The Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation has its first new leader in 15 years — a transition that comes as Atlanta, the nonprofit’s hometown, is shifting its notoriously anti-preservation attitude amid such pressures as housing affordability.
It’s the sort of challenge that appeals to W. Wright Mitchell, the Georgia Trust’s new president and CEO. He’s a local guy who mixes feisty passion — he previously worked as an attorney specializing in preservation — and pragmatic dealmaking.
“In a city like Atlanta where there is not a strong preservation ethic, unlike Savannah, you’ve gotta find other ways to get leadership interested in historic preservation,” said Mitchell in a recent interview in his office at Rhodes Hall, the Georgia Trust’s historic Midtown headquarters. “And they may not realize it’s historic preservation. They say the greenest building is the existing building,” he said, adding that the reuse of vacant, older buildings can also contribute to affordable housing “we desperately need.”
“And as a preservationist, I’ll take it,” continued Mitchell. “I don’t care what the motivation is, you know? Whether it’s altruistic or whether it’s financial or whether it’s filling a housing need, we just want to see historic buildings preserved.”
Then there’s the rest of the state, where the Georgia Trust works with — and sometimes trains — scores of local organizations. Its arsenal of resources includes a building-buying fund, conservation easements, grants, technical advice, and social events such as its “Ramble” tours, the most recent of which drew 745 attendees to historic sites in Madison.
Mitchell is a native of Atlanta’s Buckhead neighborhood. Like many in his profession, he had parents who were strongly interested in history and historic preservation. His own path, however, is more unusual, as he got a law degree and started a practice specializing in preservation. He represented neighborhoods seeking City of Atlanta historic district designations, battled accessory dwelling units in a National Register of Historic Places district, and challenged an attempt to change the historic names of Downtown Atlanta streets for a developer and a Civil Rights leader.
“I represented descendants of individuals who were buried in African American cemeteries who were facing threats to their family cemeteries by development or landowners who were denying them access to visit their ancestors,” he said. One such case was a 2010 attempt to move Buckhead’s Mt. Olive Cemetery.
As a white male leader in the increasingly diversifying field of historic preservation, Mitchell said that advocating for such clients helps him stay attuned to Georgia’s history of racial injustice. It’s a theme of this year’s edition of the Georgia Trust’s annual “Places in Peril” list of endangered historic sites, which includes displacement looming for both a historic African American cemetery and a still vibrant Gullah Geechee community.
Cemetery preservation also led Mitchell to found a local history group in 2005, the Buckhead Heritage Society. Its first success was the preservation of Harmony Grove Cemetery. Another major success there was the 2013 moving of the Randolph-Lucas House, a demolition-threatened 1920s mansion, from Buckhead to Ansley Park.
Both of those efforts won Georgia Trust awards. Mitchell also served stints on the boards of the Georgia Trust and the Atlanta Preservation Center (APC).
In early 2023 came the announcement that Mark C. McDonald would retire as president and CEO of the Georgia Trust after 15 influential years. Mitchell said he saw the job opening as “a perfect segue to move into a career in historic preservation,” and the Georgia Trust’s Board of Trustees agreed. The transition happened in September, with McDonald continuing to promote “Architecture of the Last Colony,” a Georgia Trust book he edited.
“It’s been like drinking from a fire hose in many ways,” Mitchell said of taking over the job, adding it is already “gratifying.”
He has plunged into statewide advocacy, such as the formation of a “task force” seeking an extension of the state historic rehabilitation tax credit for residential properties, which is currently set to sunset next year. It’s a powerful tool that offers a $100,000 state income tax credit as well as potential eligibility for a lengthy property tax freeze. Mitchell said that before he took on the leadership job, he “maybe underappreciated how important they are” and that without such credits, preservation “becomes somewhat of a hobby” rather than viable for many historic property owners.
Mitchell also recently rounded up opposition to the state’s plan to demolish several historic buildings at Milledgeville’s Central State Hospital. He said it would be understandable if the properties were marketed to preservation-minded developers — an effort the Georgia Trust can aid — and found it to be infeasible. But as it stands, Mitchell said, “the notion that we should just throw up our hands and tear buildings down… is just not acceptable.”
Buckhead remains important to Mitchell as his home and as a microcosm of Atlanta’s often behind-the-curve status on historic preservation. He notes that previous efforts to create City historic districts in the sub-neighborhoods of Peachtree Heights West and Tuxedo Park have failed, leaving infill development to destroy many historic properties created by prominent architects.
Mitchell said that “Atlanta as a whole, but Buckhead in particular, has been kind of the mentality, “Build it bigger, and they will come.” And you’ve seen a lot of overdevelopment in the [Buckhead] Village area, and that’s resulted in traffic problems. I would love to see a pullback from that mentality and [one] focused more on sense of place, livability and walkability. And I think that what’s gotten lost in Buckhead in all of this is that sense of place that Buckhead once had because of all of the development and the lack of focus on historic preservation. I think the community has suffered as a whole.”
On the other hand, historic preservation seems to be rising on the City of Atlanta agenda, especially as it dovetails with Mayor Andre Dickens’ policy concern about the housing affordability crisis. The Georgia Trust has already had pioneering programs in preserving historic houses as deeply affordable housing. Mitchell said in places like south Downtown and Five Points, the reuse of vacant historic buildings could be another massive strategy — and an urgent one.
On the political leadership side, he said such an effort “requires a shift in thinking. Instead of viewing historic preservation as the enemy… view [preservationists] as a partner and a way of working together to solve some of these community problems that we have.”
It also requires going beyond what he called outdated perceptions of preservation advocates. “Preservationists have, I think, gained a reputation, for better or worse, to be staid, set in their ways, interested only in preserving architecturally significant buildings. I think that’s a disservice to preservationists,” he said.
“My view is you have to take a more holistic view of the community as a whole,” Mitchell continued, pointing to Downtown’s challenges as an example. “Stop looking at individual buildings, but look at what’s best for the entire community. And what’s best for the entire community of Atlanta is saving these huge swaths of historic buildings that we have… They represent a chance to create that affordable housing that we so desperately need versus tearing them down and building something back…”
Crucial to all the Georgia Trust’s work is strong local partners. In Atlanta, that’s the APC, which has gained new influence and energy in the past three years under Executive Director David Mitchell — no relation to Wright. Among the APC’s recent remarkable successes is a surplus property disposition process focused on historic preservation and affordable housing creation.
“I think David does a great job, and I think David has the kind of personality that you need to have in a city like Atlanta to get things done,” said Wright Mitchell about the APC leader, adding that “a city without a strong preservation ethos requires a strong, forceful personality that believes very passionately in what they’re doing to move the needle … So we appreciate David’s passion and commitment to, frankly, making people a little uncomfortable.”
Another new effort Wright Mitchell calls “fantastic” is the Atlanta Way 2.0, a new nonprofit founded by SaportaReport publisher Maria Saporta. In September, the group held a brainstorming meeting on the future of the Martin Luther King Jr. Drive corridor, where Mitchell said he shared the value of such tools as tax credits and easements.
Saporta said the Atlanta Way 2.0 is a “totally independent and separate nonprofit” from SaportaReport that has yet to formally launch. Its purpose, she said, is a “way of helping address efforts in the community by bringing all interested parties together,” with priorities that include historic preservation. Ann W. Cramer of Coxe Curry & Associates is the group’s board chair, and among several honorary co-chairs are former Mayors Shirley Franklin and Andrew Young. The MLK corridor meeting, in particular included a wide variety of people, Saporta said, including preservationists, developers, Clark Atlanta University officials, Atlanta City Council members, and representatives from the Atlanta Department of City Planning and Invest Atlanta.
The “Atlanta Way” is a political term for a Civil Rights-era system of white elites working with Black leaders on moderate reforms to keep the public peace. Praised for reducing violence and elevating Black leaders while also criticized for secrecy and top-down decision-making, the Atlanta Way has taken on various new meanings and was a target of reform talk in the 2021 mayoral race.
Mitchell recalls the Atlanta Way, when he was growing up, as “a spirit of cooperation between the Blacks and the whites, and it was all to get things done for the betterment of the city. I think a kind of an Atlanta Way reboot is a great way to refer to [the new nonprofit] because that’s what it’s going to take.”
The city that serves as the hometown to both the Georgia Trust and Mitchell remains an influence as he prepares to guide the organization on its statewide mission.
“I care deeply about Atlanta,” said Mitchell. “I consider myself a Georgian first and then an Atlantan… but Atlanta is very important to me as my hometown and a place that I grew up. And some of the things that have happened in Atlanta pain me to see. I am grateful I’m in a position to hopefully be able to try and help solve some of these problems that we’re experiencing as a community. But we also have our mission that extends statewide, so I’m focused on that as well. But I will always have a very soft spot in my heart for Atlanta and a strong interest in all the preservation issues here.”
