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displacement
Atlanta Must Put Equity at the Heart of City Planning
Unless residents are meaningfully included from the start, we’ll continue to pay the price for decisions that will be made without us.
Sep 21, 2025
On some streets in Atlanta’s Westside neighborhoods, you can smell the flood before you see it. Gray wastewater rises into the roads, seeps into homes and cars, and lingers long after the storm has passed. Residents step onto their porches, hands over their faces, taking in the now-familiar scene. All it takes is a strong rainstorm to overwhelm a system that was never built to support the people who live here.
In one area, flooding became more severe after new construction added housing density without adequate upgrades to drainage infrastructure. A developer installed a retention pond across from a residential block as part of the deal, but it hasn’t been enough. This pattern is not unique to Atlanta. Many cities with legacies of redlining, highway expansion, and racially unequal investment are now experiencing the cumulative toll of decades of neglect and the rising cost of excluding communities from the decisions that shape their neighborhoods.
The flooding that plagues Atlanta’s Westside isn’t just a weather issue. It’s the result of decades of disinvestment, shortsighted planning, and infrastructure that was never designed to serve the communities that live here. And while other cities long ago updated their water systems to separate drinking water from wastewater, Atlanta still runs both through the same outdated pipes. When a heavy rain hits, the system overflows, and neighborhoods are submerged in sewage.
Many of Atlanta’s historic Black neighborhoods are situated at the base of hills, downhill from the wealthier, whiter parts of the city. That’s not a coincidence. It reflects a long history of redlining, highway construction through Black communities, and the repeated exclusion of Westside residents from decisions that shape our lives. We live in the lowlands, and we’ve been treated like an afterthought for generations.
Atlanta often celebrates its civil rights legacy, and as someone who calls the Westside home and works to support communities across the region, I understand the weight of that history. But legacy alone won’t stop the floods.
Now, as the city rushes to accommodate new developments, from Mercedes-Benz Stadium to the Gulch, we are told that flooding will finally be addressed, but only because it now threatens new investment. Downtown Atlanta sits atop massive concrete structures built 50 feet above what was once an industrial rail hub. These platforms were funded with public money, including half a billion dollars to support a luxury development in The Gulch.
Developers were handed city resources and made a promise to include affordable housing and community benefits. As part of a nearly $1.9 billion incentive package, developers agreed to make 20% of the new housing in Centennial Yards affordable. Instead, builders opted to pay an $8 million in-lieu fee, thereby avoiding any affordable housing options altogether. It’s a legal way to sidestep the promises used to gain public support in the first place. And without strong accountability, that money rarely flows back into the communities that were supposed to benefit.
Existing Westside neighborhoods are absorbing the infrastructure demands created by new development. One of many examples is Georgia Power's proposal to build a new electrical substation just two blocks from an elementary school to power nearby luxury developments. These decisions are made without our input, yet our neighborhoods are left to manage the fallout at once: an overwhelmed watershed system, expanding energy needs, and the strain on roads and public services that were never built to support this kind of growth.
This kind of development process is reactive and extractive. It’s a pattern I have seen over and over again. A developer shows up. A problem is discovered, and the community raises concerns. At that point, the city scrambles to hold a few meetings or patch together a short-term fix. But the damage has already been done.
This isn’t just inconvenient. It’s disruptive to our lives and our stability. It undermines property values, displaces long-time residents, and increases the financial burden on families already stretched thin. I have seen neighbors leave not because they wanted to, but because living here became unsustainable.
Living through the consequences and working inside the systems that produced them, I know change is possible, but only if we change how decisions are made. My journey, shaped by life in Atlanta’s Westside neighborhoods and a career focused on building community power, brought me to lead the national Just Communities initiative. The Westside is where so much of Atlanta’s civil rights legacy was born. That history of resistance and resilience is not just part of the past. It’s what drives me, and many others, to continue fighting for justice.
Just Communities is grounded in the belief that equity is a forethought. It shapes the process, not just the outcomes. The Just Communities Protocol offers a practical road map for doing exactly that. At its heart is the Declaration of Collaboration, a tool designed to formalize shared governance among community members, city officials, and developers. It’s not about public input after the fact. It’s about building structures where residents shape decisions from the beginning: what gets built, where, and how.
Right now, the City of Atlanta is updating its comprehensive plan, zoning ordinances, and watershed infrastructure. These are opportunities to finally do things differently. However, unless residents are meaningfully included from the start, we’ll continue to pay the price for decisions that will be made without us.
Atlanta often celebrates its civil rights legacy, and as someone who calls the Westside home and works to support communities across the region, I understand the weight of that history. But legacy alone won’t stop the floods. Honoring it requires more than symbolism; we need a new process, one rooted in justice and shared power. If we want different outcomes, we must change how decisions are made. Until that happens, communities like mine will continue to pay the price.
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US Pension Fund TIAA Linked to Brutal Land Grabs and Evictions of Farmers in Brazil
The 10 largest transnational landowners in the world control an area larger than Japan, according to a new report. This accumulation fuels human rights abuse, inequalities, and environmental destruction, and underlines the need for redistributive policies.
Jun 03, 2025
Angelim is a small rural community in Piauí, northeastern Brazil, where small-scale farmers and artisans have lived for generations. Their way of life dramatically changed a few years ago when a company arrived, claiming it had purchased the land. Residents report being threatened by armed men. They have faced forest clearances and the destruction of native vegetation that is essential for their livelihoods and way of life. New monoculture plantations began to dry up the wetlands. The plantations also used pesticides, polluting the ecosystem and threatening residents’ health and livelihoods.
Angelim is located in the municipality of Santa Filomena and is just one of many communities affected by land acquisitions by Radar Propriedades Agrícolas, a company formed in 2008 as a joint venture between U.S. pension fund TIAA and Brazilian agribusiness giant Cosan. In recent years, Radar has acquired more than 3,000 hectares in Santa Filomena, adding to the land it already owns throughout the Matopiba region, which includes the Brazilian states of Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí, and Bahia—the latest frontier of industrial agriculture in Brazil.
Elite Group
This region sits in the Cerrado, one of the world’s most biodiverse areas, home to 12,000 plant species (35% endemic) and 25 million people, including Indigenous Peoples and small-scale food providers. But 40-55% of the Cerrado has already been converted to commercial tree plantations, large agro-industrial monocultures, and pastures for cattle production. Land grabs, speculation, and deforestation are displacing communities and damaging the environment. One of the major players in this expansion is TIAA and its asset management company, Nuveen.
Tackling land inequality is crucial for a more just and sustainable future.
As revealed in our new report, TIAA is one of the world’s largest landowners and has almost quadrupled its landholdings since 2012. Managing 1.2 million hectares across 10 countries, it ranks 7th among the world’s top 10 transnational landowners, who together control 404,457 square kilometers—an area the size of Japan.
Others in this elite group include financial investors like Blue Carbon from the UAE, Australia-based Macquarie, and Canada’s Manulife; agribusiness giants Olam and Wilmar from Singapore; Chilean timber company Arauco; and U.K.-based Shell via Raízen, a Brazilian subsidiary.
Global Land Grabbing and Concentration Trends
This accumulation of land in the hands of a few transnational companies is part of a global trend of land grabbing that surged after the 2008 financial crisis. Since 2000, transnational investors have acquired an estimated 65 million hectares of land—twice the size of Germany. This has accelerated a dynamic of land concentration, which has resulted in 1% of farms controlling 70% of global farmland, a trend that jeopardizes the livelihoods of 2.5 billion smallholder farmers and 1.4 billion of the world’s poorest, most of whom depend on agriculture.
As the case of the Angelim community shows, land grabbing and land concentration have devastating consequences for communities and ecosystems. Like U.S.-based TIAA, virtually all the top global landowners have reportedly been implicated in forced displacements, environmental destruction, and violence against local people.
Land concentration exacerbates inequality, erodes social cohesion, and fuels conflict. But there are deeper consequences as well: The fact that vast tracts of land, located across different state jurisdictions, are brought under the control of distant corporate entities for the sake of global supply chains or global financial capital flows runs diametrically counter to the principles of state sovereignty and people’s self-determination. In particular, it undermines states’ ability to ensure that land tenure serves the public good and enables the transition to more sustainable economic models.
“Net Zero” Fueling Evictions
The question of who should own and manage land becomes even more pressing in light of climate change and biodiversity loss. Transnational landowners are associated with industrial monoculture plantations, deforestation, and other extractive practices. In contrast, up to 80% of intact forests are found on lands managed by Indigenous Peoples and other rural communities. Moreover, small-scale food providers practicing agroecology support higher biodiversity, better water management, and produce over half the world’s food using just 35% of global cropland.
Ironically, the environmental value of community-managed land has sparked a new wave of land grabs. So-called “green grabs” (land grabs for alleged environmental purposes) now account for about 20% of large-scale land deals. Since 2016, more than 5.2 million hectares in Africa have been acquired for carbon offset projects. The global carbon market is expected to quadruple in the next seven years, and over half of the top 10 global landowners now claim participation in carbon and biodiversity markets. “Net zero” has become a pretext for expelling communities from their lands.
From Deregulation to Redistribution
While global land policy debates in the past 10 years have focused on limiting the harm of land grabs on people and nature, the scale and severity of these trends demand a shift from regulation to redistribution. Neoliberal deregulation, as well as trade and other economic policies, have fueled the massive transfer of land and wealth to the corporate sector and the ultra-rich. Redistributive policies are needed to reverse this trend.
Tackling land inequality is crucial for a more just and sustainable future. However, only very few countries implement land policies and agrarian reform programs that actively attempt to redistribute and return land to dispossessed peoples and communities.
The international human rights framework requires states to structure their land tenure systems in ways that ensure broad and equitable distribution of natural resources and their sustainable use. The tools at the disposal of governments include redistribution, restitution, and the protection of collective and customary tenure systems, as well as measures such as ceilings on land ownership (including by corporate entities), protection and facilitation of use rights over publicly owned land, and participatory and inclusive land-use planning. These efforts must also be matched by redistributive fiscal policies, such as progressive land and property taxes, which remain regressive or ineffective in most countries today, thus perpetuating inequality and enabling wealth concentration.
International Cooperation
Because land grabbing is driven by global capital and the accumulation of land across jurisdictions by transnational corporations and financial entities, international cooperation is essential. The upcoming International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD) in Colombia in February 2026 offers a critical moment for governments to agree on measures that end land grabbing, reverse land concentration, and ensure broad and sustainable distribution of natural resources.
To be effective, these discussions should connect with initiatives on a global tax convention and an international mechanism to address sovereign debt, empowering states to have the fiscal space to implement human rights-based, redistributive policies and just transitions. Also important are binding legal provisions that prevent transnational corporations from using the power of their money to bend national rules in their pursuit of profits.
In a world facing intersecting crises—climate breakdown, food insecurity, persisting poverty, and social inequality—and a reconfiguration of the global balance of power, there is an opportunity to move away from neoliberal policies that have benefited very few, and to create a more just and sustainable global future for all.
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Intensifying Israeli Onslaught Has Displaced 180,000 Palestinians in Just 10 Days
"They call places safe, then attack them," said one Palestinian aid worker. "I'd rather stay home with my family and face whatever comes, at least we all die together, rather than be separated."
May 27, 2025
A United Nations group said Tuesday that Israel's renewed ground offensive and continued airstrikes in the Gaza Strip displaced roughly 180,000 Palestinians in just 10 days this month, leaving desperate, starving families with nowhere to turn as Israeli forces target shelters and other civilian infrastructure.
The estimate from the International Organization for Migration's Global Camp Coordination and Camp Management (CCCM) Cluster came a day after the Israeli military bombed a school-turned-shelter in Gaza City, killing dozens.
CCCM said Tuesday that direct attacks on shelters for displaced people "have become common" in recent weeks as Israeli forces have moved ahead with Operation Gideon's Chariots, an expansion of Israel's devastating assault on the besieged Palestinian enclave. The official death toll from Israel's assault, which began in the wake of a Hamas-led attack in October 2023, surpassed 54,000 on Tuesday.
"Since the collapse of the cease-fire on 18 March, nearly 616,000 people have been displaced—multiple times, some as many as 10," said the U.N. group. "During the cease-fire, over half a million people went back to their homes, mostly in the north, to try to rebuild their lives. That fragile progress has now been reversed, as intensified military operations are once again displacing families away from the areas they had only recently returned to."
Citing humanitarian partners on the ground, CCCM noted that roughly 80% of the Gaza Strip is either under a displacement order or marked as a "no-go" zone, making most of the enclave's population vulnerable to Israel's ground and aerial onslaught.
"My sibling died in a 'safe' zone after they bombed it," one Palestinian aid worker told CCCM. "They call places safe, then attack them. I'd rather stay home with my family and face whatever comes, at least we all die together, rather than be separated."
CCCM also raised alarm over a newly launched aid scheme led by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a private organization with ties to the U.S. and Israeli governments.
"These arrangements risk circumventing established humanitarian coordination mechanisms, undermining humanitarian principles, and putting civilians at further risk by promoting displacement without essential protection or adequate access to lifesaving services," the U.N. organization said.
The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor echoed that warning, saying in a statement that "all available information about the new Israeli mechanism clearly indicates that it is designed as a tool of coercive control over the Gaza Strip's civilian population."
"It limits families to just one aid parcel per week under highly restrictive security conditions, thus violating the principles of non-discrimination, adequacy, and continuity in humanitarian aid," the group said. "Such limited distribution is not a genuine humanitarian response, but a deliberate policy aimed at barely managing hunger, rather than actually alleviating it."
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