Remembering Larry Keating, professor and affordable housing advocate that pushed Atlanta to be a more equitable city

Professor Larry Keating, for four decades one of Atlanta’s strongest advocates for housing reform and social justice, died at age 83 on July 26, his family recently announced.

His passing leaves us in metro Atlanta with an unfinished agenda — but also an impressive list of his accomplishments. Edward L. Keating was Professor Emeritus at Georgia Tech’s School of City and Regional Planning and held a Ph.D. in planning from the University of Wisconsin – Madison and Master’s and Bachelor’s of Architecture degrees from Virginia Tech (VPI). He was an elected Fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners. 

Keating joined the faculty of the then Graduate City Planning Program in 1973 teaching planning theory and history, social policy, and housing. With Keating’s passing, emeritus professors Tom Debo (1976) and Catherine Ross (1979) remain as the two faculty-members with the longest affiliation in the history of the department founded in 1952.  

Keating was a scholar but not exactly a quiet resident of the Ivory Tower. He co-founded the Community Design Center of Atlanta soon after arriving at Tech, serving as its fundraiser and advisor. CDCA, a non-profit, was located for years at 5th and West Peachtree, providing planning and design services and advocacy for low-income neighborhoods and other stakeholders. 

In the mid-1980s, Keating began assisting journalist Bill Dedman of the Atlanta Constitution, who was investigating discrimination in mortgage lending in the Atlanta metro area. Keating put him in touch with city planning graduate student Stan Fitterman, who Dedman put to work on thousands of mortgage loan records in county courthouses.

Dedman’s series of articles in 1988 revealed that Atlanta banks and savings and loans did not loan in middle class or even affluent black neighborhoods despite having issued loans in poor white neighborhoods for years. A 1989 story expanded the focus to lenders nationwide, also finding that blacks were rejected at twice the rate as whites and that, in much of the country, high-income blacks were rejected at the same rate as low-income whites. For this series entitled “The Color of Money,” Dedman received the Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting in 1989.

Real reforms began to happen. Congress expanded the federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act to provide more public information. The U.S. Justice Department filed suit against Decatur Federal Savings & Loan — the first mortgage lending case ever in the United States. The largest Atlanta banks committed a fund of $65 million to lend at low rates to moderate-income borrowers, particularly on the city’s black Southside.  Dedman wrote me:

“Larry was a tremendous help to a young reporter trying to make sense of banking, development, and the history of Atlanta’s neighborhoods, way back in the late 1980s, in an era just before the rise of the global internet. Larry was one of the researchers, activists and neighborhood leaders involved in the Atlanta Community Reinvestment Alliance. This group, which also included Lynn Brazen and the Rev. Craig Taylor, had tried repeatedly to get the business news staff at the Atlanta newspapers to pay attention to the pattern of banks avoiding making loans in Black neighborhoods.”

Dedman, who has continued as an award-winning investigative journalist, also observed that Keating, along with Fitterman and Brazen, continued evaluating the banking industry’s response to the “Color of Money” through their academic work: “It’s hard to get a newspaper staff to return again and again to a topic, or to critique the ‘reforms’ that had been prompted by a series of newspaper articles.”

In the 1990s and 2000s, Keating became a critic of HUD’s Hope VI programs to replace conventional public housing projects with mixed-income communities. Two prominent examples were Techwood Homes and East Lake Meadows at the time of the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games. Today, almost all Atlanta Housing properties have been redeveloped or are awaiting redevelopment as “mixed-income.”

In 1990, the Atlanta Housing Authority operated 14,700 units; in 2025, according to their website, they have “over 4,000” affordable units. Hope VI had been legislatively passed on the premise and promise that the Housing Choice Voucher Program (formerly Section 8) would compensate for the lost public housing and allow low-income households to rent in the private marketplace throughout urban areas. 

In 2008, Keating testified before a Georgia legislative committee that it had become apparent that, whatever the social merits of the new mixed-income projects (and in my view, there were some), Congress had no intention of adequately funding HUD and local housing authorities to build replacement units — nor was there any political will to adequately fund the housing voucher program. If you want to hear Keating’s testimony about this, here’s a link.

Keating headed the Atlanta Gentrification Taskforce, working to prevent low- and moderate-income renters from being unfairly pushed out of their houses. He advocated a number of other initiatives: land banks to bring surplus or tax delinquent lands into the supply; a healthier balance of public subsidies between individuals (HVC recipients) and developers of affordable / assisted housing; and he sought reform of the calculation of AMI (area median income), the key parameter defining who is eligible for housing assistance. These reforms remain to be fully accomplished. 

It should not be surprising that Atlanta — a microcosm of America — now finds itself with an increased number of homeless people; a long-standing shortage of housing for the poor; and a shortage of affordable middle-class housing at a level not seen since post-World War II. The housing supply problem was exacerbated by the 2008 Great Recession, which decimated the home building industry and slowed output to a glacial pace.

Local zoning and permitting policies continue to be misused to hamper the development of affordable housing. In this market landscape, developers are incentivized to build luxury units, not entry-level housing. You don’t have to be a Democratic Socialist, as was Keating, to admit we are in a housing crisis. Larry Keating was too modest to say this, so I will on his behalf: “I told you so.” 

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Don Broussard, MCP is a city planning consultant, former NPU planner in Atlanta, and former planning director of the Buckhead Coalition under the late Sam Massell. Keating was his thesis advisor at Georgia Tech. Kimberly Cunningham former assistant to Keating contributed to this article.