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Dr. Terence Lester, founder and executive director of Love Beyond Walls, dropped by The Atlanta Voice on Monday, Aug. 25, to discuss the unhoused and affordable housing and what could be done about both in Atlanta.
Lester has many conversations about how a city growing as fast as Atlanta can ever truly keep up with the number of people living on its streets, in its shelters, and in its motels. His answers can be both complex and quite simple.
“Accessible housing is how we solve it,” Lester said. “You know many Americans, United States citizens, are one paycheck away?”
According to data from RentCafe.com, Atlanta is one of the most expensive cities in the country. The average rent for an apartment in Atlanta is $1,773 per month.
Lester believes the city and state political leaders can help create an environment where there can be luxury apartments and accessible housing (he doesn’t like to use the more popular phrase, “affordable housing”) in the city.
“People who hold or occupy spaces of political power can address some of these issues,” Lester said. “Do we create a task force to think of how to create more housing? Do we put caps on the rising rents?”
Reframing the narrative of homelessness in order to humanize the people who are enveloped in the issue.
“We have to keep the narrative in the forefront of people’s minds,” Lester said. “People strategically make suffering invisible, whether by public policy, public sanitation, or displacement. If people aren’t seen, then people aren’t part of the conversation.”
Having experienced brief periods of homelessness as a young person, Lester said he wants to change what it means to be poor and unhoused in the country, not just in Atlanta. He says this is the type of work he, his wife Cecilia, his daughter Zion, 17, and Terence II, 14, are also involved in.
“I’m really passionate about this. I wish we cared more about building people than building people,” Lester said.
Lester explained that it would be as simple as jumping in a car and riding in any direction in Atlanta to find homelessness.
“Correta Scott King said poverty is violence,” Lester said. “Poverty is not just about economics; it’s social, it’s spiritual, physical, psychological, and environmental. When you see a person standing on the street corner who you know is from this city, you can see the erosion of their soul. Poverty has impacted their whole well-being.”
More discussions involving “the actual people who love the city and the people from here”, Lester said. He wants more local forums on homelessness and “accessible” housing to include the people it directly affects.
“We need to reframe the language of what’s affordable. Affordability doesn’t solve the issue of homelessness because you’re talking about people being able to afford something they can’t afford,” Lester said.
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