When proactive racism and rejection of the market become the linchpin of City policy

Absolutely fascinating.  So often, when reading history, you see a sequence of events and wonder just how it was that they got from noble sentiment A to disastrous policy Z?  Where in the chain of events did they go off the rails morally and practically?

All failures of communist systems, and many socialist ones evoke this kind of wonder.  Both systems offer something for nothing and so it is understandable why a people, under particular circumstances and at a particular point in time might fall prey to the siren song of socialism despite the consistent failure of all such experiments in the past.  'THIS time we will get it right.'  And it never happens.  But the promise is alluring.

Hard as it is to unravel the transition from noble intentions to evil outcomes in the past, it is sometimes even more difficult in the present.  All advocates are noisy and everyone predicts utopia or apocalypse with no sense of moderation or factuality.

I wake this morning to neighborhood paper raising an alarm to a mayoral change of policy which was announced with hardly any mainstream media coverage on December 4.  The MSM representative in the Atlanta market is the Atlanta Journal and Constitution.  Very establishment - beholden to both the political class (one party only since 1879) and to developers.  Very little commitment to the some 550,000 Atlantan residents.  

The AJC managed a single story, after the Mayor's press release, on December 2nd.  From Atlanta mayor to rezone some neighborhoods to create more affordable housing by Stephen Deere.  

Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms is promoting an affordable housing plan that would rezone many of the city’s single-family housing neighborhoods to allow for greater density, according to an announcement on Thursday.

As the city’s population continues to grow, it will require land use that allows for more people, according to the Bottoms. The city’s planning department’s website says that the city is the 316th most densely populated city in the U.S. However, its population has boomed over the past few decades, causing home prices and rents to skyrocket.

Adding more housing stock would lower the housing costs for many residents, Bottoms administration has argued.

Bottoms is proposing a zoning amendment that she says would unlock 60% of Atlanta’s land for more housing. The amendment would allow for second units on properties, such as basement apartments, without substantially changing the character and feel of the neighborhood, according to Bottoms’ office.

Here is where the economic illiteracy of our journalists comes into  play.  Changing zoning to make more housing available and separately having the goal of increasing the supply of affordable housing.  One might argue about the objectives but they are at least in some fashion nominally worthy.

But Atlanta is a large city geographically.  There are plenty of low value land areas where development could occur that would provide both a larger volume of residences (single family as well as multi-family units.)  In fact this has been happening for more than a decade.  Atlanta has lots of areas which were used formerly by light industry and which have been and are being redeveloped for residential, usually multiunit apartment buildings.  

If all we want are more residences, across the full price range, the market is already doing that.  No need for a change in zoning.  

Clearly there is some other objective in mind.  From the article.

“The Atlanta City Design Housing Initiative builds on our Administration’s One Atlanta Housing Affordability Action Plan, addressing systemic racism and working to ensure affordable housing for all,” Bottoms said in a press release. “For too long, housing policies have excluded those who are most vulnerable, particularly communities of color. We are taking bold actions to reverse these policies and close the homeownership gap and rental affordability for legacy residents of Atlanta.”

In 2017, Bottoms campaigned on a $1 billion affordable housing trust fund to help low income residents remain in their neighborhoods.

So this isn't really about making more housing available, this is about gentrification.  The best way to increase affordable housing is to approve more housing development.  Atlanta has plenty of space and demand for that to happen.  It is already happening.  So why the rezoning?  This two days later report from the AJC abruptly ends there with more obfuscation, incompleteness and misdirection than clarity and logic and useful information.

OK.  We all know we can no longer trust the legacy media for anything but cheap press release journalism, partisan sniping, amateurish reporting, partisan gaslighting, fake news, and false flags.  So now we have to dig to find out what is happening.  

Patently incomplete misreporting seems like a red flag.  Reminds me of that old Buffalo Springfield song, Stop Children, What's That Sound.

There's something happening here
But what it is ain't exactly clear
There's a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware

I think it's time we stop
Children, what's that sound?
Everybody look, what's going down?

 So what's going down?  

The AJC has only the one truncated article from December 2020 on the Mayor's plan.  In searching for further reporting I come across this piece from Channel 11 news, Atlanta tries to offset Westside's booming real estate market with affordable housing for renters by Neima Abdulahi.  It's from two years ago but it gives some context of motive.

ATLANTA – Robocalls, letters and real estate signs are putting pressure on neighbors in Atlanta’s historic Westside neighborhood to put their homes up for sale.

11Alive’s Neima Abdulahi’s video about the hot housing market took off on Twitter, with hundreds of retweets and thousands of views.

It is a poor neighborhood on the cusp of redevelopment.  The Mayor's advice is:

“Don’t sell your house!” That’s ATL mayor @KeishaBottoms' message to people living in the city’s Westside neighborhoods.

As the historic neighborhoods continue to be a hotspot, some longtime residents  say they’re under intense pressure to sell. 

But again, there is this journalistic blindness.  We are being led to believe that the voracious developers are doing something other than offering to pay more for their home than has ever happened before.  

Collis Clovie, managing broker of Century 21 Real Estate, told 11Alive many buyers are looking to buy up the properties to flip them.

“That whole area is hot. In real estate, we say it’s booming,” Clovie said. “The prices have gone up. There is a lot of interest. The values have really gone through the roof.”

Clovie said market demand for a piece of the Westside has skyrocketed thanks to the new, billion dollar Mercedes-Benz Stadium and property values going up. He said young adults want to move within city limits to be part of what’s happening – and then, there are people who want to buy cheap property to flip the house.

“We’re talking about $10, $20, $30 thousand dollars. After two or three years, those properties are up to $100,000, or $150,000," he said.

The phenomenon is nothing new, Clovie said – it’s happened to East Lake, Kirkwood and Grant Park areas as well. While many realtors, developers and opportunists are popping up, Clovie said they should be mindful of those who have no interest in leaving their homes.“If someone lives in that particular area and there are memories associated with that experience, to sell the home just because it went up in value is not always the best thing,” Clovie said.

The Westside Future Fund said their priority is to keep the people who want to stay in the Westside in their homes. The anti-displacement fund covers property tax increases for homeowners – but they make up a small percentage of homes in the Westside. 

I am entirely sympathetic to residents not wanting for a neighborhood to change its character.  But I am more than sympathetic to private property.  Developers cannot force residents to sell their property.  But the quoted Collis Clovie, managing broker of Century 21 Real Estate, is not a disinterested party when he advises potential sellers not to sell a property because it went up in value is a self-interested opinion.  Sudden inflation in the value of capital assets is a windfall even though you might not avail yourself of the windfall.

Here is the very interesting reveal way down in paragraph fourteen.  It is known as burying the lead.

According to the Westside Future Fund, 90 percent of the 6,300 homes in the area are rentals. More than 70 percent of residents earn less than $15,000 per year.

The neighborhood is basically all rentals.  There is community and then there is community.  Property owners have a shared interest in their neighborhood which is usually translated into a shared commitment.  Volunteering at the local school, park clean-ups, advocating collectively for road maintenance, etc.  Renters my have a social community but usually it lacks shared commitment.  A neighborhood of renters should be the easiest to redevelop.  The property owners benefit, the number of housing units (rental or otherwise) increases, the quality of housing improves, and, in aggregate, with increased supply, cost of living comes down.  

So why not let the market work since it is serving so many policy interests and producing social goods?

Oh, here's why:

In February 2018, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms announced plans to keep Westside families in the neighborhood with plans to build 51 new affordable housing units for so-called "legacy renters" in the Westside.

The units will focus on those who are at-risk or currently underserved in the housing market -- particularly seniors on fixed incomes and low-wage workers.

The building costs are made possible through the mayor's $1 billion private-public partnership called the Affordable Housing Initiative, which addresses the negative impacts of gentrification.

The City, through an expensive initiative, is going to increase housing unit supply by 0.8% over a couple of years.  Almost certainly at greater cost and slower delivery than the market would deliver if the concern were to increase supply and reduce cost.  The objective here is not increase supply for the whole city nor reduce overall average cost of housing.  The objective is transfer resources from city tax payers to 51 residents.  This is about dealing in favors.

And when you deal in government favors without public accountability and little transparency, both corruption and failure follow.

The picture is getting clearer.  

What I saw this morning was a report on the new December 2020 plan, which was even more revealing than the AJC.  It is from a neighborhood local digital magazine and posted in NextDoor.  From Atlanta Mayor Endorses Sweeping Rezoning That Would Impact Buckhead by Ben Hirsh.  

It is no secret that Atlanta mayor Keisha Bottoms has had her sights set on an ambitious rewrite of the zoning ordinance that governs development throughout our community since taking office in 2018. However, the scope of the proposed changes that recently came to light, after a little-noticed press release, would have dramatic economic and aesthetic implications if passed.

Mayor Bottoms released a statement on December 4th announcing a set of recommendations from the Department of City Planning. 

“The Atlanta City Design Housing Initiative builds on our Administration’s One Atlanta Housing Affordability Action Plan, addressing systemic racism and working to ensure affordable housing for all,” said Mayor Bottoms.

The ideas and proposals within the report represent two years of work by a team called Atlanta City Design Housing. “Our city is growing, and we can leverage that growth to be a better city that is more equitable, inclusive and accessible to live in,” said Tim Keane, the City of Atlanta’s Commissioner of City Planning. “Atlanta City Design Housing Initiative outlines ways this growth can be designed specifically for Atlanta’s landscape, distinctive physical characteristics and unique neighborhoods.”

It is unclear how any of this addresses the purported systemic racism and working to ensure affordable housing for all.  There is no evidence advanced as to what form the alleged systemic racism occurs.  It feels increasingly like a simple dislike of the market economy.  We are on treacherous ground when we start designing policies to advantage some based on race and disadvantage others based on race, which is what this sounds like.   Further:

#3 Atlanta Should Do Away With Single Family Zoning

When I got to this, my jaw dropped. Atlanta is the city in the forest and Buckhead in particular has a tree canopy over ⅔ of our neighborhoods. What makes Buckhead so special is that it is possible to enjoy living in nature, within the city.

The report states that “Atlanta should amend the City’s zoning code to allow more housing flexibility in the existing exclusionary single-family zoning areas designed for race and class discrimination.

Today, nearly 60% of the city is still zoned exclusively for single-family zoning. Atlanta’s future depends on policies of inclusion and exclusive single-family zoning is anything but inclusive. The first step toward making Atlanta a more inclusive place to live should be to end exclusive single-family zoning by allowing an additional dwelling unit in all existing single-family zoned areas in the city.

There it is again - justification of governmental racism today because of governmental racism many decades ago.  Have these people never heard that two wrongs do not make a right.  All they have to do is adhere to Classical Liberal principles and everyone will be better off.  Instead, they have to take the coercive, racist, authoritarian route, overtly rejecting freedoms and constitutional rights.

And based on fabulist thinking:

This single zoning amendment would unlock 60% of Atlanta’s land to contribute to the city’s growth without substantially changing the character and feel of the neighborhood.

That is of course not true.  If you increase renters the web of shared commitment erodes.  If you increase density, you increase crime.  If you increase density, you increase congestion and traffic delays.  This is the magic of authoritarian central planning, the idea that we can change one variable in a complex web and not have anything else change.  

I will assume that Mayor Bottoms, Tim Keane, and Atlanta City Design all have the best intentions. They want to increase the supply of housing to keep pace with the increasing population and help pull people out of poverty who have been disadvantaged. I think that is a great premise, but they should work to find a way to do it without driving out those with more wealth. If you take away the housing choices that a wealthy individual is looking for then they will go elsewhere to find it, and take their tax money with them. That does not contribute to a healthy and diverse city.  

In addition, if you increase crime, oppose cheap development, impose development limits which increase costs (such as affordable housing set asides) all you are doing is reducing the affordability and quality of life in the city to the advantage of surrounding jurisdictions adhering to rule of law and Classical Liberal principles.

Predicating coercive actions to achieve a lower quality of life at a higher cost to the benefit of one racial group at the expense of another is evil policy.  It won't work and it will drive division as well as reverse the desire to live in the city.  We are already beginning to see dramatically rising violent crime (up 55% in 2020) owing to the Mayor's focus on de-policing.  This won't end well but it will all occur to the theme song of socialism, inclusion, racism, and diversity.  I like the classics.  Give me the Age of Enlightenment values and music.

But the thing that flabbergasts me is that A) this has received such little attention by the mainstream media and B) that is covered by distributed blogs and specialized social media.