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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