Posted on 01/26/2023 11:06:49 AM PST by devane617
Is Atlanta a good place to live? Recent rankings certainly say so. In September 2022, Money magazine rated Atlanta the best place to live in the U.S., based on its strong labor market and job growth. The National Association of Realtors calls it the top housing market to watch in 2023, noting that Atlanta's housing prices are lower than those in comparable cities and that it has a rapidly growing population.
But this is only part of the story. My new book, "Red Hot City: Housing, Race, and Exclusion in Twenty-First Century Atlanta," takes a deep dive into the last three decades of housing, race and development in metropolitan Atlanta. As it shows, planning and policy decisions here have promoted a heavily racialized version of gentrification that has excluded lower-income, predominantly Black residents from sharing in the city's growth.
One key driver of this division is the Atlanta BeltLine, a 22-mile (35-kilometer) loop of multiuse trails with nearby apartments, restaurants and retail stores, built on a former railway corridor around Atlanta's core. Although the BeltLine was designed to connect Atlantans and improve their quality of life, it has driven up housing costs on nearby land and pushed low-income households out to suburbs with fewer services than downtown neighborhoods.
The BeltLine has become a prime example of what urban scholars call "green gentrification"—a process in which restoring degraded urban areas by adding green features drives up housing prices and pushes out working-class residents. If cities fail to prepare for these effects, gentrification and displacement can transform lower-income neighborhoods into areas of concentrated affluence rather than thriving, diverse communities.
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
Low income homeowners in marginal ATL neighborhoods (black homeowners in mostly black neighborhoods) were able to sell their houses for huge profits. As far as there being more services in intown ATL, laughable. Wife and I lived in the city of Atlanta, and even in nicer intown neighborhoods supermarkets and healthcare were no closer than in the surburbs, and the infrastucture is much better in the ‘burbs.
“urban scholars “
Really.
Funny, they never mention a place they consider utopia. I think they're just a bunch of bed wetters who like to whine.
So we cannot make cities better places to live because it will drive up housing prices?
Why move when they’re successfully ruining our country?
What drives up housing prices is restrictions on housing supply — such as the war on landlords and zoning restrictions on rentals and new construction.
I propose one-way tickets to Liberia.
Yeh, its so great in metro Atlanta we’re moving 67 miles north. You can sleep at night without hearing gunfire all night long. 😆
Good catch. This article was written by someone who has never set foot in an inner city neighborhood.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.