Is Vine City Still on the Hook for the Georgia Dome?

Though I'm ordinarily an impatient person, I consider myself lucky that the Community Development Committee meeting at City Council this past Tuesday ran an hour behind schedule. I learned much of the myriad forces, both legalistic and neighborly, that battle over the path to be taken by development (and, more often recently, demolition) in the city. In the midst of so many items and petitions, I never expected to hear mention of one of Atlanta's most insular economic generators.

The Georgia Dome, apparently, has a housing trust fund named after it, established as a conciliatory measure after plans for the site were challenged in Vine City, which was partially destroyed in the process of building the Dome. It is alternately referred to as the Community/Housing Development Trust Fund, or the Vine City Trust Fund. Allegedly, money from the fund has built and restored dozens of homes in the neighborhood since it was established.

Despite this, Vine City hardly appears to be faring better today than in 1989. The two Census tracts comprising the neighborhood, 25 and 26, have lost residents since 2000, most notably nearer to the Dome. Vacant houses and apartment complexes abound, and neighborhood improvement efforts are constantly facing an uphill battle. Heroin trafficking has a vicegrip on the neighborhood, which is referred to in the context of drug dealing as "the Bluff" together with English Avenue. The biggest economic catalysts moving to Vine City in the near future, at least according to last year's news, are a new Wal-Mart, the footprint of which is causing some concern, and the conversion of a former Bronner Brothers building into condos.

Clearly, the presence of a mammoth football stadium literally across the street hasn't helped Vine City, at least not as much as an outsider would expect. It's not the legal or professional responsibility of the Georgia Dome or the Atlanta Falcons to keep this neighborhood out of the abyss. Still, the attachment of the Dome's name to a meager neighborhood trust fund, which to this day is mentioned periodically in City Council, lends the dishonest appearance of communal concern on the part of these masterful examples of capitalism. Either genuinely contribute to the neighborhood you overshadow, I say to them, or step aside and let those who do care be the saviors of Vine City.