Atlanta keeps demolishing its affordable housing
Without a decent affordable housing policy, “build baby build” leaves low-income tenants in the dust
The South puts the West Coast and Northeast to shame with its housing production. For the past five years, the South has built more new homes than the rest of the country combined. Due in large part to all of this construction, Southern cities have become magnets for middle-class and low-income people seeking out places where they can afford to live a decent life. California, by contrast, is hemorrhaging low-income residents. New York City has seen a significant decline in its Black population in recent years, driven by migration to the South. The refusal of these liberal places to allow significant amounts of housing construction makes their “inclusive” and “welcoming” political discourse a total farce. It also has huge political, economic and climate consequences.
On the other hand, Southern cities are far behind their coastal peers in terms of affordable housing policy. Rent control is in many cases banned by Republican state legislatures. Evictions are usually quick and easy. Public housing authorities have been decimated and privatized. Subsidized as well as “naturally occurring” affordable housing complexes are regularly demolished and replaced with much more expensive homes.
These are some of the eye-opening takeaways from Dan Immergluck’s new book, Red Hot City: Housing, Race, and Exclusion in 21st Century Atlanta. The book complicates overly-simplistic housing policy narratives, illustrating the consequences of a “build baby build” politics in the absence of policies specifically geared toward the needs of low-income residents. Immergluck also shows how, even as the region grows, some wealthy parts of the Atlanta metro are becoming more Californian in a bad way, walling themselves off from new housing completely. The book is a valuable starting place for comparing the pros and cons of different housing policy regimes.
Starting in the 1990s, Atlanta used the HOPE VI program to demolish and redevelop most of its public housing stock through public-private partnerships. The Atlanta Housing Authority went from having about 14,000 public housing units in 1996 to 5,000 in 2005. At Techwood Homes, one of the nation’s first public housing complexes, 1,100 public housing units were redeveloped into just 301 public housing units and 126 LIHTC, or tax credit, affordable units, in addition to several hundred market-rate units.
For-profit companies like Columbia Residential and Integral Group now control the majority of Atlanta’s subsidized affordable housing stock. LIHTC buildings have similar eviction rates as market-rate housing in Atlanta, and rents are often much higher than in public housing. Whereas public housing rents are capped at 30% of a resident’s income, whatever that may be, LIHTC rents are typically capped at a rate considered affordable to a household earning 60% of the median income, leaving many LIHTC residents severely rent burdened. What’s more, these units may not be affordable for long, as LIHTC affordability covenants are time-limited. Atlanta’s — indeed, much of the nation’s — affordable housing stock is a ticking time bomb.
San Francisco offers a point of contrast. The city is in the midst of redeveloping four of its aging public housing complexes into mixed-income complexes through HOPE VI, just like Atlanta did. But in San Francisco, these developments will yield more deed-restricted affordable housing than previously existed on each site. The developments are being phased so that current public housing residents are able to move into the newly constructed affordable units. And the affordable homes will, for the most part, remain as public housing or be owned and managed by non-profits, so they will be affordable in perpetuity.
Back in Atlanta, the most egregious anti-affordable housing practice Immergluck describes are “suburbanized slum clearance projects… reminiscent of federally funded urban renewal programs.” This is not an exaggeration. Within the past decade, Atlanta’s affluent, majority-white northern suburbs — known as the region’s “favored corner” — have in some cases used public funds to demolish modest apartment complexes, using the dubious pretense of reducing crime or improving schools to displace low-income people of color.
Immergluck pulls extensively from a study by University of Georgia PhD candidate Scott Markley, which found that over 9,000 residents were displaced by demolitions in Marietta, Smyrna, Roswell, Sandy Springs and Brookhaven between 2010 and 2017. Latinos were significantly over-represented among those displaced. All told, these projects displaced 10% of Latino renter households in the five cities.
Some of these redevelopment projects were made possible by government funds. In Marietta, the city spent $64 million from a voter-approved bond to demolish more than 1,100 modestly priced apartments in census tracts that were 85% nonwhite. The site has since been redeveloped, in part, with a practice facility and office complex for Atlanta FC, the Major League Soccer team.
The campaign behind the bond measure explicitly laid out the city’s intentions: “VOTE YES to reduce crime, encourage new business investment, improve schools, and increase property values,” the campaign website read.
Demolitions of naturally occurring affordable housing, the technical term for cheap market-rate homes, continue in the Atlanta metro. In Chosewood, a South Atlanta neighborhood close to the BeltLine, the 154-unit Gladstone Apartments is being demolished to make way for an 1,100-unit condo and apartment complex. Though some of the new apartments will be offered at below-market rates due to the inclusionary zoning requirement in BeltLine-adjacent neighborhoods, these units are likely to be much more expensive than what current residents pay. The BeltLine inclusionary zoning policy requires at least 15% of rental units (for-sale units are exempt) to be affordable to those making below 80% of the median income, or $1,240 per month for a one-bedroom. Some tenants at the Gladstone currently pay less than $500, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported.
Once again, California shows a different way of doing things. A 2019 state law requires developers who want to demolish housing occupied by low-income or rent-control tenants to offer tenants a unit in the new building at a rate they can afford. Several of the state’s recently passed housing production bills forbid the redevelopment of tenant-occupied housing altogether. In Los Angeles and San Diego, thoughtfully calibrated inclusionary zoning policies have yielded significant amounts of deeply affordable housing.
Atlanta and other high-growth, purple-state cities have a thing or two to learn from progressive cities about not demolishing their affordable housing. But before we Californians get back on our beloved high horse, it’s important to consider how Atlanta ended up with so much naturally occurring affordable housing in the first place.
The fact that even Atlanta’s wealthiest suburbs have modestly priced, market-rate apartment complexes is a testament to the importance of letting developers build. Most of these developments went up between the 70s and the 90s, and were marketed to upper-middle class singles, according to a fascinating paper by Matthew Gordon Lasner. Some were almost exclusively white in the years after they opened. But by the turn of the Millennium, the demographic profile of Atlanta’s suburban apartment complexes had changed. The segregated, “swinging singles” complexes of a decade or two prior became unsubsidized low-income housing. In a region that builds a lot of new homes, filtering can happen quickly.
Suburban leaders understand this pattern, and have mobilized to stop multifamily housing construction altogether. In the past two decades, there has been a wave of suburban “secessions” in metro Atlanta where suburban communities incorporate as distinct cities. These efforts are often explicitly framed around gaining local control over land use so cities can block apartment construction and the low-income people who reside in them. A few years after incorporating, Sandy Springs in 2017 required all new buildings above three stories to use concrete construction — a financially infeasible requirement for anything but high-rise condo towers. Apartment construction in the city went from about 1,000 units per year before 2017 to essentially zero in the years following.
Atlanta’s suburbs are becoming more like Connecticut or Marin County. It’s a worrying trend, whose negative impacts will be compounded by the region’s poor track record at protecting tenants and preserving affordable housing.
Surveying the housing policy landscape in America can be a depressing exercise. Some cities are building but not protecting low-income tenants. Others are protecting vulnerable residents but not building. Still others, like Atlanta’s northern suburbs, are doing neither.
Liberal states have a chance to lead the way here again. California might be starting to approach the sweet spot, given its decent backstop of tenant protections and its slew of recently passed housing production laws — that is, if those new laws actually work. New York state has a chance too, if Governor Hochul’s housing production package passes alongside good cause eviction protections. Maybe in a decade or two, those who have fled the coasts for the South will finally be able to return.