The city of Atlanta has announced plans to use the former Athletic Club of the Atlanta Medical Center’s campus as a temporary emergency shelter as the city prepares to launch a new effort to clear out residents living under bridges.
It marks the first time the city has publicly announced plans to use the hospital in downtown that left a hole in health care access when it shuttered.
In a one-sentence email to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Thursday night, a spokesman for Mayor Andre Dickens said the shelter would be used “as we continue to construct and identify longer-term housing solutions.” On Friday, the spokesman said the temporary shelter will support the mayor’s plan to start clearing homeless encampments under bridges in coming weeks.
He also released a list of questions and answers about bridge encampments that he said was shared Thursday night with city council. The document says that the city, Partners for Home and the Gateway 24/7 Center are establishing a temporary emergency shelter “that will be offered to every unhoused individual under priority bridge locations.”
The document says outreach teams are “deploying now and working to engage and assess individuals seeking shelter under priority bridge locations.” It did not identify the encampments given priority. Those areas will start to close over the next week, it says. The removal operation will continue for six to eight weeks.
Signs are being posted on bridges notifying residents of the coming closures. On the day an area is shut down, outreach teams will help people load their belongings and take them to a temporary emergency shelter operated by Gateway Center, according to the list of frequently asked questions. Belongings will be condensed to a maximum of three bags and “remaining remnants will be removed and discarded.”
All of the individuals will be connected to a “housing navigator” who will work to link them to “permanent housing solutions” and other services, including medical care and employment, according to the document. Individuals will be offered shelter for up to 120 days or until they move into housing, it says.
The document notes that the city’s lead agency responding to homelessness, Partners for Home, has received funding to partner with service providers to find new shelter locations for people who are removed from the homeless camps. In January, Atlanta City Council authorized a $2.4 million donation to Partners for Home for such efforts.
The operation to clear out the encampments under bridges has raised questions about where unhoused people will end up after they are removed from their encampments. Some of those who are homeless have not heard of the new campaign to force them to move.
By Friday, however, others said they had come into contact with city police and social workers.
On Friday morning, Matt Welch, 34, who goes by “Matty Ice,” was near a bridge encampment on Buford Highway, loading up a red shopping cart with belongings.
He said about five city police officers came to the bridge on Wednesday or Thursday and told him that he would have to leave.
He wasn’t certain when he would finally be forced out but said he hoped to find somewhere else to stay by the end of the day, preferably in a location with access to food and water.
“It all comes down to what resources and locations are close to you,” he said.
At another encampment bordering a cul-de-sac on Morosgo Drive, Daniel Dunlap said police and social workers had visited the site, which is not under a bridge, on Wednesday.
The 50-year-old said that social workers told him the city planned to offer people a place in a shelter.
“We ain’t got no choice,” Dunlap said. “What can we do?”
Mayor Dickens, in an interview last week with the AJC’s editorial board, said clearing the encampments was necessary because of the danger posed by fires that get out of control after unhoused people start them to cook or stay warm.
The city has for years known about the potentially devastating risks of bridge fires that begin in the camps, often sparked by fires used for cooking and warmth by people staying there.
After a blaze shut down Cheshire Bridge Road in 2021, Dickens warned of the threat that encampments pose to the bridges. Eight months later, his prediction became a reality when another similar fire broke out near a tent site under Cheshire Bridge Road, damaging a bridge and closing the road.
Parts of Buford Highway have been shut down temporarily from smoke and fires. And in 2017, a blaze collapsed a raised portion of I-85 in the city.
The city’s plan to clear encampments will focus on 10 to 20 “priority” bridges, with a focus on those that are relatively low to the ground and therefore more susceptible to damage from flames, officials said. They have declined to identify the bridge locations.
A key part of the operation will be installing sturdy fencing so people can’t re-occupy the spaces after they’re cleared, Dickens told the AJC.
In 2022, Wellstar Health System closed Atlanta Medical Center, disrupting the city’s health care ecosystem and stretching the resources of Grady Memorial Hospital and other nearby facilities to absorb AMC’s patients.
The former hospital that sits on 25 acres in downtown Atlanta has remained an empty reminder of the community’s health care loss, as Dickens continues to renew a redevelopment moratorium the city placed on the property shortly after its closure, effectively blocking any redevelopment or sale of the land.
The first-term mayor has publicly slammed Wellstar for closing the hospital, which served many low-income and underinsured patients. Dickens told Morehouse School of Medicine’s President and CEO Dr. Valerie Montgomery Rice on her podcast last August that the health system’s decision to vacate AMC was the “nuclear option.”
“I was extremely disappointed in WellStar as an organization,” he said. “When you close a hospital, you know what you’re doing. You’ve just impacted an already challenged network. This isn’t an ‘Oops!’”
But some disagreed with his insistence on maintaining a moratorium to prevent the building from being redeveloped.
Council member Amir Farokhi, whose District 2 is home to parts of the former AMC site in the Old Fourth Ward, was one of many to voice concerns about the site becoming a blighted property in the community.
“It does no one any good to leave the land sitting vacant with a housing shortage ongoing and prices constantly rising,” he told the AJC in October. “The AMC parcels are ripe for mixed-use development, including affordable housing. I hope that we allow for that soon.”
Wellstar Health System in December released a statement indicating they were open to working with the city to resolve the issue: “We are committed to a thoughtful process to determine the best use for the future of the site,” it said.
On Friday, Wellstar released another statement on the plan for the shelter. “Wellstar is working with Mayor Dickens to open the AMC athletic center portion of the campus for the City of Atlanta to use as a temporary emergency shelter. We’ll defer to the Mayor for additional details about the plans as we support the City’s work with this underserved community.”
Due to the moratorium on the land owned by Wellstar, the city must refuse any applications for rezoning, building permits, land disturbances, special administrative permits, subdivisions, or other land changes for 15 parcels of land that were part of AMC’s campus. The limitations effectively prevent the health system from selling the property for new uses.
Fulton County’s website lists the total assessed tax value for the former AMC properties at about $118.86 million. However, as a not-for-profit health system, Wellstar pays no property taxes on the land.
