This story has been updated to correct a misstatement about ownership of the property.
Midtown boosters, downtown power brokers and Atlanta city officials are close to winning a decade-long battle to close a massive homeless shelter that for 15 years has served as a refuge of last resort for people on the streets.
But advocates for the homeless like Chuck Bowen, executive director of Central Outreach and Advocacy Center, fear that many of the hundreds of men who stay at the shelter each night will end up joining the more than 2,000 documented men and women who already weather the nights on Atlanta streets.
Bowen said that could mean many more men sleeping in downtown doorways, parks and alleys -- not the image Atlanta's establishment wants conventiongoers and tourists to encounter.
Opponents of the shelter long have argued that its philosophy of providing shelter without strings attached perpetuated homelessness by enabling men to refuse addiction and mental-health treatment -- in contrast to shelters such as the Gateway Center that require participating in such programs in exchange for help.
Anita Beaty, who runs the shelter as executive director of the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless, has countered that she provides a lifeline for often desperate men.
Unless a higher court overturns a lower court's order, Beaty is to hand over the shelter Wednesday to a team run by the United Way of Metropolitan Atlanta.
The United Way will operate the shelter at the intersection of Peachtree and Pine streets for up to six months before turning the property over to its owners.
The United Way doesn't plan on replacing the emergency shelter. The organization's officials say they have a plan to find housing for the men who live there by reuniting them with their families and providing apartments and rooms through social programs that try to stabilize the chronically homeless by getting them treatment and assisting with finding work.
Protip Biswas, executive director of the United Way's regional commission on homelessness, said that with community support he hopes to find housing for 20 to 25 men a week -- or more than 500 within six months.
Advocates for the homeless question whether the agency can possibly fulfill such an ambitious undertaking, noting it has been praised for finding housing for 1,700 since 2004 -- which only amounts to about 240 a year.
Alan Harris, an advocate for the homeless, credited the United Way with providing a "supreme effort" to move more homeless people into housing, but he said the suggestion they could find housing for most of the men was "laughable."
Bowen said shelters run by Central Presbyterian Church and the neighboring Catholic Shrine of the Immaculate Conception near the state Capitol house about 100 and are full each night -- as are other city shelters.
"When we have to turn people away, we tell them that Peachtree and Pine is the only place to go," Bowen said. "Peachtree and Pine's rules were a lot more flexible and would accept people that other shelters and transitional housing programs would not -- people who suffer from mental and addictive diseases, people with no ID. ... Where are those people going to go?"
Harris noted Peachtree and Pine also has provided a day shelter that gave men a place to stay during the day rather than the parks or libraries.
"What happens when you have no emergency shelter or day shelter for men who are mentally ill?" Harris said. "They will end up wandering the streets like abandoned animals."
It costs about $8,000 a year -- or $4 million for 500 men -- to fund such housing, Biswas said. He declined a request by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution for the United Way's plan on acquiring the funding and how much housing each of its partners would be providing.
He did say the plan would become more concrete after the United Way team got into the shelter and assessed the needs of the residents. He expects the shelter "crisis" to eat up most of the United Way's funding for homelessness but also to spur contributions.
Nearly 6,000 were homeless in Atlanta during a homeless census last year. Most of them were in shelters or on the street, with only about 1,200 in transitional housing, according to the Metro Atlanta Tri-Jurisdictional Collaborative Continuum of Care Homeless Census.
United Way officials said Beaty has refused to work with them over the years or allow them access to the shelter, a charge Beaty has denied. She did not return a call seeking comment for this article.
Biswas said the United Way estimates that the shelter typically houses 350 men a night, although shelter workers say it has 475 beds and enough chairs in overflow areas to sleep another 200.
The debate on the number of residents in the shelter is symptomatic of the years-old battle between the task force and the downtown business group Central Atlanta Progress and city officials. Beaty has filed a lawsuit contending the business association, city officials and others conspired to cut the task force’s public grants and private donations, causing it to default on its mortgage, which allowed Fialkow to acquire the property.
Vince Smith, executive director of the Gateway Center, said he was optimistic that once case workers go into the task force shelter they will be able to help the vast majority of the men. But, he said, men who resist entering treatment programs will not be coddled.
"The vast majority of homeless individuals I meet don't want to be homeless -- they want to move forward," he said. "I know the collaborative community effort under the United Way's leadership will be saying to people, ‘You have to take responsibility.'"
A strong proponent of the task force shelter is Curtis Motley, 58, a former hotel manager who showed up there four years ago, homeless and addicted to drugs, and today checks in men at the shelter each night and runs maintenance crews -- made up of homeless carpenters and painters.
"We try and lift these guys up, but we lean on the side of mercy here," he said. "The way you are treated here makes it hard to leave. I had given up on myself and everybody else and the task force gave me my self esteem back by showing me unconditional love."
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