The Atlanta Quartet

Capitalism in Place:
Photos and Essays by a Marxist Tourist

Unhoused Atlanta

Revitalizing Downtown, Devitalizing People

"Unhoused Atlanta" is a about a place I know well, having worked there for the final thirty years of my teaching career before retiring in 2018. The place is downtown Atlanta, where for nearly half a century powerful groups have pursued a campaign to drive unhoused people out of the central business district and relocate them to lower-income, black neighborhoods on the south and west sides of the city. Either that, or put them in jail. And if there aren't enough jail cells, pretend they don't exist.

Who are these powerful groups? City mayors and councilpersons, hotel and convention interests, real estate developers and property owners, neighborhood associations and university administrations. The downtown growth machine, in short.

This essay is divided into four parts. In the first, I will tell you the story of the political storm that raged around a now-shuttered homeless shelter at the corner of Peachtree Street and Pine Street in the downtown area (the top star on the map), a twenty-minute walk from my former office at Georgia State University (the middle star). Known simply as Peachtree-Pine in recognition of its strategic location on the city's most famous thoroughfare, the shelter opened in 1997 and was operated by the nonprofit Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless.

In the second part, I will give you an insider's view of how the Task Force's board of directors responded to anti-shelter campaign. I joined the board in 2010 and served for seven years, the last as its chair. During this time I grew increasingly convinced that while our lawsuits might keep the shelter open and the Task Force afloat for a time, they could not alter the balance of political and economic forces on the ground. I also came to the conclusion that nonprofit organizations like the Task Force, no matter how well-intentioned, could never be effective agents of progressive change for the simple reason that they were entirely dependent on wealthy donors, philanthrocapitalists and neoliberal governing regimes to pay their bills.

In the third part, I will situate the story of Peachtree-Pine in the broader context of the spatial dynamics of capitalist urbanization following the Second World War. During this period the central business district was torn down and rebuilt in successive waves of creative destruction in an effort to promote what city boosters called "downtown revitalization." Here, I will let the photos do most of the talking. They will show you how the downtown built environment was reconfigured around the needs of motorists, how public housing was destroyed to make way for gentrification in the form of mixed-used developments and how the subprime mortgage crisis and ensuing recession hurt black homeowners and gutted large swaths of black neighborhoods. What emerged from this storm of creative destruction was a built environment tailor-made for homelessness.

In the third part of the essay, I will consider how the idea of "surplus" can help us understand the underlying forces that produce both surplus people and surplus capital. In doing so, I will put Karl Marx's concept of relative surplus population in conversation with Marxist geographer David Harvey's concept of the spatial-temporal fix.

Part I. The Battle of Peachtree-Pine

My time on the Task Force's board of directors gave me a front-row seat on the conjoined crises of homelessness and housing which were engulfing cities across the advanced capitalist world at the turn of the century. It also immersed me in the world of nonprofit social service provision, a world that has been systematically co-opted by business interests operating under the cover of public-private partnerships since the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s.

At its peak Peachtree-Pine was the largest homeless shelter in the Southeast US, if not the entire country. When nighttime temperatures dropped below freezing, it could accommodate as many as one-thousand men, some sleeping in bunk beds and others sitting uncomfortably in an overflow area called the "garage" (Slide 2-4). This term was a holdover from the old days when the 100,000 square foot building housed a car dealership and repair shop. More than 90 percent of the men who sought shelter at Peachtree-Pine were African Americans.

The Task Force also took in women and children every night, including newborns and their mothers who had been discharged from nearby Grady Hospital with nowhere else to go (Square). In conformity with the law requiring women and children to be separated from men, the Task Force converted its reception room and offices into a nighttime dormitory, rolling out floor mats to accommodate single women, mothers and their children. The next morning, the mats were rolled up and put away so that the staff could do their work. The Task Force was able to maintain a homeless "hot line" and offer a full menu of placement and counseling services, thanks to the frontline staff and a dozen resident volunteers who were enrolled in its transitional housing program.

The shelter operated in the middle of an area primed for gentrification and upscale commercial development. Peachtree Street is the historic corridor of power and privilege in Atlanta—the "miracle mile," as the city's Chamber of Commerce proudly boasts. Emory University's Midtown Hospital was just across the street from the shelter. The glitzy Fox Theater was only a few blocks away, and beyond that lay trendy Midtown and exclusive Buckhead, the latter famous for its showcase mansions, state-of-the-art lawn care and the Georgia governor's official residence.

This spelled trouble. From the first day Peachtree-Pine opened its doors, the governing "regime," as sociologist Clarence Stone called it in his classic study of Atlanta politics, mobilized to shut it down and declared the Task Force persona non grata.

The regime was a biracial governing alliance that coalesced after the 1973 election of Maynard Jackson as the city's first African American mayor. In the years since that historic victory, the regime had operated under the umbrella of pro-business, Democratic black mayors and majority-black city councils. These officials constituted the public face of the governing regime, whose decisions were dutifully reported by the city's pro-business newspaper, the Journal-Constitution.

Behind the scenes were powerful white business interests spearheaded by the real estate and hotel-convention-hospitality sectors, which could count on a compliant black officialdom to promote their policy agenda in exchange for photo ops, campaign contributions and minority business enterprise concessions.

Stripped down to its essentials, the battle of Peachtree-Pine pitted poor black people against a pro-business black political class and a pro-business white power structure.

Welcome to the politics of class and race in the "city too busy to hate."

The Achilles' heel of the Task Force was money. Peachtree-Pine was a $2-million-a-year operation. To pay its bills the Task Force relied on a mix of public and private funding. The lion's share of federal money came from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. HUD required that all applicants obtain a certificate of consistency from the city's Department of Grants and Community Development stating that their grant proposals were in conformity with the city's long-term "consolidated plan."

The regime began its offensive against the Task Force by cutting off its pubic money. At the direction of the mayor's office, the mandatory certification requested by the Task Force was withheld, causing its public funds to slow to a trickle. The flow of federal money stopped altogether in 2007, due a decision made by the Tri-Jurisdictional Collaborative on Homelessness. This public-private partnership serves as the metropolitan gatekeeper of federal grants, ensuring that cash-strapped nonprofit service providers toe the regime line. Composed of regime loyalists who were appointed by the City, Fulton County and DeKalb County with significant input from the business community, the Tri-J judged the Task Force to be the least deserving of all the nonprofits applying for funding. The message was clear: no more federal dollars for Peachtree-Pine.

Next, the regime targeted the Task Force's private funding. To give just one example, Dan Cathy, heir to the Chick-fil-A empire and a major supporter of the Task Force, received a visit at his corporate campus south of the city from a vanload of downtown CEOs who advised him to bestow his Christian charity on a more deserving nonprofit. Inasmuch as Chick-fil-A was the sponsor of the annual Peach Bowl, a gridiron classic played at the downtown Georgia Bowl and an advertising bonanza for Chick-fil-A, Cathy had a strong financial interest in maintaining a cordial relationship with the regime.

In short order, the Task Force lost one of its biggest private donors. Another clear message: corporate moguls should steer clear of the Task Force if they wanted to do business in downtown Atlanta.

Finally, these same business leaders and their allies at city hall connived with the Task Force's mortgage lenders to initiate foreclosure proceedings, raising the prospect of Peachtree-Pine being auctioned off to the highest bidder on the steps of the Fulton County Courthouse.

In the face of this economic blockade, the Task Force struggled to keep its head above water. It fell further and further behind on its mortgage payments. It could no longer pay its staff on time or at all. Each month the stack of unpaid utility bills grew taller. Of most immediate concern was the water bill which hung over the shelter like a sword of Damocles. In 2008 the Department of Watershed Management made good on its threat to cut off the shelter's water, prompting the Task Force to obtain a restraining order against the city. During this temporary reprieve the outstanding water bill ballooned to hundreds of thousands of dollars until one day a financier philanthropist appeared from out of nowhere and wrote a check for the whole amount. But the debt jubilee was a short-term fix: as long as the blockade remained in place, the Task Force would never be able to pay its bills going forward, water included.

In the meantime, Kasim Reed, Atlanta's famously cantankerous mayor, showed no sign of backing down from his stated goal of emptying the shelter, padlocking the doors and running the Task Force out of town.

The Task Force organized protests, marched in the streets, turned out crowds for "Homeless Memorial Day" and formed human chains around the shelter, all in an effort to draw attention and to its cause (slides 5-8).

II. Lawsuits and Nonprofits

The battle over Peachtree-Pine was a crash course in the dynamics of what the late geographer Neil Smith called "urban revanchism." The shelter was located in the vicinity of Midtown and the Old Fourth Ward, two neighborhoods undergoing rapid gentrification and displacement. From this fertile soil sprouted a new crop of crime-conscious neighborhood associations and law-and-order bloggers who claimed that Peachtree-Pine was a den of thieves, panhandlers, vandals, transgender prostitutes, crack heads, dope dealers, and the mentally ill. The Midtown Ponce Security Alliance spearheaded the revanchist offensive, going so far as to threaten a local Whole Foods, the hallmark of gentrification, with a general boycott should it host a fundraising event for the Task Force. Even the Centers for Disease Control got into the act with sensational and unfounded accusations that the shelter was a petri dish of TB, and as such represented a clear and present danger to public health from downtown to Midtown and the Old Fourth Ward. Even the stately mansions of Buckhead were not immune to the human disease vectors of Peachtree-Pine, the critics warned.

Looking back at this explosion of public anger and resentment, it's hard to think of a single social evil that the Task Force's enemies did not deposit on the doorstep of Peachtree-Pine. The prim-and-proper editorial board of Atlanta's pro-business press scolded the Task Force for not showing reasonableness and "community spirit," while at the same time doing its best to stir the pot of moral panic.

What gave this anti-shelter hysteria its lethal edge was race and racism.

This is a serious charge which you might be tempted to dismiss on the grounds of my partisanship. But I have hard evidence to back it up. In the discovery process of the lawsuits filed by the Task Force against the leaders of the campaign to close Peachtree-Pine, we stumbled upon a veritable armory of smoking guns: racist email chains and confidential communications among Emory's top brass who simply could not abide having to share Peachtree Street with black men they described as disheveled, diseased and dangerous. Those individuals who did not seem to fit the homeless profile on account of their nice clothes and fancy cars were described as "drug dealers." Damned either way, in the view of Emory's white corporate executives who never imagined that outsiders would one day get a peak at their racist correspondence.

On loan from a high-powered corporate law firm, the two attorneys who agreed to help the Task Force obtain its restraining order against the city stuck with us as the legal battle snowballed into multiple lawsuits against Emory, the City of Atlanta, DeKalb County, a downtown business organization called Central Atlanta Progress, and a particularly unsavory vulture capitalist who hoped to scoop up whatever pickings were available at our foreclosure. Our gifted legal team worked pro bono at first, and then shifted to a contingency-fee arrangement as the litigation dragged on for seven exhausting years.

Exhaustion was the defendants' deadliest weapon. Time was on their side, not ours.

We accused the parties arrayed against the Task Force of engaging in "tortious interference" with our business operations and, as I have mentioned, amassed enough incriminating evidence in discovery to guarantee a public outcry should it ever be revealed in open court. Few institutions in Atlanta are as mindful of their liberal and squeaky-clean image as Emory. The prospect of a full-fledged public relations disaster if the racist emails came to light persuaded the defendants to make a substantial out-of-court settlement offer in exchange for the Task Force handing over the keys, signing a non-disclosure agreement and going quietly into the night. Our lawyers gave us an ultimatum, “Sign it. If you don’t, we’ll pull out of the case and you'll be on your own”

Exhaustion had taken its toll.

You don’t need me to tell you that in David-and-Goliath faceoffs, the little guy almost always loses. The Task Force managed to keep the wolves at bay while its lawsuits ping-ponged between federal and state courts. But in 2017 the board of directors finally voted to sign the settlement papers.

Our executive director, Anita Beaty, the heart and soul of the organization since its formation in the mid-1980s, urged us to continue the fight until we finally won our day in court. Even if we lost there, she reasoned, we would have exposed the criminal wrongdoings of our foes and vindicated our good name. When the board voted to accept a cash settlement of almost $10 million (which was quickly whittled down to $3 million after settling accounts with the lawyers, bill collectors and past donors), she resigned. Her action was understandable. Honorable. Anita and her husband Jim were fearless, incorruptible warriors to the bitter end.

By this time I was serving as board chair. My own view was that the Task Force was trapped in a no-win situation. With municipal, county, state and federal authorities determined to bleed us to death, there was zero chance of the Task Force ever being able to resume the shelter services it had been offering since 1997. Even if our lawsuits somehow managed to reach a jury, a prospect which seemed more and more remote given the size of Emory's legal war chest and the skillfully deployed stalling tactics of its lawyers, Peachtree-Pine would by then be out of our hands and the Task Force reduced to little more than a name.

I also became increasingly convinced that nonprofit social service provision was a dead-end for any kind of progressive politics, whatever the outcome of our lawsuits. For years the Task Force had struggled to do its work in an institutional ecosystem dominated by Tri-Js, continuums of care, public-private partnerships and 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations. These interlocking, opaque forms of neoliberal urban governance had been thoroughly co-opted by the Atlanta regime working closely with its institutional counterparts at the county, state and federal levels.

There was no reason to believe that the balance of political forces controlling homeless service provision would change anytime soon. After all, the rise of the Atlanta regime was inseparable from the neoliberal reconfiguration of capitalism and the state after the 1970s. As geographer David Harvey argues, neoliberalism was first and foremost a class project aimed at reversing the decline in the rate of profit, breaking the back of organized labor and restoring capitalist class power. Jackson was sworn in as mayor in the midst of an urban fiscal crisis that produced the bankers' takeover of New York City in the mid-1970s and prepared the way for the neoliberal triumphs of later years. Gathering force under the Reagan-Thatcher governments of the 1980s, and brought to fruition by the Clinton-Blair governments a decade later, the neoliberal tide of privatization, marketization, financialization and austerity swept over every major city in the United States.

The defendants, attorneys and judges we came to know so well through our lawsuits were just the surface outcroppings of these tectonic shifts in urban political economy. Gentrification and displacement, urban revanchism, the criminalization of poverty, the twin crises of homelessness and housing, the vertiginous growth of inequality measured by any index you care to use--these had become defining features of neoliberal urbanization.

Not to put too fine a point on it: in fighting to keep Peachtree-Pine open, the Task Force was running up against the logic of capital accumulation in the Age of Neoliberalism.

The Task Force was in an ideal position to observe the micro-mechanisms of neoliberal power and co-optation at close range. Did other homeless service providers or faith-based community organizations rally to our support as the regime tightened the screws on the Task Force? No. Who could blame them for not wanting to join us on the regime's hit list? The new generation of nonprofit executive directors, black and white, whose résumés glittered with MBAs conferred by prestigious business schools had better things to do with their time than fight the power. For them fighting the power was old-school thinking, perhaps suitable for the bygone days of the Black Panthers and their radical community service programs but lacking in any understanding of the need for competitive, data-driven, value-added service provision. The nonprofit leaders who spoke this language were products of the neoliberal turn in organizational thinking. They had their own budgets to manage, efficiency standards to meet, grant proposals to write, bills to pay, payrolls to cover, families to feed, résumés to burnish, career ladders to climb, donors to schmooze. And most important, they had a governing regime to appease.

This helps to explain why the regime was so fixated on silencing the troublesome Task Force once and for all. Each day that the shelter remained open exposed another chink in the regime's seemingly impregnable armor, puncturing the illusion of omnipotence that it carefully cultivated. If the exercise of power can be likened to a theatrical performance, the regime seemed to be flopping in its staged showdown with the outgunned Task Force. In the view of white business leaders and black political leaders, this was a humiliation that could not be permitted to continue. While shutting down the shelter was the regime's immediate objective, neutralizing the threat posed by the Task Force was equally central to its long-term goal. The Task Force was to be an object lesson for any other nonprofit that might in the future have the temerity to test the limits of regime power.

These political realities, as I saw them, weren't going to change. In the foreseeable future, the Task Force would remain at the financial mercy of public and private funders who were deeply invested in entrepreneurial solutions to social problems. The Departments of Housing and Urban Development, Veteran Affairs, and Health and Human Services had effectively siloed the issues of housing and homelessness through their neoliberal commitment to market-driven policymaking. Millionaire do-gooders and philanthrocapitalists sprinkled their well-publicized donations on compliant charities that embraced the virtues of value-added service provision. The central assumption around which this funding system revolved was that business interests in partnership with leading "community stakeholders" could "solve" both the housing and homelessness crises.

In the real world of nonprofit social service provision, financial dependence and political independence were a contradiction in terms. Given the power structures that controlled the flow of dollars earmarked for homelessness and housing, all 501(c)(3) charitable organizations had to make a hard choice between service provision and political activism, fundraising and hellraising. In the Age of Neoliberal Capitalism, any nonprofit service provider that attempted to straddle the fence would either run afoul of the governing regime and suffer the fate of the Task Force or fall victim to political co-optation. The latter was the path of least resistance chosen by the nonprofit sector as a whole.

The best path forward, I believed, was for the Task Force to withdraw from social service provision altogether, cut its budget to the bone and use whatever remained of the rapidly dwindling settlement money to fund mobilization, advocacy and direct action for progressive housing policies along the lines of what Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Tina Smith set out in their recent call for social housing. A militant housing organization with three-million bucks in the bank might be a force to be reckoned with.

It probably won't surprise you to learn that Task Force's liberal, biracial board had no interest in such a radical makeover. I pitched my anti-capitalist, fight-the-power proposal because it made sense to me, not because I labored under any illusion that my heterodox ideas or modest powers of persuasion would carry the day. The Task Force continued to deliver stripped-down services until the settlement money ran out a few years later.

I was gone by then, having resigned in late 2017.

Nowadays, I do my best to avoid the empty building at the corner of Peachtree and Pine, with its padlocked doors, boarded up windows and tortured history. It now belongs to Emory, which was the plan all along. But there's no avoiding homelessness: it's everywhere you look in downtown Atlanta.

Part III. The Built Environment of Homelessness

Now I want to turn to the built environment of downtown Atlanta, how it came to be what it is and why if forms such an ideal environment for the production and reproduction of homelessness. I'm going to try to give you a sense of the material transformation of the central city through the photographs I have taken rather than lecture you to death. These photographs are organized around four historical changes: the vehicularization of downtown as is evidenced by the kudzu-like growth of parking lots after World War II; the demolition of public housing in the city, beginning in 1996, when Atlanta was chosen to host the summer Olympic Games, and continuing until the last public housing unit, Grady Homes, fell to the wrecking ball in 2010 (Circle); the crisis of black homeownership on the west side of Atlanta as the subprime mortgage crisis of 2005-2007 and ensuing recession of 2008-2009 ripped through these historic African American neighborhoods and left them permanently scared; and, finally, the gentrification of the central city as the much-ballyhooed Beltline project produced significant displacement of long-time, African American residents and public housing sites were demolished, making way for mixed-use, mixed-income developments.

Part IV. Marx's Concept of Surplus

Prepare yourself for brief foray into Marxist theory and how it might help us to understand the underlying political-economic forces that were at play in the struggles over Peachtree-Pine and the creative destruction of the downtown built urban environment since the end of the Second World War.

My first point, or rather Marx's first point, is that capital is a historically specific mode of production governed by its own "laws of motion." The most important of these laws is what Marx calls the "law of value." He defines value as the socially necessary or average labor time congealed in a commodity. He also explains that for the industrial capitalist, who owns the means of production, the first step is to hire workers who don't own anything but their capacity to labor. This capacity to labor Marx calls labor power. The value of the worker's labor power is equal to the value of the commodities she must buy in order to live. At a certain point in the working day, say 4 hours into an 8-hour shift, she will have produced new commodities whose value is equal to the value of her labor power. Beyond this point, which in our example is the last 4 hours of the shift, she will produce what Marx calls "surplus value" for her boss. This surplus value is the source of all profits and forms the battleground of class struggle.

Once our capitalist has overseen the production of a new commodity and sold it for a profit, the surplus value realized as profit must circulate in a particular way for the individual business and the larger economy in which it is embedded to grow. Part of it will go to the state in the form of taxes, part to the landlord in the form of rent, part to the banker in the form of loan payments, part to the merchant who has marketed the commodity. The capitalist will also spend part of the profit on his own personal consumption. What's left of the profit after it is distributed in this manner is available to the capitalist for reinvestment in his business. If he wants to stay in business, he must reinvest. He will buy more means of production and more labor power in order to produce more commodities and more surplus value. This is the critical moment of economic growth or what Marx calls capital accumulation. Reinvestment means that the capitalist's business is bigger on day 2 than it was on day 1, and when multiplied countless times over by the number of individual capitalists in the economy it means that capital as a whole is bigger as well. Marx calls this the "expanded reproduction" of capital.

Now let's consider the internal contradictions and crisis tendencies of capital. At the top of the list is the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. This happens because capitalists discover that the best way to gain a competitive edge in the market is to adopt new labor-saving technologies which will allow them to lower the price of commodities they are trying to sell. Capitalists will invest in machinery, artificial intelligence, robotics—anything and everything that will increase the productivity of labor. But this creates a problem. If capitalists are investing more and more in expensive technology to gain a competitive edge, they are reducing the share of labor inputs relative to the total capital they have invested in their businesses. In other words, they are draining living labor, the source of profits, out of their production operations. For capital as a whole, the wage bill will shrink relative to investment in the means of production. If living labor is the source of all profits, this relative decline of living labor in production will cause the overall rate of profit to fall.

When the aggregate rate of profit falls under capital, you don't have to be a Nobel laureate in economics to know what the results will be: lots of capital looking in vain for profitable investment outlets and lots of workers looking in vain for full-time jobs. Marx uses the concept of "surplus" in both cases, because both capital and people exceed what the economic system can absorb owing to its own laws of motion. In other words, one of the internal contradictions and crisis tendencies of this mode of production is to produce surplus capital alongside surplus people. I urge you to read Chapter 25 of Capital, Volume 1, which is titled "The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation," where you will find a typology of the relative surplus population that fits Atlanta's unhoused population to a T.

So if you were to ask me, what is the most important cause of homelessness in Atlanta or Oxford, MS, I would say the capitalist mode of production. And if you were to respond, "you've got to be kidding me," I would say, "Do yourself a favor. Read Chapter 25 of Capital."

To conclude this reflection on the concept of surplus, I want to explain its usefulness for understanding the forces that shape downtown Atlanta's built environment. Here, I will rely on the work of Marxist geographer David Harvey and in particular his concept of the spatial-temporal fix. While Harvey subscribes to Marx's crisis theory that I just outlined for you, he gives it a spatial dimension that, for the most part, you won't find in Capital.

Having circled back to Schumpeter's concept of creative destruction by way of the forces impinging on the production of urban space, we are ready to take up the second of our original questions: where does the contradictory unity of space and time fit into the crisis theory put forward by Marx and Harvey? In Diagram 2 above, Harvey provides a framework for analyzing how these forces align with the contradictions and crisis tendencies of capital. The diagram is a schematic representation of what Harvey calls the "spatial-temporal fix," one of his most influential concepts that works on two levels, accounting for capital's geographical expansion into new areas as well as its geographical reconfiguration of old areas.

Diagram 2 disaggregates the circulation process into the primary, secondary and tertiary circuits of capital. The primary circuit is where value and surplus value are produced, and where commodities are consumed either as means of production or wage goods. As we noted in the last section, pressures of overaccumulation build up in the primary circuit so that surpluses of capital and labor gather side by side because there are no profitable investment outlets for absorbing them. The danger is that overaccumulated capital in the primary circuit will continue to grow, driving down the rate of profit and threatening the mass of profit, until nothing short of a system-wide devaluation in the form of a crisis will be able to eliminate the surplus and restore conditions of accumulation.

This is where the secondary circuit of capital comes to the rescue. It "fixes" or solves the surplus capital absorption problem, not for all time but temporarily through a process of spatial displacement and temporal deferral. Let's see how this fix works.

Harvey subdivides the secondary circuit into two broad categories, fixed capital and the consumption fund, which share the urban built environment between them. Those elements of the built environment which enable the production of value belong to fixed capital, while those others that contribute to the consumption of value belong the consumption fund. Factories are an example of the first, apartments the second. But all elements are defined by their use, so that boarded-up factories that have been repurposed as hipster condominiums move from fixed capital to the consumption fund, while tenement apartments that have been converted into sweatshops move in the opposite direction. Streets are dual products, defined as fixed capital when they are being used by trucks that move goods in and out of production and storage facilities, and as part of the consumption fund when they are being used by motorists or pedestrians on their way to and from the shopping mall.

The spatial-temporal fix aims to manage overaccumulation pressures by "switching" surplus capital from the primary to the secondary circuit. Capital that has languished for lack of investment outlets in the sphere of production is now channeled into major urban development and infrastructural projects from high-speed rail to suburban housing tracts and downtown festival markets and spectacle venues. These are large-scale, taxpayer-subsidized undertakings made possible by long-term loans with amortization periods of 20 or 30 years. The complicated logistical and technical challenges of such projects are managed by a nexus of state and financial intermediaries who are substantially shielded from public scrutiny and form a hybrid public-private state within a state.

In addition to the anti-democratic governance structures through which they operate, spatial-temporal fixes engender all manner of destructive speculative behavior. This is due to the long-term nature of investment projects whose success or failure will not be known until long after the original investors are gone, and the moral hazard that is built into the day-to-day operations of the state-finance nexus. Spatial-temporal fixes have been a breeding ground for the some of the most insane excesses of casino capitalism. What is more, they have put urban development priorities on the auction block with the result that mammoth projects that are productive of neither surplus value nor human well-being receive the go-ahead from state-finance nexuses that are eager to please major "stakeholders" (read financial and real estate interests). "Mindless urbanization" is how Harvey describes many of the trophy projects of recent years such as Manhattan's Hudson Yards, whose sole function is to serve as a sink for surplus capital.

So what is the big take-away from this discussion of capitalist space-time? Capital bends space and time to its own needs. But the production of space-time will never be able to "fix" capital's internal contradictions and crisis tendencies once and for all. What it does is move them around in space and time.

To the degree that the production of time and space has been hijacked by such displacement mechanisms as the spatial-temporal fix, cities will continue to be treated as sinks for overaccumulated capital and gentrified playgrounds for the one-percent, while the urban crises of affordable housing, homelessness and decimated social services will continue to escalate.

What about cities for people? Don't count on it as long as capital calls the shots.

IV. Photography

Years before my parents died, photography leached its way into my blood stream. While I have never turned water into wine or raised the dead, I'm pretty sure that shooting film is the next best thing to performing a miracle. The image slowly comes to life in the developing tray under the red glow of the safety light. Pure magic. I did not want to shoot the kind of pretty pictures that make Ansel Adams so popular on the nature calendar circuit or the performance pieces that put Cindy Sherman on the postmodern map. My heroes were Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gary Winogrand and André Kertész, the masters of street and documentary photography.
Let me pause a moment to explain what I take to be the differences between these two approaches to picture-making. Street photography is set in the "street," defined as any public space, usually outdoors, where people gather, interact, perform. It aims to capture, in Cartier-Bresson's words, the "decisive moment" when the built environment and the social life contained therein chime together. It pays tribute to the single magical image that succeeds in catching the mystery and beauty of human bodies frozen in a never-to-be-repeated moment. And it seeks to evoke a palpable sense of playfulness, irony, humor, weirdness.
Documentary photography, on the other hand, has no self-imposed limits in terms of setting. What matters most is that the subject being photographed contributes to the story being told. This does not require the direct presence of human beings; landscape and still life are perfectly acceptable if they advance the story line. Rather than enshrining the singular image or decisive moment as expressive of some larger whole, documentary photography strings together a series of images, each one building upon the others, to tell a story against a specific spatial and temporal backdrop. And it tends to embed the narrative at the extreme ends of the emotional spectrum, projecting either fiery moral indignation or cool analytical detachment.
Both approaches appealed to me, street photography for its attention to visual surprise and psychological spontaneity, documentary photography for its attention to narrative coherence and historical context. But if I had to make a choice, I'd go with documentary photography.
I was trained as a historian, so I worked with documents all the time. Historians subject documents to close textual analysis, put them in context and use them to construct arguments about the past. But documentary photography has an extra bonus: it creates documents in the here and now. The world opened up to me in a new way when I began to look at it through the lens of a camera. Suddenly, everything I saw crackled with meaning and significance and beauty. Before me lay a world of pictures begging to be taken, documents waiting to be created.
Before long, I was toting around a heavy bag of photographic equipment. Cameras of all formats, lenses of all lengths and enough film to keep me shooting for a long time. I built a darkroom in my basement, spent hours and hours processing film and making silver gelatin prints. I was convinced that however fickle my other interests might be, my love for photography would be forever true.
The course of true love never did run smooth, to quote the Bard.
I stopped taking pictures sometime around 2015. Why? Partly because documentary photography is a very physical enterprise, hard on the back, knees and ankles. I had to lug around a lot of heavy equipment, to say nothing of standing on a concrete floor day after day, bent over developing trays. This brought me face to face with something I preferred not to think about: I was no longer a young man. I decided to take a temporary break and give my weary bones a rest.
Temporary turned into four or five years. With the benefit of hindsight, I think I now understand why my affair with photography ran cold. The aches and pains of old age weren’t the real reason I shut down the darkroom and put my cameras in storage. I had spent nearly a decade photographing Atlanta's housing crisis and the ferocious war being waged against the city's largest homeless shelter. During most of that time I served on the board of directors that operated the shelter. We fought hard to keep it open. We lost. You'll learn more about this in "Unhoused Atlanta."
People process death and defeat in different ways. I processed them by disengaging.
Was I depressed? Maybe so.
When I disembarked at Rome International Airport on October 12, 2019, I did so without a camera. But I arrived with something even better. I should say two things: Allyson and her smartphone. I can remember being appalled when she bought it. High-tech was verboten for me. My old flip phone was just fine. Above all, no digital photography. I rolled old school, black-and-white film and nothing else. A dinosaur and proud of it. It took the crystalline air and golden light and street carnival of Italy to bring the dinosaur into the twenty-first century. If our vacation had one hiccup, it was the tug of war over Allyson's phone. I essentially commandeered it in order to make images unlike any I had ever made before. When I was doing photography back home, my cameras kept getting bigger and bigger as I moved from 35 millimeter to 6x7 medium format and finally to large format. By the end, I was armed with a 4x5 Speed Graphic manufactured in the 1950s. I was the spitting image of Weegee.
Don’t worry if you’re unfamiliar with these terms: the point is that my bulky gear screamed out to anyone who saw me approaching, “Watch your step. Here comes a pain-in-the-ass photographer.” While some people were curious about cameras that reminded them of something their grandpas might have used, most turned on their heels and headed the other way. Not a few hotheads got up in my grill. Such are the occupational hazards of large-format, documentary photography. What freedom and weightlessness, that smartphone! I could get as close as I wanted to any subject. No worries about inciting a riot or getting a beatdown. It wasn’t that people wanted me to take their pictures. They seemed completely oblivious to my presence, so busy were they snapping selfies with their own smartphones. Digital technology, as I came to see, was a boon to both the craft of photography and the culture of narcissism. In Italy, I put aside my documentary inclinations and became a street photographer, not for some deep philosophical, political or aesthetic reason, but because jumping back into the crowd and feeling the human energy around me felt good. Just what the doctor ordered. I've come to the point in this essay where you might expect me to say something specific about the photos and how they relate to the process of capitalist place formation. The truth is I don't have anything to say here about capitalism or place. These are not documentary photographs of the sort that will bulk large in the galleries to come. If they document anything at all, it is the state of my mind in October 2019, when I was looking to make a fresh start.

Capitalism in Place: Photos and Essays by a Marxist Tourist

Unhoused Atlanta

Revitalizing Downtown, Devitalizing People

Capitalism in Place:
Photos and Essays by a Marxist Tourist