Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms will step down from her post before her $1 billion affordable housing goal can be realized. The city is on track to spend at least that much building and preserving units by 2026 (which would have been the end of her once-envisioned second term). But when Bottoms announced in May that she’d be vacating the mayor’s office after her first term expired, she punctuated the fate of her ambitious One Atlanta: Housing Affordability Action Plan with a big question mark.
Between January 2018, when Bottoms took office, and October 2021, the city committed some $596 million to developing and protecting affordable housing units. That investment went to the creation and preservation of more than 7,000 units—about half of which are “units underway,” per city records.
