How should Atlanta tackle blight in neighborhoods?
‘There seems to be so many different roadblocks’
Blight in all its forms - the boarded-up house a few doors down, the pile of tires gathered on the empty lot, the overgrown grass marring what might otherwise be a nice street - has overwhelmed Atlanta for years. It’s a problem city officials have long been unable to solve or even adequately address.
Last weekend, more than 300 Atlanta residents, elected officials, and city employees gathered inside the Boisfeuillet Jones Atlanta Civic Center to discuss how to better enforce codes designed to curb blight. Some City Hall department heads and Atlanta City Councilmembers provided a broad overview of complicated procedures related to the city’s approach to the issue. It also gave perturbed residents, who are sick and tired of negligent property owners and eyesores in their neighborhoods, a chance to complain about problem properties.
“There seems to be so many different roadblocks,” Councilwoman Felicia Moore, the host of Atlanta’s code enforcement summit, tells CL. “It seems like there’s some distraction at every step of the way whether it’s finding the owner, having to reset court dates for particular reasons, to fighting people who have left the city and need to be served. It can be very disheartening for the citizens to see something get done and for policymakers to wrap our arms around what we can do.”
City officials estimates that code violations throughout the city total approximately $40 million. Atlanta Police Department Major James Shaw, who’s in charge of the city’s code enforcement efforts, says that those kinds of vacant properties harm communities, attract drug dealers and prostitutes, and discourage investment in neighborhoods. He says that APD attempts to hold negligent property owners accountable, but the process of finding them can be overwhelming and difficult. He says the Department of Public Works helps maintain some properties belonging to some absentee owners. In other cases, the city can board up or, after a long and arduous process, demolish buildings that become problematic for communities.
“When we get to the dead end of what we can do with a property, if we find someone that cannot or will not comply, or we can’t find them, then we’re stuck,” Shaw says. “That’s how things get rolling toward demolition.”
But because Georgia law strongly protects property rights, officials are limited in the action they can take against negligent owners. Deputy Solicitor Erika Smith says that code violations can lead to fines, imprisonment, or community service penalties if convicted. But she says it can be tough to find negligent property owners that either leave the state or have protections from a investment group. Since many cases are criminal in nature, the process toward getting an abandoned property repaired is slow and often delayed, if it ever happens.
Beyond those departments, code enforcement complaints travel through a complicated bureaucratic process that includes the city’s zoning, public work, fire, corrections and legal departments. Other key issues addressed at the summit included illegal tire dumping, boarding houses, and the role of land banks. But the need to hold negligent property owners responsible emerged as the most pressing need for the majority of residents and officials speaking at the summit.
In the coming months, Atlanta’s newly formed Code Enforcement Commission will convene for the first time to look at those issues - and many other ones brought up by citizens - in hopes of addressing blight in neighborhoods. Councilwoman Mary Norwood, who co-chairs the commission, says that the panel hopes to draw up a series of solutions at both the city and state level to take on one of Atlanta’s biggest issues.