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Old Fourth Ward, construction

Atlanta’s gentrification, now a challenge, started as sign of city’s spirit of civil rights

March 10, 2019, 5:20 pm/2 Comments
Dianne Bernez

By Guest Columnist HATTIE DORSEY, civic volunteer, founder and retired president of the Atlanta Neighborhood Development Partnership

Gentrification is a word used to describe what happens with housing development patterns in cities, particularly in the North, Midwest and West Coast cities, when neighborhoods change by race and by income. It was not a pattern that happened in the South, because housing in this region was segregated by race even years after the civil rights movement.

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MARTA stations can become true community centers

October 28, 2018, 11:59 pm/1 Comment
King Williams

By King Williams Recently it was announced that MARTA, in partnership with Soccer in the Streets would be expanding its popular soccer program to 10 additional MARTA transit stations. Soccer in the Streets with support from Atlanta United Football Club, hopes to expand the program into a city-wide youth soccer league for kids in the […]

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Let’s build Atlanta as a city, not a suburb

October 15, 2018, 5:55 pm/8 Comments
King Williams

Note to readers: This post contains Instagram videos and images from social media. The article continues below these items within the post.

It’s 2018, and the massive amounts of large-scale developments in Atlanta astound both long-time residents as well as newcomers.

The current pace of development rivals any of the other construction booms that Atlanta has had at any time in the modern era.

The danger is that we are replicating the suburban aesthetic and cultural environment of decades past by focusing on parking, car-oriented retail and a suburban design ethos with little regard for how these design choices work within the city.

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King Williams

An introduction of SaportaReport’s newest columnist – King Williams

October 8, 2018, 2:45 pm/2 Comments
King Williams

It started out with a simple question, “Momma, where did the people go?”

I was a young teen at the time, and the seemingly simple question perplexed my mom and also perplexed everyone else I would ask until I reached my senior year of college.

“Those people” were the people of East Lake Meadows, a public housing project on the Eastside of Atlanta which sat right in-between the city limits of Atlanta and my native city of Decatur.

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MLK’s “Beloved Community” and the G-Word

May 23, 2017, 5:01 pm/2 Comments
Lyle Harris

An almost surefire way to start an argument in Atlanta is to utter the “G-word” – as in “gentrification.” In the midst of a torrid development boom, the inflow of affluent newcomers to Atlanta – and the involuntary uprooting of low-income residents that inevitably follows – reveals the racial and economic fault lines running through city’s social bedrock.

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