Fresh Loaf

Anita Beaty

UPDATE: Shelter stays open for now.

The water has been turned off again at the city’s largest homeless shelter and this time health officials have given the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless 24 hours to clear out of the building.

Back in December, the city shut off water service to the 100,000-square-foot shelter at the corner of Peachtree and Pine streets because the Task Force had more than $160,000 in unpaid water bills. A judge quickly granted a temporary restraining order to have the water switched back on, but gave the city the power to cut service again if the Task Force failed to keep up with a fairly strict payment schedule.

That’s where we are now. Anita Beaty, executive director of the Task Force, admits the group hadn’t paid its bill.

“We didn’t make the payments the last two months because we didn’t have the money,” she says.

Shortly after the water went off, investigators with the Fulton County Department of Health and Wellness showed up at the shelter and served legal notice that unless water service is restored within 24 hours, the building must be vacated.

“If they don’t vacate, the case will be turned over to law enforcement,” says April Majors, a public information officer with the county health department, who says she doesn’t believe it will come to that. “The management (of the shelter) is being very cooperative.”

Also, she says, if the Task Force doesn’t comply with the county order, it would be required to appear before the county’s environmental court.

The Task Force has until noon Tuesday to clear out of the Peachtree-Pine shelter, Majors says, unless it can restore water service — meaning drinkable water and working toilets.

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The woman approaching is stooped and sunken-eyed, with a weather-ravaged face that hints she might be much younger than she looks. She carries a frayed backpack and when she speaks, it’s in the beaten-down manner of someone accustomed to asking favors.

The Peachtree-Pine shelter houses hundreds of homeless men.

“Thank you, Miss Anita,” she says, as she follows her subject along the sidewalk and through the side door of the Peachtree-Pine homeless shelter. “You’re always good to me, even when I stray.”

Anita Beaty assures the woman she’ll be taken care of and ushers her into a small lobby where other street people occupy chairs along the walls or gaze out windows.

“We’re the first place people can come so they don’t die on the street,” explains Beaty as she sits down for an interview a few minutes later.

As executive director of the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless, Beaty has run the city’s largest shelter on the corner of Peachtree and Pine streets for more than a decade. White-haired and grandmotherly, her appearance belies her reputation as a relentless advocate for the homeless, and in conversation, she comes across as so soft-spoken and unhurried that you’d never guess this is someone whose world is unraveling.

Earlier this month, the city turned off the water at Peachtree-Pine, citing unpaid bills totaling more than $160,000. Beaty quickly persuaded a judge to issue a temporary injunction to restore service, but her agency must comply with a daunting payment schedule or the water goes back off.

While water is the most immediate of the problems facing the Task Force, it’s far from the only one. It may not even be the biggest.
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Anita Beaty is right about one thing: City officials would love to shut down her enormous shelter at the corner of Peachtree and Pine streets.

Yesterday morning, the city cut off the water service to the former warehouse building occupied by Beaty’s Task Force for the Homeless. By evening, however, a judge had ordered the water turned back on. But unless Beaty is able to pay off a $160,000 water bill, the shelter may soon be forced to close down for good.

Anita Beaty

“It’s very serious right now,” says former Atlanta Councilwoman Myrtle Davis, who serves on the Task Force’s board of directors. “This is part of a concerted effort by the city to shut us down.”

Arguably so, but that doesn’t change the apparent fact that the Task Force owes $160,000 in outstanding water bills. Fulton County Superior Court Judge T. Jackson Bedford ordered the shelter to come up with $6,000 by Friday and another $3,000 or so by next Wednesday, and to develop a reasonable plan for paying off the rest of the bill.

“If they miss either payment, the water goes back off,” says Debi Starnes, another former councilwoman who now serves as Mayor Franklin’s Homeless Czarina.

(Photo by Joeff Davis)

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Mayor Shirley Franklin was joined by Police Chief Richard Pennington, Councilwoman-turned-Homeless Czar Debi Starnes and a cast of dozens Wednesday to kick off the city’s latest effort to put a stop to rampant downtown panhandling.

Right away, this program seems to benefit from greater support from and coordination with the business community. And its clever slogan, “Give change that makes sense,” is sure to appeal to visitors and residents already reluctant to hand their coinage over to aggressive beggars.

Part of the initiative is a citywide marketing campaign whose goal is to get people to quit giving money to folks who accost them for spare change. There’s even a new website, stoppanhandlingatlanta.com, that directs the generous among us to instead give donations to local social service agencies via the United Way’s Regional Commission on Homelessness.

Starnes put it succinctly: “We want people to understand the difference between the homeless and hustlers.”

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As we’d reported in early August and the AJC repeated Sunday, City Hall has launched something of a crackdown on downtown panhandling. Last month, the city fired the first shot across the bow when police arrested almost 50 aggressive beggars, the first serious enforcement of the downtown “no panhandling zone” in three years.

And this Wednesday, Mayor Shirley Franklin will officially unveil the city’s new anti-panhandling strategy, of which increased police enforcement is only one aspect. Basically, the city – with support from Central Atlanta Progress, the Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau and the downtown business community – will launch a marketing campaign aimed at persuading people not to give money to beggars, but rather to social-service agencies that work with the homeless.

The ultimate goal, says Debi Starnes, a former Councilwoman and Franklin’s adviser on homeless issues, is to nudge those who are actually homeless into seeking treatment and help, while discouraging professional panhandlers.

If you’re interested, the mayor’s announcement will be in the City Hall atrium from 10:30-11:30 a.m. Let’s hope this marketing campaign works better than Brand Atlanta.

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Tiny to the point of appearing shriveled, Jessica looks much older than her 48 years. Which shouldn’t be a surprise, considering she has HIV, suffers from mental illness and has been homeless perhaps half her life.

For the past several years, she lived in the bushes outside City Hall, which is where former Atlanta Councilwoman Debi Starnes first met her. Starnes estimates that she had suggested to Jessica on at least 50 occasions that she go to a shelter or ask help from a social-service agency – only to be cussed out.

Last week, however, Jessica said she had changed her mind; she was ready to check in to the city’s Gateway Center, where she could be assigned temporary housing and evaluated for treatment as part of a comprehensive program aimed at stabilizing lives gripped by addiction and psychosis. The last they spoke, Jessica told Starnes she must’ve been sent by God to help her.

Such are the incremental victories in the battle against homelessness.

Read the rest of this article here.

(Photo by Joeff Davis)

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Former Atlanta Councilwoman Debi Starnes, who has served for the past year or so as Mayor Shirley Franklin’s homeless czar (czarina?), found herself dropped from the city payroll last week.

But, unlike other city employees who fell victim to the latest round of layoffs, Starnes is planning to keep her job. The deal she worked out with Franklin, a personal friend, is that she can stay on as the mayor’s policy adviser on homeless issues as long as she finds private funds to pay her way.

“I have to raise the money to cover my salary,” which totals $96,000, Starnes explains. “It’s the right thing to do. When the city is so broke it’s laying off firemen, it doesn’t make sense to keep funding my position.”

Although Starnes hasn’t started looking for donations yet, she says she intends to find new sources so she won’t cannibalize money that already flows to the Regional Commission on Homelessness, the local umbrella program administered by the United Way. Starnes, a longtime homeless advocate with a doctorate in community psychology, represents Atlanta on the Commission, along with Franklin.

The city’s current budget crunch won’t affect the operations of such city homeless initiatives as the Gateway Center, Starnes says, because it’s funded and staffed by the Commission, which has collected $50 million from public and private sources.

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