The push for a more affordable, well-designed Atlanta - that could also accommodate 1 million additional people

Planning commissioner and councilman say study about requiring affordable units continues

Atlanta’s real estate and development is booming. And more people are expected to call it home in the coming years.
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? In the coming months, city officials will start having conversations about how the city will function decades down the line — and even more importantly, how people in the near and long term can find an affordable place to live.
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? “We need the political muscle and the political will to say that affordable housing is essential to a holistic community, the kind of community that we all want to live in,” said Bill Bolling, moderator of the Atlanta Regional Housing Forum on Wednesday morning, at the group’s quarterly breakfast of some 100 or so housing activists, professionals, and others.
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? “We are losing housing, we don’t see any on the horizon, we feel like it’s time that this gets on the political agenda,” Bolling, the founder of the Atlanta Community Food Bank and a formidable figure in the metro region’s nonprofit community, told the audience gathered to hear three presenters on preserving affordability. 
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? The statistics when it comes to affordability are grim. According to Georgia Tech Professor Dan Immergluck, Atlanta lost nearly 5,000 affordable units from 2010 to 2013. The vast majority of new residential units are geared toward luxury buyers and tens of thousands of renters are paying more than 30 percent of their paychecks on housing. 
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? Atlanta Planning Commissioner Tim Keane, who has criss-crossed Atlanta discussing his plans for making the city a more livable place since joining City Hall in the summer, hinted at two initiatives coming up in the near future. 
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? The first is a plan to pitch what’s called “inclusionary zoning.” It’s set in different ways in different cities, but it often requires a certain percentage of a multi-family development’s units be affordable for people on low or moderate incomes. Invest Atlanta, the city’s economic development arm, has hired Cornerstone Partnership to work on possible financial feasibility models for inclusionary zoning.
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? Atlanta City Councilman Andre Dickens, who’s been studying the affordable housing issue over the past year, said he hopes to have inclusionary zoning legislation on his colleagues’ desks by the first quarter of next year. It will mark about a year’s work and study on the topic across many offices and agencies including IA, he said.
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? “Right now we have 11,000 units of new development over the past two years and almost 95 percent of it is luxury or near luxury,” the at-large councilman said. The point, said Dickens, is to make sure there are diverse options to house Atlanta’s diverse workforce throughout the city.
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? The other effort Keane mentioned is still a bit under wraps, but it has to do with planning how an Atlanta with 1.5 million residents — the city’s current estimated population is approximately 450,000 — would look and operate. Housing, Keane says, will be a part of that vision. He said there are “many, many plans at the city but we really don’t have a design for the city we want to be.”
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? “I really would like to push us — and this is going to be a big project for us next year, you’ll learn more about it this month — getting started on this design project for the city,” said Keane. “Obviously housing will be fundamental to this. As I approach this issue though, it’s not housing in isolation, of course. It is neighborhoods, this is a neighborhood issue, it is neighborhood revitalization.”
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? Keane said he is trying to get an idea of the scale of the housing issue and a better understanding of Atlanta’s vacant properties, parcels both with and without structures. The commissioner said he’s also looking at the fundamentals of building in the city, such as regulations, zoning and building codes — the first item on his to-do list after joining the city was overhauling the department’s permitting division. He’s keeping an eye open to finding places in the process where there could be space for flexibility — and innovation to build for how people will want and need to live in a future, more populous, Atlanta.
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? “You can’t expect to basically follow the same regulations, the same process, produce the same thing, and build more of it in a more constrained, more expensive environment,” he said. “That doesn’t seem like a reasonable expectation.”
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