Many, many cities will face this same scenario due to lower tax revenue. Housing values fall, revenue falls. Their budgets are based on taking in a certain amount of revenue, so if there’s a housing downturn that revenue can fall significantly.
This is why the fed shouldn’t be handing out bailouts to cities because most of them will have the same problems, bailout one, and everybody things they can get a handout instead of working to trim their budgets.
The problem is that Atlanta is run as a minority jobs program with abysmal return on investment. I used to work for a company that had a large contract with the city for engineering services (because they can’t do anything complicated themselves). It was eye opening shall we say.
The good news in this is that we may gain the impetus to wrest the airport away from city management (and cronyism; ie “disadvantaged” contracts given to firms run by black millionares) and place it under state control where it belongs.
Google the contract fiasco on the fill dirt for the new runway if you really want to be disgusted.