Why Our Housing is Fucked | Book Review of "Red Hot City: Housing, Race, and Exclusion in Twenty-First Century Atlanta"
Like anyone who has been in Atlanta for a minute, I have seen this place gentrify like nobody’s business: in my short lifetime, Atlanta has ceased to be a majority Black city, long-time residents have been displaced to the suburbs or out of the state, and luxury housing development and upscale retail has sprung up like weeds in the spring. I spent several years (roughly 2017-2020) organizing with the Housing Justice League (HJL), a grassroots non-profit that fights for tenant rights and affordable housing in the City of Atlanta and the greater metro region. During the course of my time with HJL, I participated in several relatively high-profile campaigns:
An attempt to win neighborhood input and control (in the form of what is called a Community Benefits Agreement, or CBA) when the City of Atlanta sold the Turner Field stadium and adjacent lands to Georgia State University and Carter Development in 2017. The backroom deal gave the old Braves’ stadium to the new buyers for a tenth of its appraised value. And the new buyers’ plan? To build luxury student housing and up-scale retail development all up and down Georgia Avenue, an obvious gentrification nightmare. Members of the neighborhood, in conjunction with allies from throughout the city, camped out, occupying a piece of the old Turner Field property for over 60 days, demanding a CBA.
An attempt to halt the city’s plan to take and destroy 26 homes in the Peoplestown neighborhood to build a water retention park necessary, the city claimed, to mitigate flooding in the area. Neighborhood residents, particularly those subject to the eminent domain seizures of their homes, were suspicious of the city’s true motives for this plan, particularly with the (above referenced) Carter and GSU gentrifying development happening simultaneously right up the street.
An attempt to ensure the development of the Atlanta Beltline included funding and efforts to keep long-term residents in their homes as well as build new, affordable housing units. Eventually, this work morphed into a larger campaign, advocating for a city-wide affordable housing policy package based on the best practices of other American cities.
To be frank, none of these campaigns made much headway, our cries, our rallies, our organizing, and our meetings ever evaporating into the vacuum of murk that is local government. By late 2020, I had become so personally disillusioned with the inefficacy of this housing work—so many people pouring their hearts and souls into these struggles with such little reward— that I stepped back. My discouraging experiences with HJL were a large part of what fortified my nascent anarchist views. If working through the supposedly democratic venues at our disposal feels, in practice, like fighting tooth and nail for scraps, is it not more appealing to divest energy from those spaces and place it elsewhere? To attempt to solve our problems for ourselves with the limited power we have? To build alternative infrastructure that can circumvent the systems that so clearly are not in our interests?
Yes, yes, of course yes! However, in the intervening years between quitting HJL and now, I have come to see that we are prudent to not completely unplug from those long-existing, oh-so-powerful systems and institutions. So much history and inertia rests in these towers of doom that we simply have to (in ways that are boundaried and principled) continue to understand them, engage with them, and fight them. On the Left, some call this approach “dual power”—a commitment to building the new world while continuing to fight and reform existing systems simultaneously. It’s the “both and” of radical praxis.
It’s in this dual power spirit that I set out to do this book review. I by no means think laboring to understand the arcane and opaque processes of evil that led to our current housing shit show is the best or highest use of our limited mental capacities. Yet at the same time, I do believe that understanding the things that happened behind the curtain that got us here can help our future efforts at harm reduction on a path towards more liberatory housing futures.
Red Hot City: Housing, Race, and Exclusion in Twenty-First Century Atlanta comes to us from the Georgia State University urban studies scholar Dan Immergluck. Immergluck is a nerdy, quantitative data scientist, and a fierce ally of the people. In the seven years that I’ve been aware of his scholarship, he has tirelessly worked to publicize the hard data “proving” the disturbing housing trends we all anecdotally observe and, in turn, using this work to advocate for more just housing outcomes. If you find any major study that discusses demographic shifts in Atlanta, chances are Immergluck has his hands on it somewhere.
In this new master work, he makes a pretty straightforward claim: while there is a tendency to discuss the gentrification that Atlanta has experienced over the last 25 years as an unfortunate but inevitable product of capitalism, in reality, it is actually the result of specific, intentional decisions, campaigns, and policies envisioned and executed by the Atlanta elite. Of course global market forces, beyond the control of anyone at a local level, would have pushed city demographics towards the whiter and wealthier regardless of local decision making, but nevertheless things could have gone (and, to a certain extent, still could go) differently. Ultimately, Immergluck writes Red Hot City as a call to action for Atlanta leadership to change its development trajectory while there is still some of the city’s old population and identity left to save, and equally, he writes as a warning to other cities that now find themselves in a similar position to the Atlanta of 25 years ago, urging them to take another path.
Immergluck spends the majority of the book diving into the nitty gritty details of a few key moments from Atlanta’s recent history, what he calls “inflection points,” in which Atlanta elites made decisions that changed the housing trajectory of Atlanta and pushed us further, as his title implies, into a place of exclusion.
The first he points to is the destruction of Atlanta’s public housing stock leading up to, and following, the 1996 Olympics Games. City leaders used dollars from the federal HOPE VI program, intended to rehabilitate and redevelop public housing, to demolish all of the city’s public units (some 17,000), replacing them with “mixed-income” developments. These new developments reserved only one third of their units for affordable housing through Section 8 vouchers, the rest of the units rented out at market rate. While the program was supposed to ensure all displaced residents from the original public housing projects were relocated to affordable housing options, in reality, many, many folks were lost through the cracks.
What better way to get a major gentrification effort underway than to wholesale demolish the sites of the largest concentration of lower-income Black residency? As Immergluck writes, “By dispersing the poor away from these sites, the [Atlanta Housing Authority] assisted the real estate market in exploiting substantial rent gaps. With public housing removed and the reality or perception of lower crime and fewer Black, low-income neighbors, real estate investors could capture high land values (48).”
The second point of inflection Immergluck highlights is the development of the Atlanta Beltline. For those who don’t know, the Beltline is a 22-mile corridor of old train tracks (left over from Atlanta’s more industrial days) that encircles the central city. Following the ‘96 Olympics, a coalition of planners, politicians, and neighborhood activists began advocating a plan to convert the old train corridor into a series of parks and multi-use paved trails. As the plan grew traction throughout the early 2000s, it quickly became clear that the development of this public infrastructure would have a tremendous impact on real estate values. Fairly quickly, in fact, the Beltline corridor became recognized by developers as the single best real estate investment opportunity in the entire Atlanta metro region. With this knowledge in mind, Immergluck points out, the city had ample opportunity to acquire properties along the Beltline corridor and set them aside for affordable housing use. But instead, the city focused all their efforts and funding on building paths and green spaces, leaving adjacent properties with rapidly (almost exponentially) increasing land values to be bought up by private developers, the vast majority of which would ultimately be turned into luxury housing and retail. By 2016, the city and Beltline Inc. had only helped develop a meager 600 affordable housing units, and that number has not improved much in the intervening years.
Thus, in practice, the development of the Beltline has provided the public infrastructure to make the entire Beltline corridor significantly more desirable and valuable, without implementing any projects or programs to ensure its benefits can be enjoyed by long term residents and working class Atlantans.
The rate and scale of Beltline-based gentrification is astounding. Immergluck highlights a case study of the Old Fourth Ward neighborhood, which lies along the first section of the path to be built. From 2000 to 2014, the neighborhood saw a downshift from 75% to 38% Black, losing 3,400 Black residents. Meanwhile the white population climbed by 5,600. Similarly, the class demographics shifted dramatically, the percent of those with college degrees skyrocketing from 26% to 64%, and the median annual income from $31,000 to $64,000. This can hardly be described as a neighborhood “changing,” but rather the terraforming of an area from one thing to something else entirely in the course of less than 15 years. As the path is slowly developed in the 45 neighborhoods of the Beltline corridor and affordable housing efforts remain non-existent, the fate of the Old Fourth Ward becomes the fate of the entire city.
Thirdly, Immergluck points to the role Atlanta’s development authorities have played in giving ridiculous tax incentives to private developers. Development authorities (in other cities sometimes called “investment promotion agencies” or “economic development corporations”) are odd, quasi-governmental bodies that have the power to give tax breaks to developers with the purported intention of incentivizing the economic growth of a given region. In Atlanta, we have two of these bad boys: Invest Atlanta and the Development Authority of Fulton County. Over the last 25 years, these two organizations have essentially competed to give the largest possible handouts (through tax credits) to major development projects including the Mercedes Benz Stadium, Tyler Perry Studios, the Turner Field redevelopment (mentioned at the beginning), and the forthcoming development of the Gulch.
To give you a sense of a scale of these subsidies, Immergluck cites data that show from mid 2019 to late 2020 alone our two development authorities “granted $239 million in tax abatements,” most of which “went to large real estate projects. . .in hot submarket areas, including Midtown, the Upper West Side, and the east side of the city (107).” The effects of such subsidies are twofold. Firstly, they facilitate further gentrification through the projects themselves, raising land values and displacing residents. And secondly, they fail to capture any of the potential economic benefits that these large developments may have been able to bring to average Atlantans because they don’t increase tax revenues! At the very least, massive projects could and should bolster the city coffers through taxation, providing increased funding for social services such as affordable housing. However, the tax breaks create a lose-lose situation in which developments gentrify and the city is no more well resourced to help those on the receiving end of gentrification pressures.
As Immergluck makes clear, these subsidies are plainly unnecessary; Atlanta has long been a sufficiently economically attractive region in which developers will build here whether or not they receive tax breaks. So why on earth would the city (via the development authorities) do this? The answer, according to Immergluck, is: it’s a trauma response. White flight of the ‘60s and ‘70s led to a shrinking population and the financial disinvestment of the city core in preference for the suburbs. In response, the Atlanta governmental and corporate elite adopted a “by any means necessary” posture for attracting investments back into the city. This tactic had mixed results (see Underground Atlanta for one notable example) and it is unclear what effect, if any, it actually had on bringing development interest back to the city. What is clear, however, is that by the ‘96 Olympic Games, monied interests wanted Atlanta again. Now, more than 25 years later, the city is booming beyond any shred of doubt and yet “despite the city’s transformation, local government continues to act as if it is still the 1980s, and Atlanta is still a ‘shrinking city,’ losing population and unable to attract middle- and higher-income jobs and residents (134).” Fear of returning to a place of economic deprivation has led our leaders to give our city away.
In the fourth and final point of inflection that I’ll highlight here, Immergluck outlines the way that the local and federal response to the 2007 mortgage crash shifted single family homes into the hands of corporate landlords. Immergluck argues that when home foreclosures began to skyrocket, there was a huge missed opportunity: “Had a large number of these properties been secured by government and nonprofits, they could have been used to provide a substantial amount and variety of affordable housing (153).” Unfortunately, programming and funding to buy back foreclosed houses failed to get off the ground in any substantial way. Instead, a now familiar villain stepped in to scoop up many of these single family homes while they were at rock-bottom prices: corporate investors. From 2007-2012, investment companies informally scooped up a great number of of these houses, and, in 2012, the process was sped up immensely when the Federal Reserve formally endorsed this “solution” to foreclosures, mass-selling homes from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to firms on Wall Street.
The result has been not only the decline in homeownership (and extra especially Black homeownership) in Atlanta, but also the rise of a new kind of evil landlord—one that is beholden to stock holders and therefore tries to cut costs by every conceivable means. The AJC recently did an expose on this new plague, noting that more than 65,000 homes have been purchased by investor-landlords in the metro area since 2012. Indeed, when my roommates and I were looking for housing this last winter, 90% of the homes in our desired region and within our budget were owned by the same few corporations: Excalibur Homes, Progress Residential, and First Key Homes. With a great deal of luck, we were ultimately able to find a relatively affordable house from a mom-and-pop landlord, and thank God, for tenants of these corporate landlords regularly report maintenance issues neglected for months on end, absorbent fees charged at every turn, and a general lack of access to real humans to address any of their housing needs and questions. These large firms, of course, have no interest in keeping their housing stock available and affordable in the long term. As soon as it is more profitable to sell off the homes to wealthy buyers than to extract rents from tenants, that is what they will do.
Immergluck, of course, has a lot more to say in his book than this 2,000 word summary can capture. In particular, as a numbers guy, he fills the book with rich quantitative data and pretty charts and maps. I really recommend giving the whole thing a read if this overview has peaked your interest in any way, but I do feel that I’ve covered here what I see as Immergluck’s main offerings of demystification. His investigations make clear to me now that by the time I became involved in the Housing Justice League in 2017, much of the city’s gentrification fate was sealed in stone. The destruction of public housing without creating viable alternatives, heavy public investments in the Beltline that explicitly catered to private development and ignored affordable housing needs, the compulsive subsidizing of private development at the expense of city coffers, and the failure to save single family homes from the hands of corporate landlords following the 2007 crash have all created a situation in which our housing is, to put it crudely, fucked.
Immergluck concludes by, like a good academic, reiterating his thesis: “Some witnessing the sorts of racial and economic exclusion described in this book argue that these patterns are inevitable in growing cities and regions like Atlanta. Where the conditions are ripe, they suggest, rampant gentrification is pre-ordained, a product of market forces that cannot be altered or slowed.” But in reality, “the city is a politically and socially constructed space, and its trajectories are the products of policy decisions . . . Many of the policy choices that have been made in the Atlanta region since the 1990s could have been made differently, in ways that would have led to less gentrification and displacement, more housing stability and affordability for low-income families (233).”
Keeping Immergluck’s admonition in mind, I return to the idea of dual power. It is clear that, as radicals, it is not ideal to invest our time, energy, and (most importantly) our hearts heavily in understanding, resisting, and attempting to shape the actions of the state and other large institutional actors. My time with the Housing Justice League led only to burnout and the slow crushing of my revolutionary spirit. However, we also cannot be satisfied to run off to some lala land of small-scale alternatives; as Red Hot City makes clear, we cannot deny how powerfully influential macro systems are on the lives of most people, terraforming our entire city over the course of 25 years. We cannot deny that had we been able to intervene at some of these points of inflections, our housing today may be less fucked.
The question I am asking now is: what does it look like to engage with the systems we’ve inherited and the ones we are creating simultaneously? To fight for affordable housing at a policy level, while figuring out ways of life amongst ourselves that can meet our needs without the state’s help? What does it look like to be a nuanced anarchist, to reach for the “both-and?”
