Atlanta's Enduring Compromise: Youth Contending with Home Foreclosures and School Closures in the “New South”

Waves of migration to and flight from Atlanta by both white and Black residents and businesses have constantly imagined and re-imagined the city as both a part of the socially excluded, politically regressive, Southern “Other,” and a racially progressive, exceptional model of the “New South,” and from a public health perspective, as both a riskscape and a safe haven.  We argue that the persistent health and social inequities in Atlanta have been fostered and exacerbated by the exponential growth of the city and the persistent rhetoric as it being “the city too busy to hate.”  This presentation is informed by extant research on housing and transportation processes and policies at work in Atlanta since the end of the Civil War, and in particular, the predatory and subprime lending practices during the past 30 years, with Metropolitan Atlanta being the epicenter of the contemporary foreclosure crisis since 2009.  This presentation examines how young people, living in a neighborhood where over 50 percent of the houses are currently vacant and contending with threats of school and church closures, experience the contemporary foreclosure crisis.  Using qualitative data from focus groups with 45 middle school youth, this presentation offers youth-informed perspectives and local knowledge as a counternarrative to the neighborhood change discourse by offering responses of vulnerable populations in Atlanta who inhabit rather than flee their built and social environments.