The Black Gold Rush in The Black Mecca Ends; More than 50 percent of Metro Atlanta Mortgages Underwater

Gold rushes end once the resource that attracted people to the area has been exhausted. Infrastructure that was quickly built to accommodate the influx of people instantly loses value once the economy that momentarily was based upon intense speculation collapses.

The Black Gold Rush into the Black Mecca has finally dried up

Once all of the gold has been successfully procured during a “rush,” the once booming town brimming with those hoping to strike it rich dies overnight. The primary engine for driving economic activity has ceased to produce, leaving ghost town where prosperity once seemed endless.

Bodie, California represents one of these ghost towns, a city where all economic activity and growth was connected to mining for gold; once the gold was gone, the city died.

The Black Mecca of Atlanta has represented a Black “gold rush” since 1973, when Maynard Jackson was elected mayor of the city and implemented massive affirmative action policies to enrich Black entrepreneurs who were required – by city law- to get 35 percent of city contracts.

It was Mayor Jackson, who in an article for Ebony published in December 1980 (The Airport that Maynard Built: Blacks reap bonanza at world’s biggest airport, by Bill Berry) bragged that he held a figurative gun to the white business community over the exclusion of Black involvement with the construction of what would become the world’s busiest airport:

So when Mayor Maynard Jackson had the audacity to insist that he would let crab grass grow on the site selected for the airport unless Blacks were given a “fair” share of the mammoth project, some of his critics began to wonder if he were in control of himself.

“You know, I never said anything publicly, but I thought Mayor Jackson was asking for too much,” confesses one Black Atlanta businessman who eventually reaped nearly $1 million from the airport project because of the mayor’s refusal to back down. “I mean, here Maynard was telling these white people – I mean, big industries and financial giants like Hertz and the airlines – that if Blacks didn’t get at least 25 percent of the action, there would be no airport, or they (the big businesses) would not be permitted to be a part of it. Let’s face it, you hear about affirmative action and all that stuff, but whoever heard of it working? Who ever heard of anyone trying to make it work? I was prepared to settle for whatever I could get, to make about $60,000 or $70,000, but thanks to the mayor I ended up with much more.”

(Mayor Jackson. “The word minority should not mean women. Women are an oppressed group, but they are not a minority; they are over 51 percent of the population. Minorities and women, as separate oppressed groups, must have affirmative action. But the word minority, by definition, design and inclination, cannot include White women. When I insisted on minority participation, I meant the inclusion of Afro-Americans. And I wasn’t talking about excluding anyone; my objective was to include everyone because it’s the right thing to do.”

Not exactly free, uninihibted markets? Government manipulation of the bidding process to ensure equality instead favored Black businesses owners and minority-majority owned firms started with the construction of Hartsfield International Airport, but in continued in every facet of contracting with the city of Atlanta (and Fulton County).

More to the point, public jobs in Atlanta (both Fulton County, the city of Atlanta, and MARTA) became almost entirely Black, with every department funded by tax-dollars headed and staffed – from the water board, sanitation, the courts, and voting boards – by Black people.

Whites need not apply for these jobs – or other non-Blacks – as a vice, a stranglehold has been placed upon public employment in the Black Mecca, the surest way to create a semblance of a Black middle class (just look at Prince George’s County for further evidence) in Atlanta.

But it’s all artificial. The wealth of the Black middle class is nothing more than an illusion, manifested by hyper affirmative action in government contracting and a reliance on public employment that the private sector (not even companies like Coca-Cola can employ enough Blacks) can’t replicate.

The Atlanta Paradox, edited by David Sjoquist, reports on p. 204 this about Black reliance on the public sector for employment:

Along with the denial that African Americans exhibit ethnic solidarity, it is popular to deny that the government sector can serve as a valid economic asset for creating business linkages. The public sector is seen as siphoning off black talent that could have gone toward business development or achieved influence in private-sector labor markets. However, first, the public sector clearly has been the source of the greatest accumulation of saving among African Americans which could be invested in business development… African American presence as mayors and significant city administrators was a major factor in increased ability of African American owned businesses to become large enough no longer to be classified as primarily self-employment. The importance oft eh use of municipal political power to engender large-scale stable employment among other American ethnic groups is well documented.

We already know that Black reliance on government jobs to create a middle class is not just relegated to Atlanta, but standard operating procedure by federal, state, and local governments nationwide. 

As evidenced by the almost non-existent Black entrepreneurship or small business ownership (economic activity of any legitimate kind) in once thriving Rockdale and Clayton Counties, the Visible Black Hand of Economics is beginning to catch up with The City too busy to Hate.

NPR noted in 2011 that the Black middle class in Atlanta was drying up, with government contracting eroding that Blacks had come to rely on so heavily because the odds were stacked in their favor (as opposed to unencumbered free markets that weren’t manipulated by Black-controlled government to favor Blacks):

Atlanta is a city where civil rights leaders are the namesakes of thoroughfares the way presidents and signers of the Declaration of Independence are in most other cities. There are boulevards named not just for Martin Luther King Jr. and former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, but also for civil rights leaders Joseph Lowery and Ralph David Abernathy. Last year, Raymond Street was renamed SNCC Way, after the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

But no place in Atlanta embodies the progression from the civil rights movement to political empowerment to economic development quite like the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. The airport is named after the city's first African-American mayor, Maynard Jackson, who negotiated a unique deal for its construction.

That airport was constructed with a mandate of having at least 25 percent of all of the subcontracting opportunities going to minorities and women," says Thomas "Danny" Boston, a Georgia Tech economist who studies minority businesses. "First time anything like that happened in the country."

It was a kind of New Deal for blacks in Atlanta, and it grew into many other deals, including mandated set-asides for African-American and other minority contractors and subcontractors.

But the deals also made minority business disproportionately dependent on public sector work. Now, the shrinking of the public sector is having a disastrous effect on many African-American business owners, including electrical subcontractor Melvin Griffin.

Griffin's business depended heavily on public contracts for things like installing stoplights with red-light cameras. Now he gets less work and, in turn, he gives less work.

"Employees are down quite a bit," he says. "Right now, I'm only working about three people. Couple guys, I just told them don't worry about calling me because I really got no work for them."

So what do we mean by Black Gold Rush? Blacks have been flocking to the Black Mecca since Mayor Jackson established unprecedented statues that favored Black people in garnering city contracts. The Wall Street Journal reported that this trend has only increased since the dawn of the new millennium.

USA Today reported that the suburban population of metro Atlanta is exploding, fueled by Black migration to the once pure Whitopia’s surrounding The City too Busy to Hate:

Atlanta itself has actually grown whiter in the past decade while its suburbs have gotten blacker, according to Frey's analysis. Atlanta's population in 1990 was 67% black and 30% white; the suburbs were 71% white and 25% African American. By the end of the decade, non-Hispanic whites made up 39% of the city and 53% of the suburbs while blacks were 51% of the city and 31% of the suburbs.

No, the airport Mayor Jackson extorted

What does all of this mean? That the Black Gold Rush is over. Ghost towns are coming to metro Atlanta. The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that half of metro Atlanta mortgages are now underwater (worth less than what is owed):

More than half of homeowners with a mortgage in metro Atlanta owe more than the house is worth, a new report says.

Their negative equity will slow a real estate recovery as some homeowners who would like to sell and move are "trapped in their homes," because they cannot afford to sell at a loss, said Zillow's chief economist Stan Humphries. It also makes foreclosure more likely if the mortgagee loses a job or hits other economic shocks, he said.

Zillow, the online real estate data and search firm, analyzed 35 million mortgages, including 778,870 in 22 metro Atlanta counties, to conclude 55 percent of mortgages here were in the negative range. That far exceeds the national average of 31 percent. Humphries pointed out that despite the high numbers, only 8 percent of metro Atlantans were delinquent on paying.

Employed homeowners who plan to stay in their homes long-term are not bothered as much by the "paper losses," he said, which makes the situation less dire.

Property valuations are directly tied to the standard of living created and sustained in a community. As metro Atlanta gets Blacker, each community is negatively affected with higher crime rates, business closings, and a drop in the quality of the schools (directly correlated to the majority race of the students enrolled in the school system).

Black property values are significantly less than white (or other race) in Atlanta – and nationwide.

With metro Atlanta getting Blacker – the allure of the Black Mecca and being part of the Black middle class that was 100 percent a manipulation of the free market by Black elected officials and Black cronyism – and property values falling counties that go majority Black (Clayton and DeKalb County), tax revenue begins to drop dramatically, immediately requiring austerity measures to be implemented:

Fiscal 2011, which starts July 1, is already a rotten apple on the teacher’s desk.

The avalanche began when DeKalb County school officials said last month that the system would be short $88 million in its 2011 budget. Since then, so many other shoes have dropped, it’s starting to look like a Rack Room out there.

On Thursday, Cobb County schools said their shortfall would approach $100 million. On Friday, Gwinnett County schools gave the same report: $100 million short. Clayton County said it will be nearly $63 million in the hole; and Atlanta, $47 million. Fulton County has said its shortfall could reach $120 million.

DeKalb now says its gap could hit $115 million. Those systems alone are facing total cuts of more than a half-billion dollars.

Fayette County, Gwinnett, DeKalb, Clayton… as each metro Atlanta county sees an increase in its Black population, the ability for each county to raise tax revenues to pay for teachers and improve infrastructure declines.

The Black Mecca is Underwater. The manipulation of the free market by Black radicals – and by a compliant Connected Capitalism of the Disingenuous White Liberal establishment in Atlanta – has created an unstable system --- a Black Hole from which no matter will be able to escape.

The Gold Rush is over. Ghost towns will now start popping up all over the metro Atlanta area, with Black people unable to create or sustain any of the local economies they take over as white residents flee the encroaching Black Undertow.

The white citizens of metro Atlanta have two choices, 1. Move to North Fulton (Alpharetta) and secede from Fulton County and immediately become of the richest counties in all of America  - or forever be taxed to support the lecherous South Fulton area of predominately Black residents who reside on tax dollars and public employment to subsist; or, 2. Leave Atlanta and never look back.

Regardless of what choice is made, a substantial part of metro Atlanta will eventually look like Bodie, California (go to Union Station Mall in Union City to see the truth of this statement), a reminder that the free market can’t be manipulated without devastating consequences.

A reminder that the Visible Black Hand of Economics will always appear. 

Because policies were enacted that attracted largely Black people (whose labor couldn't demand the same salaries in city's they left) to the Black Mecca to strike it rich - based solely on their race - the whole region is now in serious financial trouble. Atlanta was overwhelmed. The burden of employment of these Black people fell directly on the sustaining of Affirmative Action policies that run counter the laws of economics. 

Black Mecca Down: The Fall of The City too Busy to Hate is upon us.