Looks like they’re following the blueprint of Stonecrest, outside of Atlanta, GA, which was established in 2018:
How to Start Your Own City
A year ago this week, Jason Lary was sworn in as mayor of his brainchild, the brand new city of Stonecrest outside of Atlanta. Now Stonecrest is a frontrunner to land the new Amazon headquarters. How’d he do it?
Stonecrest was the first majority-black city to form from this cityhood movement in DeKalb County, and so far it is the only city to form in the county’s southern parts, where the bulk of the African-American population lives. There is currently another proposal to municipalize the remainder of South DeKalb into a city called Greenhaven, but it is meeting massive resistance.
It’s similar to the resistance that met Lary when he spearheaded the Stonecrest city effort. (“You cannot be a cotton ball for the kind of work I’m doing,” Lary told Rosen for The Atlantic. “It’s some Jimmy Hoffa-level work.”) For those who oppose cityhood in DeKalb County, the fears are, mostly, that residential property values will collapse and that taxes will rise, especially if the city has a majority non-white population. The research in general, does not support that anxiety, but Stonecrest, which has an almost completely black population, has at least a year’s worth of data from its own existence to test those claims.
Good info, and good for these folks for fighting!