TL;DR: protestors try to convince the City of Atlanta to not go forward with a $2 billion dollar proposal to develop the Gulch
For those of you who don’t live in Atlanta, or live in the metro area and are clueless anyway, the Gulch is this giant parcel of land that currently exists as a big empty parking lot that sits two stories lower than the rest of Downtown Atlanta, because long ago the city decided for some reason to build above everything, or maybe they just wanted to keep the streets nice and level.
The bottom line is that the Gulch is a gigantic eyesore of space that exists really, really close to some major Atlanta landmarks, like Centennial Olympic Park, Mercedes Benz Arena, the CNN Center and Philips State Farm Arena. It’s basically where cars park to get broken into, or where the drivers get harassed, buy drugs, assaulted, murdered or all of the above. It’s undesirable, looks like shit, and is in desperate need to be taken over by developers and actually developed.
So when some smarmy hot-shot California developers come into town and propose some $2 billion dollar idea to develop the Gulch, you’d think there would be people that might actually be excited by the promise of the City of Atlanta gentrifying yet another shitty area and trying to make it look nice, right?
Fuck no, of course not. Much like the Beltline, Mercedes-Benz Arena, ScumTrust Park, there are a ton of people who show up, all up in arms, about how it’s a bad idea, and how it’s going to price people out and how some rich developers are going to get richer at the expense of the poor. Now in their defense, the city most certainly didn’t need Mercedes-Benz Arena or ScumTrust Park, but the Beltline most definitely succeeded in both beautifying the areas it’s been developed in AND pricing out the poors while the rich got richer.
Here’s the harsh reality though: every single proposed plan in the history of proposed plans always ends up with rich people getting richer, while the lower on the totem pole you, the more people get screwed. That’s just the way of the world, unfortunately. The real victories of development exist in how little people get screwed, because people are always going to get screwed, but may as well get some pretty shiny new toys out it, if it’s inevitably going to happen anyway.
Frankly, I don’t really know what people are even protesting for, and why. At least projects like the Beltline and Mercedes-Benz were actively displacing people who lived in those areas, but the Gulch is a giant hole of ghetto. The only people going to be displaced are homeless people who frankly shouldn’t be there in the first place.
These progress cockblockers are citing their concerns over affordable housing, despite the fact that the Gulch has no housing in the first place. And even if there were, look no further than the Beltline, as an example of how developers can cite all the affordable housing they want, when it comes time to develop and make money, there is going to be none.
Honestly, I don’t really know where I’m going with this post, other than the fact that it looks like people are protesting the idea of an ugly ghetto hole in the ground actually getting developed, because they’re butthurt about some investors getting rich. Of course the rich knows this, this is how they get rich in the first place, but at least they’d be accomplishing something in beautifying a hideous part of Atlanta, and improving the city’s overall appeal and value, versus a bunch of white guilters preferring a giant sink hole of blight existing instead.
Maybe it’s the fact that I don’t actually live in city proper anymore that makes it easy to NIMBY stories like this, because I can easily go back to my nice sensible home outside of the actual city limits, and judge the shit out of things that aren’t really my problem and won’t be, because I’m actually dissatisfied over my own county’s bullshit and need some company for our own misery.
But c’mon, protesting for the Gulch? What the fuck is wrong with these idiots?
