Some Clayton County officials have contended for more than a year that their county has become a dumping ground for people forced to find new homes when Atlanta started tearing down some of its housing projects 12 years ago.
Atlanta officials say it’s not true.
But Clayton County Commission Chairman Eldrin Bell believes that indeed is the case, and he has come up with what he sees as a solution. He wants a copy of all residential lease agreements.
“The effort is not to oppose where people can live,” Bell said in an interview. “It’s opposing people who can’t live by the standards and codes of the community.”
Bell said the agreements would remain private because they would be kept by county police. The county, he said, would charge landlords about $25 a year in most cases to maintain the records.
“This is not to say Big Brother is watching,” he insisted. “It says Big Brother is helping.”
Why settle for a gated subdivision when you can have a gated county?
Thanks to KB
If the Cons have their way, it’ll become a gated COUNTRY!
housing projects have always been minimum security jails designed to keep their inhabitants out of sight, a sort of liberal-induced apartheid
by tearing them down, people hope to break the cycle of poverty these gulags foster.
when the displaced people start moving into low-rent districts the neighborhood changes, and people hate that — tough shit, in the free market people can live where they please.
but don’t get me wrong– keeping landlords responsible for maintaining their property is a good thing, but the people who receive section 8 assistance are already registered and tracked so tracking tenant leases is at best unnecessary and at worst a recipe for discrimination
I live in ATL, and this guy loves the press. He is a former ATL police chief and father to American Idol season 1 runner-up Justin. Whether it’s something like this or butting heads with their sheriff, he’s always in the news. Gets old pretty fast.
#2 –
While I agree that this is a situation that this county should just have to cope with, I have a hard time understanding how helping the poor could be considered institutionalized discrimination. The semi-apartheid in this country is a result of the asinine idea that people can climb up to the next social class by shear force of will as if there’s no class hierarchy at all.
Well, there is a class hierarchy in the US, and upward mobility gets harder the farther down you start. The poor are stuck in their class rut because they are forced to send their kids to poor schools. This virtually assures that those children will have substandard education and have minimal opportunities for improving their lives when they graduate (if they graduate). In general, if you can’t improve your education, you can’t improve your earning potential. And if you can’t improve your earning potential, you can’t move up to the next class strata. The free market may work well for certain systems, but when that system is inherently discriminatory to begin with, it just makes things worse.
My point is that housing isn’t a cause of social inequality, it’s a result of it. That said, making it harder on the underclass does nothing to help the occasional extraordinary individual who can overcome the severe obstacles of their social class and find their way out of poverty. But until the country acknowledges it has a class problem and stops blaming the less fortunate for their inability to will themselves out of poverty, we all will just have to cope with untouchables in our neighborhoods.
Bell, a former Atlanta police chief, says under his plan Clayton police can tell landlords about renters involved in criminal activities and the landlords can decide whether to evict the tenant.
If the renters are involved in criminal activities shouldn’t the police be arresting them instead?
Lets see…
city wants to clean up an area.
Developer needs land.
city county and state Raise Property taxes.
Landlords Raise RENTS.
Rents get to high, people MOVE OUT.
developer gets property, CHEAP as no one can afford to live in this area, in CHEAP, OLD, Houses.
city county State Raise property taxes higher, or made deal with developer, NOT to raise taxes UNTIL property was SOLD.
WOW, thats the AMERICAN WAY… WHICH is a BAD COMMENT on Americans, AINT IT
Bell was fun to watch when he was Chief of Police in Atlanta. George Patton and Audie Murphy combined didn’t have as many medals hanging off their uniforms as this guy. I think most of them were for single-handedly charging TV live remote vehicles, mastery of handling giant scissors used at ribbon cutting ceremonies and service above and beyond the minimum attendance requirements for televised events. One of those may have been just a frequent uniform dry cleaners platinum club lapel pin, that doesn’t count of course.
Did he always get the right pants back from the dry cleaners? 🙂
#8 – I got no clue who this guy is… But your description was brilliantly fun to read 🙂
#8,Ballenger,
Sounds like a Bush kind of guy. All ideas and no brain.
#5. “In the free market the taxpayers don’t subsidize housing. Or anything else, for that matter.”
damn straight – if the sprawlmongers want their roads, let them pay for them.
The greater Atlanta Metro area is a miserable fascist corporate craphole. The pinheads make noises about “solutions to traffic, air quality, infrastructure, etc, etc.” but won’t stop issuing building permits to the rapacious neo-con developers who rip up the roads and neighborhoods building bloated McMansion developments that over tax existing utilities and services and leave the resulting mess to be cleaned up by the poor fucks who used to enjoy living here’s tax dollars. And the Repugtards who’ve moved in are robotic supporters of people like Newt “Goebbels” Gingrich and Bob “Brownshirt” Barr and the other pack of bastard developer scum pretending to be Congresscritters and County commissioners. Greedy asshats all, whose only mission in life is to suck all the money they can out of the populace. Thirty years ago, Atlanta wasn’t all that bad, it had a certain amount of personality and ambiance, but it’s now a wretched hive of frantic, twitching lemmings rushing to and fro, madly racing to their fuel-screw jobs like meth crazed worker bees and then to the nearest strip mall to give the remainder of their credit balance to the Overbankers in exchange for shoddy chinese crap. And just what does the aforegoing have to do with the article? Not much and everything. I’m a native and just needed to unload. Do yourselves a favor and stay the hell away from here. Unless of course, you want to pay way too much for my house, so’s I can get the hell out myself.