Housing is a human right.
Everyone should be able to have a safe, accessible, affordable place to live. While this feels like it’s a no-brainer, the City of Atlanta seems not to understand the dire urgency and the actions needed given our housing landscape at hand.
As Atlanta continues to reign as the City with the highest income inequality in the country, housing is one of the most urgent needs for Atlanta residents. Not only are rent costs rising astronomically — with home ownership costs following a similar trajectory of unaffordability — we know that there simply isn’t enough housing. According to the Atlanta Regional Commission, the City of Atlanta added 14,300 residents in the past year alone, nearly three times the previous 12-month period. Atlanta is growing, and unless we actually build homes for the people who want to live here, we know that there will be clear winners and losers.
One of the solutions to housing affordability is ensuring that missing middle housing is built to match the need. Right now, there is a proposal to build 30 new townhomes at 1526 Hardee Street, less than a ten-minute walk from the Edgewood/Candler Park MARTA station. While 30 townhomes certainly are not going to solve our housing crisis, these small developments all come together to create real change in our city. Why, then, has this development been sitting in the Atlanta City Council Zoning Committee’s desk drawer for three years?
How can a proposal for new housing sit dormant for three years? Is this the same lack of urgency that the City of Atlanta will act with towards the promise of delivering 20,000 units of affordable housing by 2030? If we can’t even allow 30 townhomes, what hope do we have to build the number of homes that we know we desperately need to build?
When we slow down or deprioritize building the missing middle housing that needs to be built, that’s another family that’s forced to compete for limited housing options that are unaffordable and inaccessible to public transit, grocery stores and walkable neighborhoods. That’s another family priced out of the neighborhood they may have grown up in, that have no choice but to move farther and farther into the Metro Atlanta suburbs, furthering residential segregation in our city.
As an organizer with Abundant Housing Atlanta, as well as the lead on one of the first comprehensive studies on Atlanta’s Neighborhood Planning Unit (NPU) system since 1978, I am no stranger to the much-needed revamp of our systems that are designed only to serve the privileged few. Our NPU system, for example, is one of the many structures put in place to block progress and innovation through lopsided power dynamics that favor the privileged rather than helping residents imagine how to create an inclusive and prosperous Atlanta for all of our neighbors.
Creating an Atlanta with housing abundance — an Atlanta where anyone who wants to live here can afford to live here — cannot take the snail-mail route. We need affordable, abundant housing in Atlanta now.
Abundant Housing Atlanta is calling for Atlanta’s Zoning Committee to push forward on 1526 Hardee Street. We know that this development is not the only example of the city’s complacency with our processes blocking the new homes that we desperately need. We are calling on the City of Atlanta to wake up, smell the coffee, and reevaluate how we are failing our neighbors by letting our systems and approval processes designed to say “no” determine our city’s future rather than creating a city that reflects our urgent need for more affordable and abundant housing.
All great points. It’s amazing how much the City of Atlanta drags it’s feet on allowing much needed housing.
Naming the NPU system and describing it as designed only to serve the privileged few. I’d like the author to say more about what she means by that.
There is no affordability component to this project. The developer has been explicit about this in discussions with the neighborhood. This project will impact adjacent legacy neighbors and make their property taxes unaffordable. All impacts, especially affordability, need to be considered and demanded of developers. Building alone will not solve our housing problem and will likely result in more detriment.
The adjacent neighbors asked for affordability to be incorporated into this project early on. It was requested again recently, and neighbors were told it was “too late” to get affordability into the plan… that the “train had left the station.” The developer paid a fee to be exempt from affordability on this project. This loophole is preventing affordability from being mandatory in the push for housing.
The author makes an significant – and incorrect assumption when she asks “Why, then, has this development been sitting in the Atlanta City Council Zoning committee’s desk drawer for three years?”
I am one of the residents of Edgewood that was directly involved in working with the developer to move their proposal through the neighborhood review process. This project has been under consideration for a lengthy period of time because the developer would take months to get back to the neighborhood with proposed modifications and, on more than one occasion, put their project on hold, stating that they “needed to take a step back and reevaluate”. Both the City of Atlanta and the neighborhood worked diligently to complete their review functions in a timely manner. But the process can only move as fast as an applicant wishes to proceed.
There are many factors that contribute to Atlanta’s lack of affordable housing. But there’s one that seems to go unnoticed and that could be easily addressed – DeKalb County (and to a lesser extent Fulton County) assesses vacant land at far less than its actual, fair market value. Vacant land is routinely valued by the county at 1/3 (or less) than the value of the land on surrounding, developed parcels. This makes ‘warehousing’ vacant land artificially inexpensive for speculative investors, thus reducing an incentive for its development.