Red Hot City

A growth-above-all development ethos permeates the Atlanta region and is rooted in the city's twentieth-century expansion. Like some other booming Sunbelt metros, Atlanta has combined a continuing reliance on public-private partnerships and a state and regional planning and policy regime that excessively caters to capital, often at the expense of its poorer residents, who are predominantly Black and Latinx. As the city proper has become a hot commodity in the real estate arena and is no longer majority-Black, the region has inverted the late twentieth-century poor-in-the-core urban model to one where less affluent families face exclusion from the central city and more affluent suburbs and are pushed out to lower-income, sometimes quite distant suburbs, usually farther from mass transit, large public hospitals, and other essential services. At this writing, the Atlanta metropolitan area is the ninth-largest in the country and likely to climb into the eighth spot in the not-to-distant future. This book focuses on four key, interconnected themes in the evolution and restructuring of Atlanta in the twenty-first century. The first is the major racial and economic restructuring of the region's residential geography, including the city proper. A second theme of the book is the failure of the City of Atlanta to capture a significant share of a tremendous growth in local land values. A third theme of the book is the critical role of state government in constraining and enabling how development and redevelopment occurs and whether the interests of those most vulnerable to exclusion and displacement are given serious consideration. The final theme of the book, and its key overarching narrative, concerns the political economy of urban change and the presence of inflection points. These are periods during which particularly consequential policy decisions are made that have a disproportionate impact on the trajectories of a place and direct and long-lasting implications for racial and economic exclusion. The book's conclusion ties together many of the lessons from these chapters. It ends with discussing what recent political trends could mean for the development trajectory of, and continued exclusion in, the region. It also calls for avoiding a market-inevitability"fatalism that suggests that nothing can be done to redirect or alter the sorts of trajectories described in the book. It reminds the reader that the events and consequences described are not simply the result of apolitical, atomistic market forces, but is shaped heavily by institutional actors and processes"--