How an Apartment Tower in Atlanta Is Makes Life a Living Hell for Its Poor Residents

[unhappycamper]

http://www.alternet.org/economy/how-apartment-tower-atlanta-makes-life-living-hell-its-poor-residents



How an Apartment Tower in Atlanta Is Makes Life a Living Hell for Its Poor Residents
By Zaid Jilani / AlterNet
August 10, 2015

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This has been particularly painful for the residents of so-called Friendship Tower, an apartment for senior citizens in downtown Atlanta, which has been without functioning air conditioning for nearly three months.

~snip~

What's happening at Friendship Tower is what the class war looks like in the 21st century. Race, gender and religious background are not the dividing lines between the senior citizens in this apartment complex and the prominent church that owns their property. The divide is over raw access to money, and the power it brings. As Senator Fort noted, FBC, having just received nearly $20 million to sell its property, is awash in cash. The church has played its role in the South's African American history, but has also hosted the well-to-do of the community, such as its former pastor Reverend William Guy, whose daughter Jasmine Guy is a TV star.

There are no television stars or prominent political donors living at Friendship Tower, just low-income seniors, struggling against a political and economic system that doesn't value their lives because they simply don't have the dollars to make them care.

As debates over things like race, gender and sexual orientation dominate national media discussion, cases like Friendship Tower are swept under the rug. Talking about raw power among different economic classes is a sort of irreverence you rarely find on cable television or in the major newspapers, but it is a power differential that increasingly defines America's greatest and most persistent form of inequality. Rest assured, the seniors at Friendship Tower won't be the last ones who suffer from it; if we ignore their plight, the rest of us will be next.

[nruthie]

1. Money and power have more clout than religion in the end.