Fight over Downtown Atlanta Homeless Shelter Strains Some Down-Home Ties
Photo of attorney Steven Hall by Gregory Miller
Stephen Riddell was livid. He was mincing no words with Steven Hall as they took turns interrupting each other during a deposition last year. “You’re pathetic. You’re an embarrassment to the legal profession,” Riddell sputtered at Hall in an exchange captured on videotape. “Racist,” Hall muttered in a pointed, one-word retort.
The blowup was uncustomary for both.
Riddell is managing partner of the Atlanta office of Troutman Sanders, a national firm of more than 650 lawyers. Hall is a shareholder in the Atlanta office of Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz, a national firm of more than 560 lawyers.
Their ugly exchange came at the conclusion of an all-day, aggressively played cat-and-mouse game last year in the deposition of A.J. Robinson, president of Central Atlanta Progress, a downtown business association. But this scrap between two high-octane lawyers—both working pro bono—may be the least bizarre incident in nasty, ongoing litigation that has set the city’s upper crust against itself.
Robinson is accused in a civil suit (PDF) of helping orchestrate an illegal effort by city, business and civic leaders to shut down the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless, a shelter that houses 500 to 700 men each night, nearly all of them African-American.
The powers that be in Atlanta have made it clear for more than a decade that they want the shelter—located on a valuable stretch of the city’s famous Peachtree Street—to go away. They say the facility, which has been operating for 14 years in a building donated to the organization by a Coca-Cola heir, hurts business, tourism and the lifestyles of others in the neighborhood—as well as the homeless men they claim are simply warehoused there.
Click to continue reading “Battle of Atlanta” from the May issue of the ABA Journal.
