Economic mobility lessons from 30 years ago — post-96 Olympics

Let’s travel back in time to 1996 when an influential group of business and civic leaders developed a strategy to feed Atlanta’s economic momentum following the 1996 Summer Olympic Games.

An initiative to develop a strategy to solidify the city’s economic base was led by Roberto Goizueta, then the CEO of Coca-Cola Co., working with the City of Atlanta and the McKinsey & Co. consulting firm.

It was called the Atlanta Renaissance Program, and it was spearheaded by Byron Marshall, then the chief operating officer for the city.

To sum up Atlanta Renaissance strategy: we needed to increase Atlanta’s middle class to help make sure our city is as healthy as it could be post-Olympics. In those days, Atlanta had one of the greatest divides between the haves and the have-nots.

Sadly, not much has changed.

Here we are 30 years later in Atlanta’s post-World Cup era. Despite the glow from the World Cup, both the Atlanta region and the City of Atlanta continue to struggle when it comes to economic opportunity for all.

Raj Chetty, a Harvard University professor and his research group, Opportunity Insights, published an economic mobility study in 2014 that ranked Charlotte, N.C. 50th out of 50. Metro Atlanta ranked 49th. Ten years later, Chetty and Opportunity Insights did a new study. Charlotte had improved its ranking to 38th. But the Atlanta region went from 49th to 50th.

To get inspiration for how we should move forward as a region, I reached out to Marshall, who continues to call Atlanta home after resigning as the city’s COO in 1997. He has since worked for multiple cities – both on staff and as a consultant.

Over the years, I often have thought of Marshall’s work with the Atlanta Renaissance Program and the city’s missed opportunity when it disbanded the initiative in early 1998 by letting the report sit on a shelf. (A summary of recommendations is part of that link, but I also copied them at the bottom of this column).

Marshall and I got together for breakfast on Aug. 13 to reflect on the past while also exploring what is still relevant today as we continue to tackle the inequalities in our region.

Former mayors Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young encouraged then-Mayor Bill Campbell to help neighborhoods within the Olympic ring leverage economic opportunities.

“They wanted to make sure neighborhoods would receive long-term benefits once the party was over,” Marshall said.

Goizueta also challenged the business and civic community on ways to leverage our post-Olympic cache. Increased investment by companies would benefit Atlanta’s economy.

“At the same time, we did not want to have the influx of new people and new capital overwhelm or displace existing residents and businesses,” Marshall said. “We wanted to have a strategy to improve their lives at a time when the City of Atlanta had a high rate of poverty compared to other major U.S. cities and other cities in the region.”

Poverty-fighting initiatives are not new in our country or our community.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt launched “the New Deal” in the 1930s to help the country out of the Great Depression. President Lyndon B. Johnson championed “the War on Poverty” in the 1960s.

And former U.S. President Jimmy Carter launched “the Atlanta Project” in 1992 to elevate disadvantaged neighborhoods through partnerships with business, academic and civic partners to address difficult issues of health, education, housing and crime.

In fact, Marshall was working for the City of Austin when the Texas capital modeled “the Austin Project” after Atlanta. According to Marshall, many of those initiatives in Austin continue to this day, be it civic engagement, wealth creation, pre-K investments, innovation, entrepreneurship and housing development.

In other words, these challenges are not new. Neither are the solutions.

Today in metro Atlanta there’s a growing groundswell to improve our economic mobility.

Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens has launched the Neighborhood Reinvestment Initiative to focus economic revitalization efforts on seven Atlanta communities.

And several regional entities — namely the Atlanta Regional Commission, which Mayor Dickens chairs, and United Way of Greater Atlanta — are exploring ways the region can best address our disparities.

It all comes down to making sure everyone has an opportunity to succeed, whether someone is born in Bankhead or Buckhead, Clayton or Cobb, Douglasville or Dunwoody.

“You can’t just look at this as just a city; it needs to be looked at as the region,” Marshall said. “To get this to work, you need a regional point of view and a regional strategy. [Different local governments] may be competitors, but you are not enemies. Your region is competing against other regions.”

But Marshall said it is critical for regional entities to have the same goals and understanding of what they’re measuring.

“You need to have the same agreed-upon metrics, so you know if you’ve been successful,” Marshall said. “If you don’t know what success looks like, then how can you know your part in achieving success?”

For example, the Renaissance Program, which just focused on the City of Atlanta, understood the importance of public transit and the need to build office centers around transit stations. In response, BellSouth unveiled its “Metro Plan” to locate all its office hubs near MARTA stations. It was part of the “transit-oriented-development strategy” recommended in the Renaissance program.

Looking to today, Marshall cautioned the Atlanta region not to view this work as a one-and-done. Case in point, the economic mobility work in Charlotte was coordinated by Leading on Opportunity. But earlier this summer, Leading on Opportunity was disbanded after Charlotte reached 38th among 50 U.S. regions in economic mobility.

“This is not a sprint,” Marshall said. “You have to recognize this will take several generations. You need to have a 50-year vision with a 20-year strategic plan that can be refreshed every five to 10 years to make sure you’re on the right track. The benefit of that approach is continuity of purpose.”

Syncing economic mobility initiatives with traditional economic development efforts makes sense because it links job creation, workforce training, education and housing investment.

At the risk of getting in the weeds, the Chetty study measured what percentage of young people went from the lowest 20 percentile in wealth to the highest 20 percentile in one generation.

In my opinion, the Chetty report may not be the best measure of economic mobility because it fails to celebrate gains from the lowest tier to middle-income levels – improvements that are key to creating healthy communities.

So, I go back to the Atlanta Renaissance Program’s focus on growing the middle class.

“Building a middle class is still important, not just in Atlanta but in the country,” Marshall said. “The middle class is being hollowed out. We have a growing divide of rich and poor, and the opportunity to move to the middle class is diminishing.”

In closing, Marshall shared these wise words.

“As you get older, you realize you need to take the long view,” Marshall said. “You don’t have to reinvent the wheel.”

From the 1997 Atlanta Renaissance Program report, which outlined multiple ways to grow our middle class:

• Attract and grow business in the city by having an organization like a chamber of commerce dedicated to bringing jobs and growing companies inside the city limits; energize the city’s new super-development agency to help target companies and develop incentive packages; and refocus the economic development marketing efforts of the Atlanta Empowerment Zone.
• Create middle-income housing by assisting developers in assembling land and streamlining the zoning and permitting process; create financial incentives to attract middle-income development; create incentives to attract middle-income homeowners; establish a city agency to work on this project, neighborhood by neighborhood; and reconfigure Atlanta’s Neighborhood Planning Unit system to help in the redevelopment process.
• Improve public education by supporting the Atlanta Board of Education’s efforts and by linking school improvements with neighborhood revitalization.
• Reduce crime by increasing street patrols, implementing community policing programs and ensuring appropriate support from the courts.
• Attack poverty by continuing to support programs for job training and assistance for single mothers.
• Provide better access through public transportation to jobs throughout the metro area; increase the use of rent vouchers so poor people can lease apartments closer to available jobs; continue rebuilding Atlanta’s public housing.