Atlanta has reached its $50 million funding goal to provide more than 500 apartments for the city’s homeless, according to Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms.
The $50 million will go to the city’s HomeFirst Initiative, which will provide 550 apartment-like units for people needing shelter, reported The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The funds will also be used to restore the old Capitol View Apartments on Metropolitan Parkway on the city’s south side.
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The city’s numbers show about 3,700 homeless people living on Atlanta’s streets — about half of what it was 10 years ago, WSB-TV reported.
This announcement came at a time when the city closed the city’s largest homeless shelter which housed an estimated 500 people per night due to an outbreak of tuberculosis.
For the new program, Atlanta “partnered with the United Way of Greater Atlanta to raise funds for the program, about $25 million of which came from private donations that ranged from a few thousand dollars to a whopping $15 million…The other half of the money came from the Homeless Opportunity Bond sale that started under former Mayor Kasim Reed and was approved in 2017,” The Atlanta Black Star reported.
A final donation of $114,000 from Ameris Bank helped the city to reach its funding goal. Atlanta will not only use the money to provide housing but also to “connect those experiencing homelessness to the necessary resources and rental assistance so that they remain stable.”
“This is one of the things I had the fortune of walking into when I was mayor,” Bottoms said of the initiative.
