This week, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms released her plan to address the affordable housing issue. After the recession, the Atlanta housing market saw a slow recovery but in the last few years, housing – and housing costs – have exploded across the city. Many long-time Atlanta residents, and supporters of Mayor Bottoms, are being pushed out of their historic neighborhoods by rising rent or selling their homes.
Since the beginning of her term as mayor, Bottoms has shown a commitment to affordable housing. “In my first year as Mayor, we invested more than $100 million in public funds to help build and preserve more than 2,000 affordable homes and provide housing assistance. Also, I appointed Atlanta’s first-ever Chief Housing Officer to lead and coordinate our housing affordability efforts,” said Bottoms. “Yet what we have done is just the very beginning of our efforts. To truly address the challenges we face, we must be bold, strategic, and courageous enough to do things differently. That is why I am proud to share our One Atlanta: Housing Affordability Action Plan, which outlines our path forward to ensure our city remains affordable for all who seek to call Atlanta home.”
The goals are relatively straightforward – though the implementation is the difficult part:
• Create or preserve 20,000 affordable homes by 2026 and increase overall supply;
• Invest $1 billion from public, private, and philanthropic sources in the production and preservation of affordable housing;
• Ensure equitable growth for all Atlantans and minimize displacement; and
• Support innovation and streamline processes.
Bottoms and the city released a 46 page report detailing the plan and its implementation strategies. The plan is called “One Atlanta” and takes aim at the inequality many Atlanta politicians point out as a major issue for the city – in this case specifically related to housing inequality.
The reasons behind the increase in housing costs for Atlanta are many but perhaps the most significant is just that there are so many more people around. Since 2000, Atlanta’s population has grown by 17% and in 2017, Atlanta was the third-fastest growing metropolitan region in the country. There have been more than 105,000 new residential units permitted since the year 2000, but much of these are concentrated at higher cost end of the market. Many of the new residents to Atlanta are in this market and can pay higher rents. Additionally, higher cost housing is sometimes seen as less of a risk for developers – fewer mortgage defaults and lower crime rates impact both the value of the properties and their long-time viability.
The report also points out that despite tremendous economic growth, the pace of wages has not kept up with the pace of rent. Between 2000 and 2017, median income in Atlanta increased by 48% but median rent increased by 70% during this time. Almost half of Atlantans were spending more than 30% of their income on housing and utility costs in 2016.
The implementation of the plan will be a major project throughout Mayor Bottoms’ tenure, stay tuned…
To read the full report from the city, see here: https://www.atlantaga.gov/home/showdocument?id=42220
