New report quantifies DeKalb’s woes

DeKalb’s challenges by the numbers

-2 percent: Decrease in employment growth during the past 10 years.

6.3 percent: Population growth from 2000-2013, among the lowest.

40 percent: Proportion of rental housing, among the highest.

50 percent: Decline in the county’s unicorporated tax digest in the past six years.

76 percent: Increase in vacant housing since 2000.

87 percent: High school graduation rate.

Sometimes an alcoholic must look hard in the mirror before shelving the bottle. Or someone who’s obese must stop denying what the scale says.

With that in mind, DeKalb County officials want to change the momentum in a county that has been snake bit for years. Officials asked an outside consultant for a clear-eyed view of where the troubled county stands. The results came back recently and can be summed up in a word: Ouch.

The market assessment highlights and categorizes a bevy of problems that are no surprise to anyone who has picked up a newspaper or clicked on the TV news. High crime. Problematic schools. Political corruption. A plummeting tax digest. Decreasing job creation. Slow growing population. Racial divisions. And break-away municipalities leaving behind an impoverished urban core. It’s all there in 59 depressing pages of colored graphics and charts.

The report compares DeKalb to Cobb and Gwinnett counties and to Prince George’s County in Maryland, said to be the wealthiest community of black residents in the nation. By most measures, those other metro counties have stronger foundations and more promising trend lines than DeKalb.

“We’re not interested in beating you up,” the study’s author, Angelous Angelou, said in an interview. “This is just the first step in the process towards what will become (economic development) strategy recommendations. We have to recognize those challenges. We can’t run away from them.”

Angelou’s Austin, Texas, firm is being paid $300,000 for the study. He said first impressions could drive away business leaders and developers interested in coming to DeKalb.

“When I get on Memorial Drive (the thoroughfare running northeast from Atlanta to Stone Mountain), I do not see very attractive infrastructure,” he said. “It’s very easy for someone to turn back. DeKalb County was once the darling of Georgia. We have to try and bring that back. We want to create a constituency of public support to get people to know it is not hopeless.”

The report, complete with businesspeak like “stakeholders” and “leveraging,” said it is vital for leaders “to change focus from negative issues” and market DeKalb’s “assets.” The draft report pointed out kernels of hope. DeKalb is a close-in entity connected to major interstates, has lots of cheap property, educated residents and several colleges, including Oglethorpe, Mercer and Emory Universities.

But before DeKalb can peddle itself to outsiders, it must come to grips with the myriad of woes shoe-horned into the report.

Perhaps most distressing — beyond the troubled schools, the charges of political corruption and even the high crime rates — is this: “a severe decrease in the unincorporated tax digest — an estimated 50% during the last six years.”

The report attributes this to widespread foreclosures and decreasing property values, as well as incorporations “of wealthier communities in the north into cities.” The report is referencing the incorporation of new cities like Dunwoody and Brookhaven, annexations by existing cities like Chamblee and new proposed cities like Lakeside in north-central DeKalb.

“As cities become Incorporated, the lower income families are being left behind,” the report states. “As as result, the county tax burden is shifting to an ever increasingly poor dynamic.”

Kevin Levitas, a former legislator and a leader of the effort to create the city of Lakeside, said he is “highly suspicious of the timing of the report and its conclusions.”

He said that when areas become cities, the county then has less services (like police or recreation) to provide. However, he said DeKalb has not cut its payroll commensurate to the decrease in services.

The list of problems in the report “pinpoints a lot of the motivations people have in seeking incorporation,” he said. “It’s disappointing. It’s disheartening. We’re not trying to withdraw from DeKalb. We’re trying to save it from itself.”

DeKalb’s interim CEO Lee May (who was appointed to replace Burrell Ellis, who was indicted on corruption charges) said there was no “timing” on the report, other than it was time to try to turn things around.

May said the report is part of a three-pronged approach to try to improve business interests.

First, the report will become a “road map” to point out key areas of focus to create economic development strategies. For instance, the report said Emory and the CDC could provide spin-off health and scientific industries. Also, the south DeKalb region near I-285 is a direct shot from the Savannah port and near Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, making it perfect for a distribution and logistics center.

Also, the commission recently approved a new private-public entity for economic development that can issue tax credits, create tax allocation districts, make small business loans and issue bonds for industrial applications. The county, he said, has also hired a firm to help make permitting businesses a less bureaucratic and frustrating process.

Lee said the report “is not troubling. It’s just showing us where we are. It gives us a baseline of where we need to go.”

The county is inviting DeKalb residents and business owners to register their own opinions in an online survey tied to the market study (dekalbcounty2020.com).

DeKalb schools Superintendent Michael Thurmond, who was called in last year help DeKalb’s school district get off probation, said the report compared DeKalb to more well-to-do counties like Cobb, Gwinnett, meaning that those counties will come across with better scores and graduation rates.

“We’re making progress,” Thurmond, who was the state’s labor commissioner. “We’re not where we were 12 months ago….The truth will set you free but be careful about the broad brush of relatively limited data.”

Thurmond, like many others interviewed, called himself a “glass half-full guy.”

“The big mistake is to linger too long and fret too much on the deficits.”

Gil Turman, a retired DeKalb schools principal, read the report and called the list of challenges “staggering.”

Turman heads the South DeKalb Neighborhoods Coalition and said he has heard a lot of promises about economic development before.

“To me, we’re talking over and over; we’ve been down this road before,” he said. “I’m in a part of the county that doesn’t know what economic development is. Why is there hardly any economic development here? Naturally, I see there is a racial barrier there.”

DeKalb, he notes, has always been a bedroom community first, but the foreclosure crisis slammed the county’s largely black south side, killing property values.

“My house is not a true investment; it’s the place I live,” said Turman. He added that county codes enforcers can’t keep up with the flood of complaints from that area. That, in turn, allows the area to slide in appearance and value, making it a less attractive to develop.

Arnie Silverman, a development consultant and former head of DeKalb’s chamber of commerce, agreed the problems are daunting. But, he added, the county is taking steps to address those issues and he likes the creation of a new economic development agency.

He said being close to the Atlanta urban core is an advantage and land, especially in south and central DeKalb, is relatively cheap, presenting an upside for developers.

“If the person buys the worst house on the block,” he said, citing an old real estate axiom, “he can make the most money.”