking about putting in these ponds that will hold the raw sewage and the stormwater as a first proposal, that’s why we ended up calling it the ‘poop park’ or the ‘poop pond.’ We knew that was not a good solution,” he said.
While the design later shifted underground, residents remain concerned about health impacts, odors, and construction-related harms.
“You’re talking about the middle of a block of a neighborhood where people live that these trucks are moving in and out. They’ve got to remove all that dirt in order to build that vault, and that’s a lot of dirt they’ve got to remove,” Ward said.
Watershed Management officials said the facility is designed to minimize odors and that “normal park operations should not experience persistent odors during typical conditions.”
But Noibi disputes that assurance.
“The science says odor control technology can control odors — not that it will,” he said. “Technology often fails, so why not try to prevent it?”
Outside of disagreements over the project’s design, the initiative also hits a sore spot for longtime residents, as it has led to the displacement of various community members during a time when the neighborhood is already facing rapid gentrification.
In order to obtain the land needed for the project, the city used eminent domain to seize an entire block of homes along Custer Avenue, displacing Black families who had lived there for generations.
Three homeowners fought the city in court before the acquisitions were finalized in 2022. Tanya Washington Hicks, Bertha Darden, and her husband, Robert Darden — reluctantly agreed to sell their Peoplestown homes to the city of Atlanta for a combined total of more than $5.3 million.
“I knew most of the families on that block,” Ward said. “Some of them had been here for years and years.”
Echols said the use of eminent domain in this context was unprecedented.
“It’s the first time in the city of Atlanta I know where eminent domain was used with the notion of creating a park,” she said, “although the park’s purpose was to store combined sewage.”
Communication breakdown
Residents have also criticized the city for lapses in communication. Kim Scott, executive director of Georgia WAND and chair of the Intrenchment Creek Community Stewardship Council, said the city committed to quarterly construction updates but has failed to deliver.
“That continues a troubling pattern of broken communication and unfulfilled public commitments,” Scott told Capital B Atlanta in an email.
Ward said community engagement has also deteriorated since the project began construction toward the end of last year.
“We had some good, positive meetings from the beginning, but the city has started lacking again, now as Dickens is on his second term, and that welcome feeling of ‘let’s meet, let’s discuss, let’s work together’ we don’t feel that right now,” Ward said.
About 20 residents gathered at a Peoplestown Neighborhood Association meeting last week and raised ongoing concerns about construction of the project. Residents took time in the meeting to organize next steps in their push to secure a formal meeting with the city.
Those in attendance reflected a cross-section of Peoplestown: longtime, legacy residents with deep roots alongside newer neighbors. Despite different histories, their concerns were the same, which is that they want continued communication from the city about the project’s construction and how it could affect public health, safety, and daily life.
Residents spent the meeting sharing contacts, tracking unanswered emails, and planning how to escalate pressure on the mayor’s office, the Department of Watershed Management, and other city leaders until a meeting is scheduled.
Watershed Management said it has engaged residents through meetings, project updates, and coordination with neighborhood stakeholders, but acknowledged that the core design is final.
“The overall design and function of the project will remain unchanged,” a department spokesperson said.
The mayor’s office did not immediately respond to Capital B Atlanta’s request for comment.
For Ward, the stakes of this project and the issue of flooding extends beyond Peoplestown.
“We still have to be concerned about what’s going to happen to our other neighborhoods beyond Peoplestown, and what plans are being put in place,” he said. “The city has not done a good job in terms of what they’re gonna do about infrastructure changes to keep flooding from happening in the community because it’ll be the next neighborhood with some bigger problems if we don’t start doing something about it now.”
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