Mayor Andre Dickens on Wednesday unveiled 100 studio apartments that will provide permanent homes and supportive services for unhoused Atlantans, as part of the city’s Rapid Housing Initiative. But the ribbon-cutting celebration at the newly built Waterworks Village, just west of Atlantic Station, occurred under the shadow of looming Trump administration cuts to permanent supportive housing funds.
When residents move into the new development later this month, they’ll have their rent covered by the city’s go-to homeless services nonprofit, Partners for Home, until Atlanta Housing inks a rent-voucher agreement and takes over. The complex will staff on-site healthcare workers to treat tenants with chronic medical needs, as well as provide access to jobs training programs and mental health and substance-use treatment.
With Waterworks Village, located at 653 Green St., the city is still 246 units shy of its goal to produce 500 homes for unhoused people by the end of the year, but more ribbon-cuttings and groundbreakings are in the pipeline. Early next year, city officials plan to open a mixed-use complex with 112 supportive housing units on Cooper Street in Mechanicsville, and they are working to acquire another property to finalize the 500-unit program.
Atlanta’s Rapid Housing Initiative kicked off in January 2024 with the debut of The Melody, a 40-unit shipping-container village, and has since delivered an additional 48 apartments at The Winnwood in Midtown, 23 at The Bonaventure in Poncey-Highland, and 43 at a recently acquired Westside property.
But as Dickens touts “bold steps to reduce homelessness,” the White House is gearing up to cut 70% of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Continuum of Care funding, which provides permanent supportive housing for unhoused people. Atlanta would lose nearly $10 million in Continuum of Care grants. Currently, 844 Atlanta households rely on that federal funding for housing and wraparound services.
The Trump administration will instead divert funding to short-term housing initiatives with work requirements and mandatory mental health and substance-use treatment.
Waterworks Village is insulated from those cuts, because it is financed instead by local Homeless Opportunity bonds, the city’s Affordable Housing Trust fund, and Beltline Tax Allocation District dollars.
But at the Dec. 3 ribbon-cutting ceremony, the city’s top housing leaders recognized that these 100 new housing units for the unhoused are opening just as HUD’s cuts to Continuum of Care funding risk displacing nearly 600 formerly unhoused Atlanta households from other permanent supportive housing.
The city’s uphill battle to reduce homelessness, Dickens said, “becomes a tough thing going forward when the Trump administration has said that they’re going to slash some of this funding. So we now have to go out to philanthropy [groups], go out to the state and the county, to ask for more money for permanent supportive housing.”
Those other funding sources have already become increasingly competitive as federal backing wanes, the mayor added, so the city is quickly trying to establish a contingency plan.
“The new Trump administration was not factored in,” Dickens said, when he took office in 2022 and promised to generate 20,000 affordable housing units by 2030.
“We are trying to figure out how we’re going to make the Continuum of Care program whole,” Partners for Home CEO Cathryn Vassell told Atlanta Civic Circle. Her nonprofit coordinates the federal grant spending for the city.
“The research and evidence is abundantly clear: Homelessness is a housing problem,” Vassel said, and not a side effect of drug abuse or mental instability.
That means the Trump administration’s treatment-first edicts won’t keep people from living on the streets. But can Atlanta and other big-city metros convince the Trump administration that funding permanent supportive housing will?
I’m proud and thankful that the one in place of the administration is someone that understands the will of Our Heavenly Father. I pray continuously for all in agreement of doing what he mandate in his word. This is my vision manifested. Thank you for doing what others haven’t been able to do for those in need. God blessings.