Racial, economic inequality still haunt Atlanta
at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies

Forty-five years ago, former Mayor William Hartsfield dubbed Atlanta the "city too busy to hate."

Today, the Southern metropolis might be described as a city of ironies. The contradiction between the city's boundless economy and its racially defined pockets of poverty are the subject of The Atlanta Paradox, one of a series of seven books from the Russell Sage Foundation's Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality.

Atlanta "is a paradox of substantial racial segregation in a community with a reputation for good race relations and of high inner-city poverty in the face of substantial economic growth," says the book's editor, David Sjoquist, economics professor and director of the Andrew Young School's Fiscal Research Program. "In many ways, Atlanta personifies the problem of urban inequality."

For years, the Atlanta region -which includes the city and its surrounding suburbs - has been one of the most economically successful areas of the United States, with the number of jobs here increasing by more than 4 percent a year from 1980 to 1996. Yet employment in the city proper increased only 1 percent annually during the same time, and the poverty rate of inner-city blacks grew from 29 percent in 1970 to 35 percent in 1990.

Despite the end of legal segregation more than 30 years ago, its economic legacy remains, said Sjoquist, who co-wrote several of the book's chapters.

Although traditional policy solutions have included laws that prohibit discrimination in housing, lending and hiring, social and physical barriers still prevent the poor from taking advantage of economic opportunities.

A large number of available jobs, for example, are located in the suburbs where there is limited or no access to public transportation. The resulting "spatial mismatch" perpetuates the cycle of poverty, researchers say.

The Atlanta Paradox also addresses Atlanta's history of racial strife and discrimination since the Civil War, black/white residential segregation and the labor market disadvantages faced by black women.

Still, there are some signs that the gap between inner-city blacks and white suburbanites could begin to narrow in the coming years. Few whites still hold overt negative stereotypes of blacks, and both whites and blacks would prefer to live in more integrated neighborhoods, researchers noted. The city also has seen the emergence of a dynamic black middle class and numbers of successful black-owned businesses - both of which indicate that Atlanta is still a good place for African-Americans to prosper, Sjoquist said.

RELATED READING: The Atlanta Paradox, David Sjoquist, ed., Russell Sage Foundation (2000).