Stephanie and I explored the West End and Westview neighborhoods. We recently discovered these neighborhoods. It is a sad reality that one can live in Atlanta for years without even knowing about this historic part of town. Here are some pictures
West End:
Several houses had this design feature.
This is the Hammonds House.
Westview Neighborhood:
This is a 6 bedroom foreclosure being sold for $99,000. This house is a great candidate for the housing cooperative we want to start. We need a large, affordable house for the co-op, and these two neighborhoods provide some good options.
The Westview Cemetery borders the neighborhood to the West.
One thing we didn’t capture in photograph is how bad the streets were. On Ralph David Abernathy which goes through the heart of historic West End, the road was almost unbearable with all of the potholes and bumps. The streets in Westview were slightly better. All streets in Atlanta have some problems, but it is no surprise that Atlanta neglects this part of town while working to improve street conditions for the rich, white parts of town. Keeping roads in horrible shape is a way of shifting costs back onto the general public as it increases the cost of upkeep on your car, and it acts like a regressive tax since it hurts the working class the most.
Although not as serious as other public resources, the deterioration of roads is symbolic of the way the city has treated all publicly funded resources. You can see the same deterioration in MARTA, public housing, Grady, and Atlanta public schools. In all these cases the government shifts costs to the general public to free up funds for various types of corporate welfare. This is the essence of class warfare in America, and the capitalists and coordinators are continuing to beat down the working class.
December 22, 2007 at 5:36 am |
The streets have been repaired for the most part! They were torn up because of the city’s big water project. Everything is getting repaved now that the work is done.
December 22, 2007 at 1:20 pm |
You are right, the roads are much better now. Perhaps I was just going through the neighborhood at a bad time. Part of the problem was they had just ripped up some of the streets in anticipation of paving them over.
Regardless of the condition of the roads, Westview and the West End are two neighborhoods where I’d like to be. It’s one of the few intown areas that hasn’t been gentrified completely from the outside and yet is quite livable in most ways.
I am actually in the process of trying to buy a house in Westview. I think it is the ideal neighborhood to start a housing cooperative, and I believe the neighborhood has great potential for activist organizing.