On: 'Less than human': how unhoused people in Atlanta are being treated during the...

July 19, 2026

I read today of a city preparing for a grand spectacle, a World Cup, and of the people swept from its streets to make the view more pleasing for visitors. They call it “cleaning,” but I know the arithmetic of displacement. It is an old sum: the cost of a festival is never borne by those who attend it.

They speak of economic forces, of legacy and investment, as if these were winds or tides, natural and unstoppable. I must tell you - an economic force is a choice. It is a policy drafted in a quiet room, and its violence is measured in the belongings tossed into a dump truck, in the human being made to feel “less than human” for the crime of having nowhere to go.

You will hear the justifications: order, safety, the greater good for the city. But I observe who defines that good, and who is excluded from its consideration. The blind spot is not an accident of vision; it is a deliberate turning of the head. When you design a policy that treats people as a stain to be scrubbed away, you have not solved a problem. You have merely moved your evidence.

Here is the domestic consequence of such grand plans: a person’s dignity is their shelter. To strip one is to destroy the other. I think of my own household, of what it means to have a hearth, a place where you are known. These people are not a problem to be managed; they are citizens, unhoused. If we build stadiums but cannot see the people sleeping in their shadows, then we have constructed only a monument to our own indifference. The ledger of a nation must include this cost, or its prosperity is a fiction.