Blank Foundation Adds $4.6M to Westside Investment
The grants are aimed at helping residents on the Westside to gain economically and remain in their rapidly changing neighborhood.
As part of its commitment to aid the two communities most directly affected by the development of his Mercedes-Benz Stadium, Arthur Blank through his family foundation has announced $4.6 million in new philanthropic grants.
Two neighborhoods, Vine City and the English Avenue community, which number about 7,000 residents, are just west of the stadium. They will benefit from two grants split between the Atlanta Technical College and Goodwill of North Georgia to train a total of 650 workers from the Westside in trades where job growth is strong.
The Blank Foundation announced it is also helping fund an Atlanta city government program to help young people between the ages of 18 and 30 from the Westside with career development, placement help and on-the-job training. The new grants bring the investment the Foundation has made on the Westside since 2007 to $106 million.
The managing director of the Blank Foundation’s work there, Danny Shoy, Jr emphasized that the Foundation’s efforts are aimed at changing the area’s history.
“We are working to change pathways for residents who, unfortunately, have not had job training support for a long time, which is why you have the challenges that you have in the Westside.”
Shoy points out that at one time the two Westside neighborhoods had a mixed-income population four times what it is today and a history that goes back to the late 19th century. It was the home of Atlanta’s first black millionaire, Alonzo Herndon, who founded the Atlanta Life Insurance Company. His stately mansion built in the early years of the last century has been preserved there.
But changing patterns of neighborhood development combined with white flight that changed Atlanta’s racial make-up more than a half-century ago led to a steep decline in the communities there. Today many of the homes are owned by absentee landlords, who have shown little interest in maintaining the properties or by speculators who have bet on the future growth of the area.
An investigative series in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution a decade ago showed that one wealthy Atlanta investor owned 150 properties there and had little interest in maintaining them. He was sentenced to 30 days in jail for violations of the city’s housing code.
Today, all that is beginning to change. Gentrification and rising property values are having a visible impact on streets once defined by boarded up dwellings and drug dealing. Just to the north, Atlanta’s newest recreation area, Westside Park, with its 35-acre reservoir, opened three years ago.
The Westside BeltLine Trail, a three-mile greenway, has started to have a measurable impact on the area, as it has on the Eastside of the city where it is credited with creating 50,000 jobs and $10 billion in economic development.
Blank’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium, which was build adjacent to Vine City, was recently joined by a new Hilton Hotel with nearly 1,000 rooms, six restaurants, and 100,000 square-feet of meeting and event rooms. The two buildings adjoin the World Congress Center, one of the nation’s largest convention centers, with nearly four million square-feet of exhibit space.
The concern today is that new interest in these old and once dilapidated neighborhoods will push out residents who have made their home there for decades. The fear is that gentrification will have little to offer those stuck in generations of poverty.
The former head of the Atlanta BeltLine, Inc, P aul Morris, is particularly concerned about affordable housing disappearing around the BeltLine.
“The space with which affordable housing is declining is much faster than anything else happening in our economy.”
Shoy is working to make sure that decline is slowed.
“We also know that a healthy, thriving community is a mixed-income community. It’s a community where people of all socioeconomic backgrounds can live side by side and benefit from each other. And I truly mean that. I mean people of less means benefit from people of middle income and upper income.”
During the next decade, the Foundation has indicated that it will be working to increase the affordable housing supply for the residents who live there now. It also plans to continue to prioritize workforce development programs, such as those just announced, and to work for what it describes as “additional innovations, like guaranteed income, to help reinforce residents’ income.”
Shoy says the work that Foundation is doing on the Westside is fundamental to how it sees its philanthropic mission.
“If I take a step back from the Westside for a moment, I think the foundation’s real motto for all of its work across all of its giving areas is this notion that we really want to support everyone to collectively thrive.”
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