TL;DR: protestors try to convince the City of Atlanta to not go forward with a $2 billion dollar proposal to develop the Gulch

For those of you who don’t live in Atlanta, or live in the metro area and are clueless anyway, the Gulch is this giant parcel of land that currently exists as a big empty parking lot that sits two stories lower than the rest of Downtown Atlanta, because long ago the city decided for some reason to build above everything, or maybe they just wanted to keep the streets nice and level.

The bottom line is that the Gulch is a gigantic eyesore of space that exists really, really close to some major Atlanta landmarks, like Centennial Olympic Park, Mercedes Benz Arena, the CNN Center and Philips State Farm Arena.  It’s basically where cars park to get broken into, or where the drivers get harassed, buy drugs, assaulted, murdered or all of the above.  It’s undesirable, looks like shit, and is in desperate need to be taken over by developers and actually developed.

So when some smarmy hot-shot California developers come into town and propose some $2 billion dollar idea to develop the Gulch, you’d think there would be people that might actually be excited by the promise of the City of Atlanta gentrifying yet another shitty area and trying to make it look nice, right?

Fuck no, of course not.  Much like the Beltline, Mercedes-Benz Arena, ScumTrust Park, there are a ton of people who show up, all up in arms, about how it’s a bad idea, and how it’s going to price people out and how some rich developers are going to get richer at the expense of the poor.  Now in their defense, the city most certainly didn’t need Mercedes-Benz Arena or ScumTrust Park, but the Beltline most definitely succeeded in both beautifying the areas it’s been developed in AND pricing out the poors while the rich got richer.

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