The City of Atlanta’s Downtown Rising plan focuses on housing in downtown-area neighborhoods. At The Melody complex in South Downtown, shipping containers were repurposed into apartments.Photograph by Associated Press Whatever the successes of the ’96 Olympics Games, the blow it dealt to Atlanta ’s unhoused community is widely considered a moral failure. Determined to show visitors a sparkling, world-class metropolis, Atlanta officials tried to hide thousands of poor people living on downtown streets. The city handed out free bus tickets to whoever would sign a form promising not to return, and police arrested more than 9,000 people in the year leading up to the Games. Many were cited for violating new statutes that made it easier for police to clear the streets, such as “being in a known drug area” or “walking across a parking lot with no vehicle there.” “It was so much worse than we had anticipated,” says Anita Beaty, who was leading the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless at the time. At one city meeting, Beaty and her fellow activists found stacks of police citation forms, the words “African American male” and “homeless” already printed on them. “They were clearly just going to hand them out to police to arrest anybody they could,” she says. Many of the people picked up by police were denied hearings and languished for weeks in the new Atlanta City Detention Center, built in anticipation of the surge in arrests. Activists sued, and days before the Olympics’ opening ceremonies began, a judge blocked some of the arrest statutes. “It seems to the court,” the judge later wrote, “that the city of Atlanta is largely indifferent to how its laws are enforced upon this group of people.” Thirty years later, Atlanta officials want to prove they’ve learned their lesson for the FIFA World Cup. In 2025, Mayor Andre Dickens and the city’s coordinating nonprofit Partners for Home launched Atlanta Rising, a $212 million housing-first plan to bring unsheltered Atlantans into sustainable housing with wraparound services. The first stage of the plan, called Downtown Rising, focuses on World Cup–adjacent neighborhoods; in March, the city announced it had surpassed its goal of housing 400 people in newly built units before the start of the tournament. “They are nice units. I would live there,” says Tim Franzen, an Atlanta-based housing activist with the American Friends Service Committee. Some housing units were refurbished from existing apartment buildings, and others, such as The Melody complex, from repurposed shipping containers. All include private bathrooms and kitchenettes. The problem, Franzen says, is the math: This year’s homelessness survey counted nearly 3,000 unhoused Atlantans, about 1,000 of them living outside. Advocates are concerned that those not in housing will be arrested or forcibly displaced and their belongings destroyed during encampment clearings. Anita Beaty, former leader of the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless, at a 2011 protest.Photograph by Associated Press “The city has told us, ‘No one’s going to get arrested as a result of Downtown Rising,’ says Michael Collins, the director of Play Fair ATL, a watchdog coalition of human-rights activists focused on the World Cup. “But they declined to put that in writing [in the FIFA-mandated Human Rights Action Plan].” The action plan also did not include a proposed moratorium on encampment closures, which have come under intense public scrutiny after Cornelius Taylor was killed by heavy machinery during such a closure in January 2025. Mayor Dickens says he can’t promise nobody will be arrested—“people get arrested daily for various offenses”—but insists there’s no targeting of homeless people. “There’s no ‘magical jail.’ We’re not ‘rounding people up,’” he says. The city is increasing shelter capacity and using hotels rooms to make up for the housing gap, he says, and the “2 percent” of people left on the streets will be treated respectfully. “We have thousands of examples of people going into proper housing,” he says, “and that’s what we’ll be doing the whole time.” Hindsight will reveal the full impact of the World Cup on Atlanta’s homeless community, but Franzen still believes that today’s story could be better than what happened 30 years ago. When it comes to unhoused Atlantans, Franzen says, “the legacy of the ’96 Olympics is that Atlanta jail. But the legacy of this global event could be that, for a fraction of that cost, we could build not only the housing, but the services to support people rebuilding their lives.” This article appears in our June 2026 issue. The post Atlanta’s World Cup Homelessness Strategy: Avoid the mistakes of 1996 appeared first on Atlanta Magazine. ...read more read less