Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Clarkston, GA

Clarkston is a small city in DeKalb County, Georgia, about 10 miles northeast of downtown Atlanta, widely known as "the most diverse square mile in America."

Clarkston is also nicknamed the "Ellis Island of the South" because it has been a federally designated refugee resettlement community since the 1980s, chosen for its affordable housing, walkability and public transit.

More than 40,000 refugees have begun their American lives in Clarkston over the past few decades, arriving from countries including Somalia, Bhutan, Burma, Congo, Ethiopia, Nepal and Afghanistan.

More than 60 languages are spoken in Clarkston, and about 40 percent of its residents were born outside the United States, according to the Census Bureau.

The 2020 census counted 14,756 people in Clarkston, nearly double the 7,554 counted in 2010 after a major annexation expanded the city.

Census Bureau QuickFacts counted about 3,947 households in Clarkston in the 2020–2024 survey period, averaging an unusually large 3.68 persons per household.

Refuge Coffee Company, based in Clarkston, runs a job-training program that employs refugees and immigrants as baristas.

Resettlement agencies report that about 90 percent of Clarkston's refugees become self-sufficient within 180 days of arrival, a rate held up as a national model.

Despite its tiny footprint of under two square miles, Clarkston packs in residents from more than 40 countries, and by 1990 refugees had transformed a once overwhelmingly white mill town into one of the most international communities in the South.

Clarkston's first Black woman mayor, Beverly H. Burks, was proclaimed an "International Mayor" by the Georgia House of Representatives in recognition of the city's global makeup.