The news that the Imperial Hotel faces foreclosure should cause all of us to reflect on the history and prospects of affordable housing in this city.
When members of the People for Urban Justice, led by Ed Loring and Murphy Davis of the Open Door Community, occupied the vacant building in June 1990, they expected to be arrested and carted off to jail. Instead, dozens of homeless people converged on the hotel to join in the occupation that ended up lasting weeks.
The negotiations that occurred involved the homeless squatters, the People for Urban Justice and representatives of John Portman (the building’s owner). Mayor Maynard Jackson dispatched his chief trouble shooter, Shirley Franklin, to look after the city’s interests. In the end, the occupiers left the property in exchange for the city’s commitment to build thousands of new single-room occupancy units. Whether the Jackson administration lived up to that promise remains an open question.
By 1996 the Imperial was back in the news. The Olympics were coming to town, creating of frenzy of development activity. Advocates feared that low-income housing would be a casualty of Olympic fever. One of them, Bruce Gunter of Progressive Redevelopment Inc., asked the city for a $1 million loan to purchase the Imperial, which he proposed to redevelop as a showcase of affordable housing. Thanks to the persuasive powers of Housing Commissioner Carl Hartrampf, Mayor Bill Campbell agreed to authorize the loan.
The Imperial Hotel became an Atlanta success story. At a time when the Atlanta Housing Authority was demolishing the city’s public housing projects and moving toward a new model of “mixed-income” housing, the Imperial seemed to prove that public-private partnerships offered the best way to shore up the bottom end of the housing market. Backed by a combination of low-income housing tax credits and public subsidies, the city, AHA and PRI could point to the Imperial as proof that market forces, properly understood and harnessed, held the key to preserving the nation’s stock of affordable housing.
Today, the sad fate of the Imperial Hotel demonstrates the fallacy behind the idea that every social problem has a market-driven solution. It should remind us that any housing policy based on this false idea puts our most economically vulnerable fellow citizens at the mercy of market forces that show no mercy when times get tough.
Charles Steffen teaches history at Georgia State University.
