Briefing Paper
Atlanta Metropolitan Regional Forum
July 28, 1997

Prepared by
David A. Goldberg,
Staff Writer for regional issues
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

OVERVIEW

Physical Description: The Atlanta metropolitan area sprawls across the Piedmont region of Georgia from the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains to the developing exurbs 50 miles south of downtown. The U.S. Census considers 20 counties to be in the orbit of the city of Atlanta, covering an area of 1,800 square miles. At 1,366 persons per square mile, Atlanta is the least dense of all major metro areas.

The Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC), the area's metropolitan planning organization (MPO), comprises 10 counties, including Cherokee, Cobb, Douglas, Clayton, Fayette, Fulton, Henry, Gwinnett, DeKalb and Rockdale, with a population of 3 million.

With no large bodies of water or severe mountain ranges to hem it in, there are no real geographical constraints to Atlanta's growth.

Historical Growth Patterns: The city now known as Atlanta was founded in 1843 as Terminus at the end of a rail line from Charleston. While the river provided water and some navigation, it was the rail lines that shaped the city's initial growth, and transportation continues to be the primary driver of development.

Although a very young city, Atlanta had become a significant enough industrial and distribution hub by 1864 to warrant burning by General William Tecumseh Sherman's men in 1864. The city quickly rebuilt and hasn't stopped growing since. The city developed its first suburbs around the turn of the century along the streetcar lines first installed in 1889. In the 1950's, Atlanta was quick to capitalize on the nation's new interstate highway program and became one of only five cities at the nexxus of three interstates. The region now has a network of major freeways -- I-75, I-85, I-20, I-285, I-575, I-675, I-985 and Georgia 400 -- that have spawned development far into what was once thought of as farm country.

The decentralization continues with astonishing rapidity today. Major suburban "downtowns" have sprung up at the intersections between the major freeways. The ARC counts 22 existing or emerging major activity centers in metro Atlanta, nearly all north of I-20 and many north of the I-285 beltway. A twenty-third, at the new Mall of Georgia, seems likely to emerge in north Gwinnett County, which during the 1980s was the fastest growing county in the country. Most suburban downtowns have grown up around shopping malls.

Metropolitan Government Structures: As ARC director Harry West has noted, metropolitan Atlanta can best be thought of as 11 large cities that both contain and are surrounded by dozens of smaller cities. The central city, Atlanta, accounts for only 12 percent of the region's population. Under Georgia's constitution, cities and counties have virtually identical powers. Armed with similar arsenals, all the tax-base hungry municipalities in the region compete fiercely with one another for development.

Representing only part of the entire region, the ARC alone contains 74 local governments. The ARC serves as the joint planning agency for the core 10 counties but has limited authority. Under Georgia's planning act, the ARC reviews developments of regional impact and makes a recommendation as to whether they are in the best interests of the state. It greatest authority comes from the federal ISTEA law, which gives MPOs the responsibility to program federally funded and other transportation projects.

The Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) was conceived as a truly regional entity, but it has been confined to only two counties, Fulton and DeKalb. Other counties have refused to contribute sales taxes in order to join the service, although representatives from Clayton and Gwinnett continue to sit on the MARTA board.

Economy: Atlanta has a diverse and dynamic economy. Regional employment more than doubled from 1970 to 1990. After a temporary slowdown during the recession early this decade, Atlanta again leads the nation in job growth and never felt a predicted post-Olympics slump.

The region made its economic mark as the transportation hub of the Southeast. Hartsfield International Airport is one of the world's busiest, accommodating 63 million passengers a year and a growing cargo business. Georgia has more miles of rail than all but seven states and is 14th in freight tonnage moved by rail, the vast majority of which moves through metro Atlanta. The opportunity for linkages to air and rail as well as an extensive freeway network have attracted the largest trucking company in the U.S, UPS, as well as countless distribution facilities.

Coca-Cola and Delta Air Lines dominate the corporate landscape, but Atlanta also is home to other economic giants, including Home Depot and more than 20 Fortune 1,000 companies. Although it has lost its dominance as the financial center of the Southeast since bank deregulation, Atlanta has gained prominence as a telecommunications center and soon will be a key nexxus of fiber optic communications. With Georgia Tech to anchor its research infrastructure, the region is home to growing high-tech companies such as Hayes and Internet service provider Mindspring. Atlanta's job growth has been driven by the service sector, but the region still retains significant manufacturing jobs, such as the Ford plant in Hapeville. Atlanta also is a major site for conventions and trade shows.

The ARC predicts regional employment will grow 28 percent from 1990 to 2010.

Ecology: The Atlanta region is bisected by the Chattahoochee River, whose far ranging watershed provides 70 percent of Atlanta's drinking water. Overdevelopment, stormwater runoff and sedimentation all threaten the river, as they do other watersheds in the region.

A combination of topography, weather patterns and excessive man-made emissions conspire to keep Atlanta in violation of federal standards for ground level ozone. After many years of improving air quality thanks to tighter emissions standards, the region foresees a worsening of conditions over the next 20 years, absent significant changes in human behavior.

A near-tropical climate has blessed Atlanta with a lush tree cover that is a hallmark of the region. But keeping Atlanta green is a struggle in the face of rapid auto-dependent development, with its insatiable need for parking, driveways and laneage.

Demographics: The white flight that has been a feature of metropolitan Atlanta's development since the 1960s is still occuring, though the pattern has shifted as African-Americans themselves have fled a central city perceived to be in decline. From 1970 to 1990, the African-American share of the metro population grew from 22 percent to 28 percent.

That period also saw a large increase in the numbers of Asians and Hispanics, who now make up about 2 percent each of the population. These new arrivals and the middle class blacks migrating away from the city are tending to settle in the region's older suburbs. In 1970, nearly 80 percent of the region's African-Americans lived in the city of Atlanta, but that had dropped to 40 percent by 1990. DeKalb County, in particular has been a large draw for both international immigrants and blacks, with South DeKalb County developing as a sought-after enclave for middle class blacks.

But non-white populations also are growing rapidly in closer-in areas of outlying counties as well. Since 1970, their numbers have quadrupled in Gwinnett and Clayton counties and tripled in Cobb County. As these changes have occurred, the white residents who settled these areas have moved farther out and are driving much of the growth in Atlanta's exurbs.

At the start of this decade, Atlanta had 12 percent of the region's population, but 65 percent of the area's public housing and 78 percent of its impoverished households. Poverty is still concentrated in the central city, but the numbers of poor are growing in closer-in suburbs -- about 60 percent of the region's poor now live in suburbs. The poverty rate for the region has declined to about 10 percent, but it has risen in the central city to nearly 30 percent. About 60 percent of poor families in the region are headed by single mothers.

THE SCAN

Atlanta's economic growth since World War II is the envy of the Southeast. The area enjoys a level of prosperity unheardof previously in the agrarian South, and so for many years it has been difficult to speak candidly and productively about the challenges that come with phenomenal growth. It has now become clear to many that Atlanta's growth could burn itself out all too quickly unless the region can find ways to make it sustainable while preserving, and hopefully improving, the local quality of life.

By some estimations, the bounds of metropolitan Atlanta have nearly doubled in the 1990s. The region measured roughly 65 miles north to south in 1990; now that once-exurban counties such as Cherokee, Forsyth and Coweta have been brought firmly into the Atlanta orbit, the area measures about 110 miles across. This undoubtedly makes Greater Atlanta one of the fastest spreading settlements in human history. If the land consumption rate from 1990 to 1995 continues to 2020, it would take 526,464 acres to accommodate the projected addition of 1.3 million people -- the approximate total of Gwinnett, DeKalb and Rockdale counties.

This trend clearly portends dramatic strains on the region's environment, infrastructure, financial capacity and social fabric:

Environmental degradation

Air quality: As mentioned previously, a 13-county area of Greater Atlanta is in violation of federal standards for ground level ozone. Last year, more than a decade of foot-dragging caught up to the region when the Transportation Improvement Program was rejected because it relied too much on road expansions and failed to improve air quality. As a result, the region's road-building program is frozen until a complying plan passes federal muster. While ARC planners have warned that making a good-faith effort to curb pollution will mean changing growth patterns and travel behavior, local elected officials have countered that their constituents are not ready to support such changes.

Water quality and supply: The region's watersheds are under assault from both rapidly developing rural areas and the decaying infrastructure of older areas. Rivers and streams are subjected to sedimentation from poor development practices and pollution from stormwater runoff streaming across thousands of acres of pavement. The city of Atlanta, meanwhile, has missed five deadlines to lower phosphorous levels in treated wastewatera and fix a sewer overflow problem that sends raw sewage into the Chattahoochee after every severe storm. While struggling to preserve its shaky tax base, the city is paying $20,000 a day in fines and must spend about $700 million to fix the problem.

Social fragmentation

Metro Atlanta is becoming a deeply segregated place, sorted by income and race and separated by vast stretches of highway, and increasingly, locked behind guarded gates. Suburban sprawl has left behind the lower-income residents who can't afford large lots, new homes and late-model cars that are the passports to life on the suburban frontier. To preserve exclusivity, mass transit doesn't go there. Meanwhile, jobs go wanting in the suburbs. The poor are left isolated in the hole of the urban doughnut, without middle class examples of work and family stability.

Rising Tide, Sinking Ships: Contrary to the national trend, median family income has grown in metro Atlanta over the last 20 years. Atlanta's middle class has been growing at a time when the middle class of the nation as a whole was shrinking. But the exodus of the middle class from our central city, the heart of the region, has been astounding, and it continues. The city lost 72 percent of white, married couples with children and 53 percent of similar black families over the course of two decades. Then in the 1980s, after middle class whites had abandoned the city's schools and neighborhoods, the ensuing rising crime and declining school performance led middle class blacks to leave. The result is that after two decades of incredible job creation and income growth in the Atlanta region, the city had a poverty rate approaching 30 percent, fifth highest among cities with population over 200,000.

Lack of Affordable Housing: The availability and distribution of affordable housing causes a terrific strain for a significant share of the population. According to the ARC, when sorted by income level, the largest segment of the region's population is "low middle" income. Yet the average home price in the region is well in excess of $100,000. Huge portions of the region are all but closed to lower income and low middle income families, particularly the outlying counties as well as large sections of Gwinnett, Cobb and North Fulton. Exclusionary policies are designed to produce communities composed almost entirely of large, single family houses on expansive lots.

Transportation challenges

Congestion and resistance to alternatives: Metro Atlanta's three million residents drive an average of 35 miles per person each day, farther than the citizens of any other city on the planet. In Los Angeles, famous for freeway sprawl, residents motor an average 21 miles per day. Commute times are growing even as jobs theoretically are moving closer to workers living in the suburbs. Congestion is growing rapidly, particularly in the northern suburbs that have fueled the region's popularity. Over the next two decades, vehicle hours of travel -- the time each person spends in a car -- is expected to double, according to the ARC. New road expansions fill up almost as fast as they're built. A recent study found that, when a highway in a place like Atlanta is widened, within five years 60 to 90 percent of the new capacity will be filled with trips that would not have occurred before the widening. By 2010, a majority of travel in the region will occur under conditions of "extreme congestion," the ARC predicts. Meanwhile, state transportation officials are fighting efforts to divert funding to alternatives. Instead, they are pressing ahead with plans to widen existing freeways further and build a multibillion-dollar Outer Perimeter 20 miles beyond I-285, despite concerns about air quality and ARC protests that it would fuel unsustainable sprawl. The $3 billion MARTA rail system is constrained to two central counties and cannot deliver workers to most of the region's jobs.

Although there is growing concern about these trends and the costs of supporting them, there is as yet no powerful constituency behind the notion of taking a new approach. Several challenges are ahead if this is to happen: public education about the problems, a change in transportation funding to allow the greater use of alternatives and reform of land use policies to support these changes, to name a few.

Balkanization, in-fighting and state disinterest

Although the Atlanta region is for all intents and purposes a single economic entitity whose parts depend on the strength of the whole, there is no one entity responsible for its continued health. In fact, local jurisdictions all too often make decisions to proceed in a direction that the regional planning agency has said is counter to common interests. The air quality issue provides a perfect illustration. The ozone non-attainment area covers 13 counties. Three of them lie beyond the reach of the regional planning agency. State environmental officials are responsible for making plans to comply, but Georgia's home rule provisions give them little authority to implement those plans on the local level. Nor does the ARC have enforcement authority.

Staff planners have said that compliance probably will require regional transit service and tighter land use policies that prevent overdevelopment on existing roads and promote transit accessibility. But the local politicians who make up the ARC board have balked at those ideas. When ARC staffers told Gwinnett leaders a huge new regional mall on the rural outskirts ran counter to air-quality efforts, the local government indicated they would approve the project regardless. The ARC later settled for a compromise under which Gwinnett agreed to tightly manage land use around the mall. The state's governor, meanwhile, has declared air quality and other sprawl-related problems a purely local issue and avoided state involvement.

POSSIBILITIES FOR REGIONAL SOLUTIONS

This is a pivotal period for Greater Atlanta. The ARC currently is rewriting the 20-year plans governing transportation, water management and economic development. Developed in concert, the three promise to suggest profound changes for Atlanta's growth, development and redevelopment. Their success is sure to depend on building upon past successes as well as making new inititiatives.

Achievements to date

The Olympics. Winning, and then successfully staging the Olympic Games took an unprecedented degree of collaboration among state and local governments and the private sector. With a common goal in mind, all parties involved shared resources and expertise to shore up the transportation infrastructure, develop 30-plus venues and make plans to accommodate several million visitors. The region may be able to draw upon this experience to overcome the present hurdles to regional cooperation.

The Olympics also provided a lesson in the power of behavioral changes to maintain mobility and improve air quality despite substantially higher population. During the games, thousands rode mass transit, car-pooled or shifted commute times to successfully avert gridlock. Their efforts also prevented ozone violations that almost certainly would have occurred absent those measures.

Central city revitalization efforts. The City of Atlanta has attempted to capitalize on the Olympic momentum and capture available resources to create a 24-hour downtown, grow its middle class and redevelop blighted areas:

Downtown revitalization has been given a boost by the conversion of several defunct office buildings into loft apartments. The city of Atlanta built mixed income apartments atop retail shops that attracted downtown's first major grocery store in years. Older industrial areas are being coverted to lofts and studios by artists and younger residents who want to be near them.

Empowerment zone. Atlanta was one of six cities to win fierce competition for Empowerment Zone designation and an accompanying $250 million in federal grants. The zone has been criticized for over spending on administrative costs, but has begun to show some progress. A recycling plant called Renewal is expected to hire about 30 residents of the zone. The area has added 800 new housing units and nine police officers. Atlanta officials point to $4 million used to seed projects such as the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill, where developers are turning an abandoned warehouse into loft apartments.

The Atlanta Rennaissance Program, a collaboration between local officials and the city's top corporate executives, is developing a strategy to increase the city's middle class by 65,000 to 75,000 residents. To do that, participants have acknowledged they will need to improve the schools and reduce crime to a level competitive with the suburbs while making higher-paying jobs accessible to the working poor.

Some possible initiatives

Local planners, advocacy groups and politicians have suggested a number of steps that could be taken to better manage growth, preserve quality of life, protect the environment and improve social equity. Some are:

Regional tax base sharing. Provide funding for regional programs, reduce the incentive that different tax levels provide to develop undeveloped land and equalize the burden of caring for the region's poor by pooling tax revenue.

Transportation reforms. Georgia's constitution currently provides that motor fuel tax revenue go only to roads and bridges. As the principal source of money to leverage federal dollars, this restriction hampers to ability to fund alternative modes. Changing this would require a constitutional amendment or creating a new funding source, such as a regional tax on car registrations.

Land use reforms. A regional entity could be given authority to veto local land uses that run counter to regional priorities by over-taxing regionally significant infrastructure, impinging on sensitive or protected lands, straining water supplies, etc. This, too, would require a constitutional change.

Regional authorities. One or more regional authorities could be created to oversee activities of common interest, such as transportation, compliance with air quality laws, water use or waste disposal. Any such agency would have representatives elected directly by voters. A recent poll by the Atlanta Journal Constitution found that nearly two-thirds of residents support such and idea.

Fair housing reforms. The state could pass a regulation requiring each jurisdiction to ensure that it has affordable housing enough to match the proportion of the region's population requiring it.

Growth boundary/open lands preservation. The state could require that each municipality establish an urban services boundary to focus growth on areas where present and planned infrastructure can handle it. This could also be accomplished by establishing a green belt or system of green belts around jurisictions.

THE FEDERAL ROLE

Just as federal policies have fueled sprawl, some recent changes to the federal approach have provided both impetus and some tools to begin to get a handle on harmful growth patterns. Following are some thoughts on how movement in this direction could be strengthened and accelerated.

Linking transportation, land use and environmental protection Without stating it overtly, Congress was promoting regionalism when it passed the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 and the 1991 Intermodal Transportation and Efficiency Act (ISTEA).

The Clean Air Act designated non-attainment areas that in most cases follow the lines of economic regions. The Act put teeth into air quality enforcement by threatening to withold transportation money for areas that failed to comply. ISTEA gave transportation programming responsibilities to the Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) for the region. ISTEA called for new levels of public involvement in decision-making, strengthened the local role in transportation programming, gave higher priority to environmental concerns and provided that federal funds could not be spent without a properly approved Transportation Improvement Program that was financially balanced and supportive of environmental goals. ISTEA also linked progress on air quality conformity to continued federal support for transportation, and provided a special pot of money to help non-attainment areas experiment with alternatives to solo driving.

In Atlanta, these two pieces of legislation are having a profound effect. In 1996, planners determined that the region's Transportation Improvement Program could not meet the budget for a key pollutant, nitrogen oxides. The 13-county non-attainment area now faces the prospect of having its transportation program frozen indefinitely unless a new longrange plan can be modeled to show air quality improvements. No one believes that can be done unless the growth in vehicle miles traveled can be slowed, and perhaps even reversed.

This realization has stimulated vigorous debate over how to create a region where residents drive less while maintaining a high quality of life. It also has given rise to the development of citizen advocacy groups, among them a new Georgia Federation of Homeowners, a coalition of local groups that heretofore had seldom looked beyond their own backyards.

In a "homeowners summit" earlier this month, the group approved a Livable Region Proposal that includes their own suggestions about how to modify the longrange plan to meet air quality and other goals: Establishing a regional transit system with the possibility of many providers, including ones for the private sector; using incentives and disincentives to cut the number of solo commuters; rejecting construction of any portion of the proposed Outer Perimeter beltway; adopting a "concentrated development pattern," in which development is focused around cities and towns; clustering homes and shops around transit hubs and job centers; making protection of the region's woodlands and waterways a priority.

Many of these goals already are being promoted by federal initiatives under ISTEA and the Clean Air Act. A federal grant helped the ARC establish Commute Connections, which provides expertise to businesses looking to set up alternative commuting programs as well as a regional ridesharing database. Federal CMAQ funds are helping the MARTA transit system purchase 200 low-polluting, natural gas buses.

On the land use side, a federal grant also is helping MARTA to prepare a prospectus for a "transit-oriented development" on a parcel of land it owns surrounding the Lindbergh MARTA station. It is hoped that this can demonstrate the efficacy of it farther down the highway.

For the synergy in federal transportation and clean-air policies to work, EPA and the US DOT must continue to coordinate their enforcement efforts and ensure that are undergirding, rather than undermining each other. The Georgia DOT, for example, is currently attempting to "grandfather" a number of major road projects that are likely to further the region's dependence on solo motoring and make it harder to comply with air quality standards. If the US DOT allows these projects to go forward, will this support EPA's efforts to lessen the health effects of air pollution?

There are opportunities to do more. The inter-agency cooperation that has been necessitated by the two ISTEA and Clean Air Acts needs to be institutionalized among all federal agencies that deal with cross-cutting regional issues. It may be helpful for federal agencies to appoint representatives to regional working group that can make sure federal efforts are working jointly and not at cross purposes.

The Next Step: Coordinating transportation, housing and welfare policies

Such a working group could also oversee federal efforts toward providing job accessibility to low-income workers and welfare recipients who soon will be pushed into the workforce.

The Clinton Administration already has recognized that, in places like Atlanta, the location of a vast majority of jobs well beyond the reach of mass transit either shuts low-income workers out of the market or requires the possession of a cheap car that becomes a repair liablity and worsens air quality. HUD, US DOT and EPA working cooperatively with regional governments will have an important role in overcoming this barrier to employment both by extending mass transit and promoting the viability of locating jobs closer in.

Federal action can also promote accessiblity to jobs for the working poor by making it profitable and feasible to redevelop within brownfields and Empowerment Zones. Federal agencies such as HUD also could call for the creation of a regional entity to coordinate programming the region's federal funds for transportation, housing and community development.

Federal efforts should be mutually reinforcing. For example, commuter express buses that recieve CMAQ funding could be required to take inner city workers to the suburbs in the "reverse commute." Federally supported transit-oriented development could be required to contain housing for a full range of incomes.

Federal support also could help create and popularize location efficient mortgages, which would allow home buyers who live in close proximity to transit to qualify for a more expensive house based on the potential for transportation savings. This simultaneously would bolster the federal investment in the transit system, make closer-in homes more affordable and provide a counter-incentive to auto-dependent sprawl.

CONCLUSION

As a point of departure for discussion, these are just a few ideas of how a federal-regional partnership can address the challenges the Atlanta region faces.

The federal role in shaping the growth of Atlanta to date cannot be overstated. As previously noted, national policies since World War II have aggressively promoted suburbanization. That has been particularly true in Atlanta. At about the same time in the 1960s and 1970s, federally ordered school integration helped set off white flight to the suburbs, while national policies concentrated public housing and support for the poor in cities. Meanwhile, the federal and state governments were building freeways to open new territory to suburban development. Homes on the new frontier were made affordable through federal tax breaks and mortgage insurance.

ISTEA and the Clean Air Act were only the first steps in what probably will have to be a series of federal initiatives to address the full range of issues being addressed by the Metropolitan Forum. Current reform efforts will need to be reinforced by other policy changes. Welfare reform, for example, won't work if the working poor can't get to where the jobs are. HUD policies promoting mixed income housing won't work if every suburban community in America is allowed to erect barriers to it. And piecemeal policies like Empowerment Zones, which attempt to address blight in one area without putting constraints on the forces that create it, can only fail without a more wholistic federal approach.