The City of Atlanta’s ongoing zoning code update, which planning department officials have said would make the city more welcoming to truly dense development, might not be as drastic as urbanists and housing affordability advocates had hoped, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said Wednesday during a Zoom discussion hosted by Leadership Atlanta.
“It’s a process,” Bottoms said, referring to the Atlanta City Design Housing Initiative, which has been expected to pave the way for more dense development and welcome more accessory dwelling units (ADUs) — think a tiny home in the backyard or an apartment over the garage — in town. There are a lot of new options on the table, she said, “but that’s not what’s going to come out in the wash. It’s going to be something that’s much more scaled-down, and it may not even look like what was put on the table initially.”
Bottoms added that the reformed zoning code likely won’t include blanket policies, but instead ones that cater to neighborhoods differently. “It’s not going to be a one-size-fits-all for the entire city,” she said. “It will very likely be tailored to specific communities.”
The original plan would turn Atlanta into a heat sink. We need green spaces to accomodate density, and it wasn’t there.
If we’re going to have density, we need a master plan that creates more parks, especially small ones. Even with the Westside Park, we’re still dramatically underparked. The city needs lungs or it will die.