Mayor Andre Dickens: Atlanta has a moral imperative to fix city’s inequality
My mother often worried about making ends meet and spent most of her life working hard to raise me and my sister.
We made it, thanks to her efforts and lots of prayer. But far too many children in Atlanta never have an opportunity to reach their full potential, a distressing outcome that is not solely based on the financial resources of their parents.
I believe systemic poverty in America is primarily a problem of place.
A child born in one of Atlanta’s distressed neighborhoods will have a 20% chance of being born below a healthy weight, an 80% chance of entering fifth grade without basic reading proficiency, a less than 1% chance of becoming a high-income earner and, statistically, will live 20 years fewer than a child born just a few miles away.
These stark statistics do not capture the full weight of what children in these neighborhoods endure. They do not measure the constant hum of anxiety brought on by underperforming schools, absent grocery stores, crime, violence and crumbling infrastructure.
This toxic stress often has a lasting impact on a child’s developing mind and body, and becomes a factor leading to intergenerational poverty. The neighborhood itself becomes a factory in which its children are constrained before they have had a chance to discover what they might grow up to be.
This is not about individual failings. It is about what society built — or failed to build.
Neighborhood Reinvestment Initiative would invest $5B
Past decision-makers created many of these conditions through policy choices such as redlining, disinvestment and highway construction that destroyed Black neighborhoods.
Today, we can address those wrongs through policy choices that respect residents and lead to genuine partnerships that recognize the wisdom, strength and agency already present in these neighborhoods.
My administration’s Neighborhood Reinvestment Initiative is a multidecade plan to restore several of our most distressed neighborhoods to the healthy places they once were.
This is about balanced growth, achieved by protecting legacy residents from displacement and creating fairness of place so that every child in Atlanta — regardless of ZIP code — has access to safe streets, quality schools, good housing, healthy food and economic opportunity.
We’re starting this initiative with a plan to invest more than $5 billion in health clinics, early learning centers, parks, trails, small businesses and grocery stores that will catalyze billions more in philanthropic and commercial investment. It also includes the largest investment in affordable housing and transportation in the city’s history.
This plan builds on the work my administration has already done over the past four years to invest in day care centers, public safety, parks/green space, affordable housing, small businesses and youth initiatives like midnight basketball, all of which has contributed to a significant decrease in violent crime and the highest graduation rate ever in Atlanta Public Schools.
TADs do not increase taxes or divert funds
To fund this investment, we are asking the city of Atlanta, Fulton County and Atlanta Public Schools to join us in extending the existing Tax Allocation Districts. TADs finance catalytic projects (i.e., Atlantic Station, the Beltline, Camp Creek Marketplace, thousands of affordable housing units) using the future incremental tax revenue that those projects generate.
TADs do not increase taxes or divert funding as some have suggested. Instead, they simply ensure that the future property tax revenues generated by these projects are captured over time to finance those investments. We must not lose this vital tool when the TADs expire over the next few years, but instead commit to investing in neighborhoods that have been neglected for far too long.
This work will take time. It will require something Atlanta has demonstrated before — the ability of public, private and philanthropic leaders to come together around a shared purpose. It will demand that we stay focused not just through one administration but through many more in the future. And it will force us to recognize that the return on investment should be measured not just by financial returns, but by human flourishing.
We cannot call ourselves a great city while tolerating profound inequality of place and its impact on our children.
We cannot celebrate our prosperity while young people in parts of our city fear they will not survive to adulthood. We cannot claim to value all children equally while investing unequally in the neighborhoods that shape them. Every child in Atlanta deserves to grow up in a place that believes in their future.
This is not a policy goal. It is a moral imperative I am asking us to meet.
Andre Dickens is the mayor of Atlanta. He was reelected to a second four-year term in November and chairs the Atlanta Regional Commission board.
