Bipartisanship in America can be difficult to find these days and we need more of it. In Washington, D.C., the federal government is only recently reopened after a record shutdown that saw both parties posture for the cameras.
But in Atlanta, politicians of all backgrounds have managed to come together to make things work. And they’ve done it on one of the most important issues of our time: housing.
The main driver of Atlanta’s housing success has been Mayor Andre Dickens, who just won a second term. Dickens’ housing record is one to be admired.
Housing in Atlanta was never as unaffordable as in other big cities, but come the 2020s, rampant inflation began changing things. The cost of rentals shot up sharply. The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Atlanta spiked 31 percent between just 2017 and 2022.
Yet by August 2025, the median asking rent in metro Atlanta had plunged 13.6 percent compared to 2024. Compare that to Savannah, where rents went up modestly, or Manhattan, where they increased by 13 percent, and you’ll see that what Atlanta did was almost unique.
What happened was that Dickens tuned out the distractions and focused like a laser on building housing.
As Dickens put it in an interview just days ago, “We made it our mission to build for low- and moderate-income families and to stop people from being rent-burdened.”
Stating in 2021 that he wanted to construct or preserve 20,000 affordable housing units by 2030, Dickens has already met 60 percent of that goal. This is thanks in part to his Affordable Housing Strike Force that meets monthly to chop through red tape and get permits approved.
Plenty of cities and states have built housing but not all of them have built it smartly. Too often, ambitious governments approve chockablock developments, handing developers whatever they want without thinking through logistical concerns like transportation or density.
Dickens has mostly avoided this pitfall. The crown jewel of his housing success is the Atlanta Beltline, a 22-mile corridor on a formerly defunct rail track that’s being redeveloped to mingle homes with office buildings, parks and trails.
The Beltline’s transformation has been truly remarkable, with one resident telling the New York Times, “It’s almost giving me goose bumps.” Such accessible and attractive developments often brings in new businesses and jobs, with cutting-edge companies like Intuit and Rivian already moving into offices overlooking the Beltline.
Some have raised concerns that the Beltline, and Dickens’ housing surge generally, are gentrifying Atlanta and driving out the city’s poor. But the fact is rents are coming down and the city has built much low-cost housing.
Dickens is one of a handful of local politicians shutting out the national political circus to get things done. He’s accustomed to working across the aisle, having chaired the 2024 bipartisan National Housing Crisis Task Force, which provided recommendations on housing policy to the incoming president.
Dickens’ bipartisan approach has also meant avoiding easy rhetorical targets. He and his allies have done more than just rail against “billionaires” or “bureaucrats” or “NIMBYs.” They have also refused to join the growing, headline-grabbing crusade against rent-pricing algorithms — likely itself a political move to regulate software tools that help property managers set rents.
What the algorithmic pricing software does is leverage recent sale and rental data, as well as supply and demand trends, to provide estimates on rental values. Blaming this technology for high prices is simply misguided.
Instead of looking for scapegoats, Dickens stuck to the fundamentals. He understands that when buildings go up, prices come down. And he set aside ideology to make that happen. That is why Atlanta’s rents are falling while so many other cities are seeing increases.
Importantly, Dickens isn’t content to rest on his laurels. The mayor now wants to use a development tool called tax allocation districts (TADs) to invest another $1.3 billion into housing, revitalizing areas on the city’s south and west sides as well as $3.7 billion in other areas.
TADs use current taxpayer money for immediate development in exchange for property tax revenues generated later, with the hope that investment now will pay off with improved development leading to a larger tax base. In short, its a way the municipality can bet on the future, hopefully creating 10,000 housing units on top of Dickens’ lofty first-term goal.
When it comes to housing, Atlanta has made things work. Future mayors and other cities should take note: housing doesn’t have to be a political punching bag.
