Category: David Pendered

Several leaders in Atlanta’s beauty industry are turning their attention to helping the homeless and will start with an event Sunday.

“If I want to apply for a job and my hair is terrible, what do I do?” was the question posed by Jakki Dee, a longtime fixture in Atlanta’s beauty industry and owner a Buckhead salon.

Dee’s answer was to spearhead a fundraising event that he hopes will lead to the opening of a salon where the homeless can get free hair care. Among the 25 participating salons are Van Michael and Richie Arpino – two leaders in Atlanta’s vibrant cosmetology industry.

The foreign export initiative underway in metro Atlanta begins with a simple question in an online survey that could help make the case for the deepening the Savannah harbor.

The question is, “Does your company currently export?” That is the starting point of a survey the Metro Atlanta Chamber intends to use to establish a game plan by mid 2014 to boost the region’s foreign exports. Chamber membership is not required to participate.

Metro Atlanta now is ranked 13^th in the nation in terms of exports from the country’s 100 most-populated cities, according to a fresh report by the Global Cities Initiative. The report also shows metro Atlanta is losing ground to other regions in certain categories, even as Atlanta’s airport bustles with foreign travelers and the Savannah port project attracts a visit from Vice President Biden, as it did last week.

Forget Charlotte. Metro Atlanta’s rival for the title of the southeast’s most globally connected city may well be Greenville, S.C.

The Greenville-Spartanburg corridor punches far above its weight in terms of foreign exports. Greenville, by itself, ranks as the 11^th most export-intensive metro area in the nation, according to a joint report prepared by the Brookings Institution and JP Morgan Chase for the Global Cities Initiative.

Metro Atlanta, on the other hand, has lost ground over the past decade among the nation’s 100 largest cities in terms of the proportion of its output that was exported. Metro Atlanta now ranks with Harrisburg, Memphis and Little Rock for exporting less than 15 percent of the output of their top industry, according to a new report from the Global Cities Initiative.

Discussion of poverty and the lack of mobility in U.S. suburbs, particularly in Atlanta’s suburbs, seems to be hitting a new high.

Just last week, a speaker from the Brookings Institution named three primary causes of the spike in poverty rates in Atlanta’s close-in suburbs: The foreclosure crisis; shortage of transit in the suburbs; and housing vouchers that facilitated a move from the inner city to communities with smaller safety nets.

For Kim Anderson, the CEO of Families First who was on the panel with Alan Berube, of Brookings, the spread of poverty raises one troubling question: “Are we going to repeat what we did in the urban community in the suburban communities?”

In a region still wracked by the lingering recession, metro Atlanta leaders are escalating the conversation about poverty in the suburbs.

At the Atlanta Regional Housing Forum’s quarterly meeting Wednesday, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution drew a bright line under a grim statement reported by the ARC in February: “Metro Atlanta had the highest percentage-point increase in suburban poverty among the 20 most populous metro areas in the nation.”

On a related point, MARTA GM Keith Parker said last week that the dip in MARTA ridership has coincided with the quest for affordable housing that has prompted long-time transit riders to move from the urban core to the suburbs. Once there, the former transit riders find other means of transportation, Parker said at an Aug. 30 meeting of Georgia Stand-Up.

As the United States pauses to honor workers on Labor Day, one Atlanta mother is thankful and proud that she’s on her way to becoming a pipefitter.

Jacquelyn Treadville-Samuels is changing careers after working as a forensic science technician in Atlanta and Alabama. She lost her taste for that work after caring for her cancer-stricken mother in Alabama. She returned to Atlanta and became homeless while looking for a job.

“This is a dream come true,” Treadville-Sanders said outside the auditorium where members of Georgia Stand-Up had just applauded the first all-female class of pre-apprentice trainees in its Trade-Up program. “I’ve prayed for something like this, but I never knew is would be like this.”