Atlanta, the capital of the Southeast, is known for its growing economy, beautiful homes and fine universities. For most of its citizens Atlanta offers growth, vitality and prosperity.

But for 160,000 Atlantans this is not true. They live in 40,000 unfit dwellings in neighborhoods with names such as Vine City, Cabbagetown, Lightning, Summerhill, Mechanicsville and Buttermilk Bottom, only minutes from downtown Atlanta, but decades away from the mainstream of Atlanta’s progress.

The social, economic and ethnic character of Atlanta’s population is undergoing profound change. Middle-class families are moving to the suburbs, leaving behind in the central city area an increasingly large concentration of unemployed, underemployed, poorly educated, low-income families.

Some of the residents of the central city are long-time, hard core, slum dwellers. Added to this group are thousands of rural “in-migrants’ who move to Atlanta yearly from surrounding states. Crowded into deteriorating housing and alien surroundings, the newcomers from deprived rural area join the residents of the central city in a lonely, miserable existence characterized by restricted opportunities and despair. Most are unskilled. Many are illiterate, lacking the most basic skills in reading, writing and arithmetic. Many are unable to fill out job applications, read street or bus signs, or follow written work instructions. Finding no work and little hope, the family unit disintegrates as individuals break and flee or fathers move out to allow their families to qualify for public assistance. Desertion, divorce, crime, delinquency, unemployment and dependency follow.

Who are the poor in Atlanta?

They are young men, like the 21-year-old holding two jobs, neither paying more than $1.25 an hour, to support his wife and four children. A loan company is now threatening to garnishee his wages because he missed payments on money borrowed to buy Christmas toys for his children. One of his children had pneumonia. The medicine and additional coal to heat his room took all he had.

The poor are women like the 33-year-old mother supporting three children. She earns $28.00 a week and pays $12.00 a week rent on three rooms. She must leave her children alone at home while she works because there are no no-fee daycare centers near her neighborhood.

The poor are old, like the 76-year-old man living alone in one room, existing on canned tomato juice and wieners which a neighbor brings every six or seven weeks. He is paralyzed. No one else ever comes to see him.

Who are the people living in Atlanta’s slums?

A study of 47,000 people, 18 through 75 years of age, living in poverty neighborhoods served by EOA centers, found that: More than 2/3 of all unemployment in the Atlanta Metropolitan area is concentrated in these low-income areas. 77% earned less than $3,000 a year- 52% of all households were headed by women. 82% were Negroes. 57% of the adults did not graduate from high school. 7% had no formal education. 12% needed medical aid to remove a work handicap. 11% claimed no job skill, or only farm work as experience. 22% of the whites and 25% of the Negroes were seeking work.

This gap between rich and poor is affecting Atlanta at every level. The extent of the gap comes as a shock to most.

A recent study of social blight in Atlanta by our Community Council shows the disparity clearly.

The council found that if you live in one of Atlanta’s upper income areas you share an acre with six others; if you live in a downtown slum you share an acre with 56 others.

The council found that a baby born to slum parents has only half the chance of surviving as an infant in the highest income areas. The tuberculosis rate is five times higher among slum adults than for adults on the Northside.

The same trend follows in juvenile delinquency according to the council. In Vine City the juvenile arrest rate is six times higher than in Buckhead. Juvenile problems are numerous.

Scarred by severe deprivation, children represent one of the greatest tragedies of poverty. The cycle of public dependency and failure repeats itself as they grow up little better equipped than their parents to cope with the demands of urban life.

Many of the children live in broken homes. One out of four children in Atlanta live with only one parent. In our slums the figure would be more like one-half to two-thirds. Most of these parents work. Those who earn little cannot afford daycare and the EOA and United Appeal centers for poor children can handle only 1,200. The remaining 12,000 children have no where to go. Often they are left alone at home or in the streets because parents have no alternative. Trouble is never far away. One out of six Atlanta youths will become juvenile delinquents within one year.

The week of January 12 has been proclaimed START NOW ATLANTA week to urge Atlantans to learn about our city’s problems, what the poor have done for themselves and what we can do to help them.

EOA is ready to lend a hand. Groups or individuals who want to visit poverty areas as guests of poor people or who want to volunteer in new ways can do so by calling EOA at 525-4262.