At the Dec. 3 Atlanta Regional Housing Forum, the city’s chief of staff, Courtney English, took the floor to talk about an ambitious plan to extend all eight of the city’s tax allocation districts, or TADs, just days after the City Council punted the proposal into next year.
In October, Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens announced a major plan for his second term to extend the tax districts and use more than $5 billion in potential investments to “balance” Atlanta’s ongoing development.
But the fast-moving plan ruffled feathers. Some argued the TADs have served their purpose and don’t need to be renewed, while outspoken critics like Councilmember-elect Kelsea Bond have called the mechanism a “gentrification engine” for spots like the Beltline and Atlantic Station.
Several public leaders urged the city to look at each TAD individually, rather than extend all eight at once. The districts are set to end at varying points between 2031 and 2038, but an extension would push them into 2055.
On Nov. 25, a crowd of critics took to the City Council meeting to hopefully postpone the bill. Before they spoke, though, Courtney English took the floor to announce that the committee’s vote to extend the districts would be postponed until early 2026.
English has been a major proponent of the plan and spoke at the mayor’s neighborhood reinvestment announcement. He did not say what would change between now and the new year, but on Dec. 3, English gave a TAD presentation at the Atlanta Regional Housing Forum.
It seemingly indicated city leadership plans to keep up the extension push in the new year. English said the mayor’s ambitious vision for the city requires people to face some “harsh truths” about uneven economic development.
“We’ve been working diligently on a comprehensive response to address the equity gaps we see in the city of Atlanta,” English told a crowd of housing advocates and experts.
He laid out a so-called “tale of two cities.” Atlanta has been recognized for booming business, the film industry, diversity, arts and culture, food and more. But it also ranks dead last when it comes to economic mobility in the top 50 metro areas.
English laid out the tax allocation districts as a way to create “balanced growth.” When a TAD is created, the city establishes a “base property tax value.” For the decades-long duration of the district, any annual revenue above the base value gets redirected to TAD projects.
Atlantic Station is one of the city’s more well-known TAD stories. In 1999, the TAD was created to transform a vacant steel mill. Across 25 years, the “increment” revenue from the district helped turn the mill into a popular mixed-use shopping center.
Under the mayor’s neighborhood reinvestment plan, TADs will be an essential tool to raise funds for the redevelopment of long-neglected neighborhoods. But critics say they are not necessary in heavily developed areas like the Beltline – and diverted property taxes take funds from the local school systems.
If the city successfully extends the TADs, though, English said it will generate an estimated $5.5 million worth of investment in transit, affordable housing and more.
“Our goal is to utilize the economic power of TADs to build healthy, whole neighborhoods that ultimately work for everybody,” English said.
Tax Allocation Districts have a beginning date and an ending date. That was the bargain the City of Atlanta made with the taxpayers of these districts. Extending the TAD beyond the original date should be decided by the voters. Anything less is a blatant breach of promise. If this measure is “railroaded” through, the voters will never vote to allow any future TAD’s, as City leaders will have proved themselves untrustworthy!
Great point!
Let me start with a point of civic clarification that illuminates something deeper about how our democratic institutions actually function. Tax Allocation Districts have never been subject to direct popular referendum. They emerge instead from the deliberative chambers where our elected representatives—city councils, school boards, county commissions—wrestle with the complex machinery of urban finance. Their periodic extension is not some aberration but rather part of the ordinary rhythm of municipal governance, as familiar in Chicago and Milwaukee and other cities.
The more pressing question—the one that ought to occupy our serious attention—is this: How do we address the vast equity gaps in our city?
Mayor Dickens has proposed an answer: the Neighborhood Reinvestment Initiative. It’s an attempt to replicate the successes we’ve witnessed in East Lake, the Old Fourth Ward, and along the Memorial Drive corridor—places where investment has sparked genuine transformation. Now, reasonable people can disagree about whether this is the right approach. Indeed, if critics possess alternative frameworks for narrowing our equity gaps, we should welcome that debate with open arms. What strikes me as intellectually thin, however, is reflexive opposition untethered to any competing vision. That’s not policymaking; it’s posturing.
The gentrification concerns are legitimate—indeed, they touch on one of the central tensions in modern urban life. How do we revive struggling neighborhoods without displacing the very people we’re trying to help? The answer lies not in abandoning renewal but in building guardrails: affordable housing that keeps these communities accessible to working families, anti-displacement protections that allow longtime residents to in place. These aren’t afterthoughts in the NRI; they’re foundational elements. Absent the TAD extension, these safeguards vanish, and market forces—indifferent to our aspirations—will reshape these neighborhoods according to their own logic.
Here’s what troubles me most about the opposition: It masquerades as concern while actually defending a status quo that is morally indefensible. We’re talking about neighborhoods where 80 percent of fifth-graders can’t read at grade level, where a child has virtually no chance of ascending to economic security, where life expectancy is truncated by two decades compared to healthier communities. These aren’t mere statistics; they’re human lives foreclosed before they’ve properly begun.
If you can look at those outcomes and shrug, then by all means, oppose the TAD extension. But if, like Mayor Dickens, you find this state of affairs intolerable, then the path forward requires not just critique but commitment to the difficult work of neighborhood renewal.
Given the tight finances of all 3 local govts, if we don’t get the $200M/yr back from the TADs when their terms are up as promised, they’ll be raising taxes again to make up for the loss.
That might be OK if the City really spent the money wisely on helping the poor. But what you’d never know from Mr Edwards is that the first to benefit if the Westside TAD is extended will be the poor Gulch billionaires, who will pocket at least $200M extra. Those LA Gulch bros didn’t even provide the 61 affordable units that their new apartment tower promised, remember.
It’s no wonder that despite decades of the TADs, the poverty that Mr Edwards decries is as bad as ever. The TAD money has not been spent wisely or targeted at helping poorer families to get a boost. Recently, Mayor Dickens has spent $58M of TAD money on 2 Peachtree, an obsolete, ratty office tower, with nothing to show for it and only an absurdly expensive ‘plan’ to convert it to affordable apartments. The TAD plan to convert the old AJC building makes no financial sense, either. There’s a pattern in these fiscally irresponsible projects. Let’s not ask how much Beltline trails have cost per mile to construct. TADs fund boondoggles, not poverty reduction.
Bloated staff and overhead expense at Invest Atlanta and Atlanta Beltline Inc account for a big chunk of our diverted TAD dollars, too.
Many residents would rather see APS spend the money on teachers and school maintenance and Fulton spend it on fixing the death-trap jail – necessities which would help lower-income people – than let the Dickens administration enjoy the patronage of dispensing $5 Billion on whatever takes their fancy.
There’s a familiar pattern in civic life where we mistake budget allocations for moral seriousness. Mr. Bene waves his spreadsheet and declares that dollars for teachers and jails represent authentic compassion, while economic development smacks of cronyism. But this binary thinking—schools good, TADs suspect—reveals a poverty of imagination about the nature of the problem we actually confront.
I won’t defend against Mr. Bene’s attack on the Mayor’s character and motives, which needs no defending from me. But I will note that Mr. Bene’s critique offers no coherent strategy for closing the equity gaps that continue to plague our city. Either he doesn’t care or believes they can’t be addressed.
We feel differently. Consider the evidence before us: Atlanta Public Schools has seen its budget grow at over 5% annually since 2011, with per-pupil spending doubling. A significant investment by any measure. Yet reading proficiency among low-income Black fifth graders has crept from a dismal 17% to a marginally less dismal 18%, while their white peers sail along at 81%. This isn’t an indictment of dedicated educators laboring within those buildings—it’s a recognition that by the time a child crosses the schoolhouse threshold, the die is often cast.
The social science here isn’t controversial. A child’s trajectory is shaped by the ecology of place—by whether her street is safe, whether fresh food is available, whether she sees functioning institutions and economic opportunity around her. The natural experiment unfolding at Burgess Peterson Academy tells the story: reading proficiency among the same demographic has surged from 19% to 39% since 2014, precisely as Reynoldstown and East Atlanta transformed from food deserts marked by blight into neighborhoods with declining crime and visible investment. The Beltline and Memorial Drive corridor investments didn’t just move capital—they reconstituted social capital, that mysterious alchemy of trust, aspiration, and collective efficacy.
Now, one can certainly debate whether specific TAD projects—the Gulch, 2 Peachtree —are worthwhile endeavors. Accountability matters. Transparency matters. But the deeper question is whether we’re serious about altering the conditions that produce unhealthy and unfulfilling lives or whether we’re content to keep pouring resources into downstream interventions while the upstream determinants remain untouched. The latter isn’t policy; it’s what we do when we want to feel like we’ve done something. We are absolutely open to hearing alternative approaches to closing these yawning equity gaps. But “more money for what we’re already doing” isn’t a serious alternative. It’s an evasion dressed up as fiscal rectitude.
Postponing to 2026 is wise. We need more time to assess TAD’s impact on school funding beyond just development.
“Balanced growth” sounds great, but funds must reach neglected areas instead of fueling gentrification. We’ll watch in 2026.