Midtown neighborhood group urges Whole Foods boycott
September 10, 2008 at 10:57 am by Thomas Wheatley in News(UPDATE) The fundraiser has been canceled because of neighborhood response and the boycott has been lifted. See this post for details.
The Midtown Ponce Security Alliance, a vigilant homeowners group whose stance on crime teeters between neighborhood watch and Batman, has called for a boycott of Whole Foods today because the high-end grocery store is donating a share of today’s sales to the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless. (Whole Foods has a nearby location across the street from City Hall East.)
In an e-mail sent to members today and forwarded along to CL, the alliance says “In all likelihood, Whole Foods will furnish several thousand dollars to this “task force” so that crime and disorder in our community can continue.”
The group says nearby Peachtree Pine homeless shelter, which last year lost state and federal funding and would benefit from the donations, does not help the city’s homeless population and merely allows “crime and disorder” to flourish in the gentrifying area. The e-mail points to two specific events — the recent killing of a Florida resident at a Midtown gas station and a resident who was assaulted with a brick.
Quite strange when you think of all the other good Whole Foods accomplishes, as well as the larger issue of what can be done to help break the cycle in which many homeless people find themselves.
The full e-mail to alliance members is pasted after the jump.
MIDTOWN PONCE SECURITY ALLIANCE - Whole Foods Boycott
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It has come to our attention that Whole Foods on Ponce is running a benefit for the organization operating the Peachtree Pine shelter. This causes great concern for us in light of two major incidents in our neighborhood involving street people.
The tourist murdered by a panhandler
A resident brutally assaulted with a brick
As you remember, the City worked to have state and federal funding cut off from the Peachtree Pine shelter. After all these years, the Peachtree Pine shelter has shown itself to be a massive contributor to neighborhood crime and disorder. Day and night drug dealers ply their trade on that block, and the shelter simply washes their hands of the detrimental impact on the community. The shelter does nothing whatsoever to help people out of “homelessness” and onward to a more productive life. They merely provide a street people facility in which to hang out when they take breaks from their criminal and nuisance activity.
Whole Foods has committed 5 percent of all of their sales for today (9/10) to go toward this massive community nuisance under the disguise of the “Metro Task Force for the Homeless.” In all likelihood, Whole Foods will furnish several thousand dollars to this “task force” so that crime and disorder in our community can continue.
Please do not shop at Whole Foods today. We also urge you to call Whole Foods and voice your displeasure at their sponsorship of neighborhood crime and disorder. The phone number for the offending store is 404-853-1681.
For background information you may wish to read the following resources on the MPSA website:
1. Digest of Peachtree Pine Responses – A dossier of letters from the community opposing funding for the Metro Task Force for the Homeless. This would shed light on the character of the organization.
http://www.midtownponce.org/news/PPineDigest.pdf
2. The MPSA letter to the Atlanta City Council urging them not to approve recommendation for funding for this community nuisance
http://www.midtownponce.org/news/OpenLettertPeachtreePine.pdf
3. A similar letter from the Midtown Neighbors’ Association
http://www.midtownponce.org/news/MNA_PPine.pdf
In the name of a safer neighborhood please boycott Whole Foods today, and reconsider your ongoing patronage of that business contributing to major problem in the neighborhood you call home.
- Your neighbors at the Midtown Ponce Security Alliance
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©2008 MIDTOWN PONCE SECURITY ALLIANCE - www.midtownponce.org
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September 11th, 2008 at 9:11 am
Bob Cramer, one of the executives of this group had the audacity to label the Midtown community racist for daring to oppose their programs that have proven to be destructive to the neighborhood and counter-productive to the needs of the homeless. Of course, Bob doesn’t mention that he lives in a lily white neighborhood far from Midtown and that the company of which he is the CEO is in a sterile and expensive office complex with private security. Like the rest of the “Task Force”, Bob wants to use our neighborhood as the petri dish for his social experiments, yet doesn’t want to live or have his business near it. Neither do we. I won’t sink to his level and call him a racist for sequestering yourself from minorities except for an occasional visit to your warehouse for criminals.
September 12th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
Isn’t this the same group of folks who coined the term “transvestitutes”? Not exactly a hotbed of enlightenment there, much less humanity or acceptance or tolerance.
Why don’t they just install a big fence and cut to the chase?
Yuppie Ghettoes for everyone!
September 12th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Transvestitute = Transvestite + prostitute
God, we are SO intolerant. How can we live with ourselves? We must be horrible Neanderthals!! Oh the humanity!!!
Please move to our neighborhood so you can enlighten all of us insensitive Cro-Magnons!
I could live with myself a lot better if I were “LIVING WITH MYSELF” instead of living among the tranny hookers on the corner outside my townhome and the crackheads/car thiefs/pimps/dealers they attract to the same corner.
September 12th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
Hello.
I looked at your site thoroughly after the AJC article regarding your boycott of Whole Foods due to their benefit for the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless.
I would like to add the criminal offense of slander to your watchdog agenda. The 43 pages of letters sent to City Council provoked by your tactics and the utter immature move of threatening a business(Whole Foods) that is bringing in revenue for the city and increasing our property value by simply existing in our neighborhood of Midtown is not only detrimental to an already vulnerable population, but is detrimental to the reputation of this community.
It is websites and language from organizations such as yours that gives well respected neighborhoods, such as OURS the not in my back yard stigma. I applaud the continued support that this organization has for the Gateway Center and Atlanta Union Mission for they are doing such good work. But, I whole heartedly believe that if the Mission or the Gateway was located in the district of Midtown this organization would have the same response. Let me remind you that there are a slew of other homeless service providers that attract “vagrants and street cats” to the Midtown area. None of which are mentioned in your safety reports? Why the utter avoidance of Crossroads Ministries or Midtown Assistance Center? Many people experiencing Homelessness receive Social Security Benefits. There is a SSI office in Midtown. Most churches in the area offer some sort of service including some that just “feed” the individuals experiencing homelessness and let them go on their way. Why not viciously slander the churches for not being accountable for the actions of these individuals once they leave the doors of the place of worship?
The vicious and rabid attacks on the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless not only have a not in my back yard aura about them. They are lined with personal gain that your organization’s members stand to receive as a result of the development of the neighborhood. This is not an attempt to return the dignity to those who(as you all so gracefully put it) are “warehoused” by the Task Force. So spare me the forced compassion. It is a complete and tactful attack on their dignity of fellow brothers and sisters for personal gain.
Is it not enough to be the catalyst of the stripping of almost $300,000 dollars from an organization that houses women and children, picks people up from under bridges and takes them in from the freezing street, and advocates from the basic human dignity that all of us deserve? Obviously not.
You call for the CLOSING of the Task Force!! Friends, this would be the beginning of the downfall of our beloved community. If we forced 600 to 1,000 brothers and sisters in humanity into the streets of Midtown the sense of desperation would be greater than most this city has seen. When people are thrust into a desperate situation, people act desperately. I cannot fathom what 600-1,000 acts of desperation entail.
So I tell your organization to STOP misrepresenting the good nature of the citizens of Midtown. We are not the victim of a broken system as you are leading people to believe. We are the beneficiaries!! We are not hurting as the people experiencing homelessness are hurting because someone loudly asked us for money. We are not living in fear of the vagrants of the night. That claim is outrageous. We have one of the most beautiful neighborhoods in the Southeast with a park comparable to Central Park in NYC! We have a thriving business and entertainment community. We enjoy a classy nightlife and have well respected organizations of faith. Our community is blessed with this and so much more. If we continue to forget our good fortune we are potentially jeopardizing it along with our good nature. Let us use our good fortune as a model for other districts and not call for the closing of Task Force. If the Task Force’s operations are not adequately serving the homeless as you say, then let us FUND them adequately so they can maximize their efforts and become the vision that they have on their website(www.homelesstaskforce.org)! Let us build up our neighbor not shun them from existence.
September 12th, 2008 at 7:21 pm
THANK YOU Actual Resident #2.
All I can think of any of this is: Martin Luther King, Jr. is spinning in his grave. What happened to the “city too busy to hate”? It seems the MPSA is more the city too busy hating to come up with actual solutions.
I’m ashamed of this city. Not because of the homeless population, but because of its ivory tower residents whose idea of a solution is shoving the homeless population into prisons and just, you know, wherever so long as we don’t have to see them. Get a clue: you live in the city proper. Atlanta is, statistically speaking, has a crime rate in the top 20 among cities throughout the nation. Hang out in the West End sometime, or around Lakewood, or drive down Donald Lee Hollowell Parkway. You’re not dealing with much but nuisances of living in a highly populated, highly trafficked area. As for the boycott, I’m sure the same folks who can afford the $275 a year necessary for an MPSA membership also have no problem dropping $150 a week on groceries at Whole Paycheck any other time. So why are you complaining? Your newsletters seem to be a lot of alarmism and hand-wringing dedicated to making the ivory-tower-dwellers who constitute your alliance feel less guilty about themselves while stating “we do want to help the homeless, we just don’t agree with any of the methods used to help the homeless in Atlanta”. Perhaps this is mostly because your idea of helping them is just getting them the hell out of your neighborhood because you don’t want to see them. Homelessness is a very real problem in Atlanta, yes. But attitudes like the MPSA’s are absolutely not helping. And where SoPo, Whole Foods, and their supporters wanted to help those who wish to help themselves by affording them access to (environmentally sound) transportation, you’ve just taken a great big shit on them and their ideals. Well done, Atlanta. Well effing done.
September 12th, 2008 at 7:45 pm
Those of us who support the MPSA are hardly in an Ivory Tower. We live in the middle of the problem. We are the ones whose cars are broken into, whose homes are burglarized, who have to arm ourselves with pepper spray or more to walk our dogs at night. We support many homeless advocacy groups, but we do not support Peachtree Pine.
Also, to another poster, MPSA doesn’t drive down my property values, however, the tranny hookers on the corner outside are very effective in that regard.
September 13th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
If you want to talk about Ivory Towers, look at where those running the Peachtree Pine mess live… in upscale Buckhead neighborhoods.
It is one thing to serve as a, well, a gateway center to direct people in need to appropriate services that will help them move on to a more meaningful existence - this is what the Gateway Center and Union Mission work for. This is a whole different dynamic than “you can sleep in this bed, TV room is downstairs, and schedules for free meal programs are listed and over there on the bulletin board.”
It is not a homeless service service per se that causes the problem - Union Mission is located in the middle of a residential area - more so than Peachtree Pine or Gateway - and yet nobody has ever heard so much as a peep from residents seeing it all from their living room windows about major ongoing problems as is the case with Peachtree Pine.
September 13th, 2008 at 11:52 pm
What is the truth?
MPSA and all intown neighborhood alliances have prospered since 1997 when Taskforce moved into Peachtree Pine. Anyone who lived in the midtown area at that time would barely recognize this area today. The Midtown area is probably one of the best examples of what this city can become when Atlanta chooses to break free from the divisive values of the OLD SOUTH. That means that many of the residents in these communities were not even around when generational poverty was the order of the day. So much poverty existed that Federal Empowerment zones were awarded and setup to attract and encourage investment/jobs/training in the 4th Ward area. Much of the area has been revitalized, tax breaks have been given to developers, bonds were issued, attorneys made loot and gentrification replaced a lot of the faces of poverty. But what happened to the people that the $100 Million was intended to help?
The Taskforce has only responded to the needs of the Men, Women and Children who in many cases are victims of local politics and policy. The MPSA on the other hand represent unfounded principles that discriminate and then hide the TRUE voices of the Midtown Community. Many in Midtown are living off of resources that should belong to those bearing the burdens of Atlanta’s long relationship with poverty. I’ve often wondered if anybody from MPSA has ever helped or feed or clothed or employed anybody that was homeless or in need of compassion. Living so close to the King Memorial should have fostered a relationship of tolerance within these intown communities. Instead there are those who would kick a man when he is down and vilify any who would help him up. Grow up Midtown/Ponce, drop the ego, count your blessings and help to undo many of the injustices that thrive in the community. Lives depend on it.
September 14th, 2008 at 10:17 pm
So your case is that Peachtree Pine has contributed to that growth?
That’s like saying that the guy who washed the towels in the gym Michael Phelps worked out in 10 years ago is responsible, or even contributed to, Phelps success.
Peachtree Pine is a plague on the community. MPSA is not opposed to homeless outreach, they vigorously support Gateway, but they are 100% opposed to Peachtree Pine.
I share that position.
September 14th, 2008 at 10:28 pm
To clarify, just because the towel boy was present, doesn’t mean he had a positive effect. Same with Peachtree Pine. In fact, I can make an argument that the recovery of my neighborhood would be even more dramatic without the criminal support system known as Peachtree Pine.
November 28th, 2008 at 4:29 pm
If you move near the landfill you put up with the smell. If you move across the street from a junk yard you live across the street from a junk yard. When you move near the shelter you live near the shelter, take personal responsibility for your decisions.The homeless move here because the shelter meets their needs, why did you? In my opinion it just makes clear how little mental health treatment there is in Georgia when crazed homeless persons hurt someone.