re: ‘Black Mecca’ no longer? Atlanta prices cause families to move out of the city

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Atlanta has been called the black Mecca because of its disproportionately large black upper and middle class…

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This is why Atlanta has been called the black Mecca or Harlem of the South because of the Atlanta University Center and the number of well heeled parents who send their kids to school in Atlanta and those kids tend to stay in Atlanta and flourish. Thats since the 70s anyway, prior to that Atlanta was, and still is a regional hub for commerce and as such offered more opportunity to escape share cropping and textile mills for poor southern blacks and whites and as an actual city instead of a town Atlanta, while not free of the stupidity which was prevalent across the rest of the south, was marginally less of an issue in Atlanta. It wasn't Detroit or Chicago but it was infinitely better than the rest of the south.

Atlanta is probably not remotely as good as the rest of the south for poor black people today...the cost of living, particularly housing, is getting up there. There is a huge push to gentrify ITP areas and it costs a bunch to live in those areas. Atlanta is still heads and shoulders above the rest of the region for middle and upper class black people and probably more welcoming than most comparable cities in the US with the exception of maybe Houston.

What this woman is describing is indeed real....for those with low income Atlanta is increasingly becoming too expensive to live...as is the case for most of the country. Tying this to the "black mecca" thing is too suggest that Atlanta was ever a mecca or utopia for poor people of any race. It was marginally better than the rest of the south for certain but poor people are poor no matter what their neighbors look like.