Metro Atlanta communities must reform zoning to create more affordable housing
A recent Atlanta Regional Commission survey asked metro Atlanta residents to name the biggest problem facing the region.
Two responses dominated: housing affordability and traffic.
Working on the National Zoning Atlas’ analysis of metro Atlanta helped us see how the region’s zoning rules contribute to both of these issues.
Zoning, adopted at the local level, governs construction in almost every part of the region. What we found — across nearly 40,000 pages of zoning codes in the 169 cities, towns, and counties that exercise zoning in metro Atlanta — is a regionwide legal framework that inflates housing costs and exacerbates traffic-causing sprawl.
One of the most striking patterns is the way that zoning bans the type of walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods that make life convenient.
We found that only 8% of the zoned land in metro Atlanta allows housing to be located alongside non-residential uses. People can’t walk down the street to grab a coffee or stop into the office. They have to get into their cars to do virtually everything. Zoning gives them no choice but to be the very traffic they hate.
Development pattern due to zoning rules has consequences
Zoning codes also enforce sprawl through large lot-size mandates. You can live in a single-family home on a small lot within Atlanta’s pre-1952 boundaries and in a handful of suburban town centers. But the further you get from the city’s core, the larger the lot you need to have a home.
Nearly two-thirds of single-family land in Metro Atlanta requires around an acre or more. Even inside the Perimeter, in Sandy Springs and in Buckhead, thousands of acres of residential land require single-family homes to sit on lots larger than a football field.
Restrictions on denser housing types also contribute to Metro Atlanta’s high housing costs and traffic gridlock. We found that while single-family homes are allowed on 94% of the region’s residential land, structures with four or more units are outright prohibited on 86% of that land.
In other words, zoning codes shoehorn residents into one-size-fits-all large-lot homes in single-use subdivisions, giving them little option to live anywhere else.
The development pattern created by local zoning rules has consequences that go beyond the pocketbook. All that driving means more time wasted in the car, more air pollution, and less time with friends and family.
Zoning codes influence whether employers can find workers close enough to fill jobs, whether older residents can downsize without leaving their communities, whether new residents can find housing and whether current residents can afford to stay in their transforming neighborhoods.
Elected officials across the region must coordinate action
Our completion of the Metro Atlanta Zoning Atlas coincides with the City of Atlanta’s release of a proposal for the first major zoning reforms in over 40 years. The proposed zoning overhaul — dubbed ATL Zoning 2.0 — includes some promising components, like streamlining the permitting process for more types of housing and writing zoning rules in language people can understand.
However, it still leaves most existing large-lot requirements and multifamily restrictions intact. It also significantly increases the length of Atlanta’s zoning code — potentially adding hundreds of pages.
Atlanta already has more zoning districts per person than any major city in the National Zoning Atlas database. We are skeptical that piling on more complexity in a city that saw rents shoot up nearly 60% since 2021 is a good solution.
Even if city leaders rewrite the rewrite to address these issues, our data makes one thing clear: Atlanta cannot solve the region’s problems alone. The suburbs must reckon with the fact that their outdated land use policies make it too hard for people to get by.
Besides, affordability is the suburbs’ problem too: JP Morgan Chase recently reported homeownership costs in Atlanta’s suburbs rose more than 60% since 2019 — far more than incomes.
Seniors on fixed incomes and lower-income households are most burdened by this widening gap: the suburban Atlanta rental market has the third-largest disparities in rent increases for rich and poor tenants in the country.
We recognize many factors contribute to these conditions. But the National Zoning Atlas has exposed a critical factor: the regionwide chokehold of local zoning codes on denser, more affordable housing, and by extension, better-planned and more accessible communities.
Elected officials across metro Atlanta would do well to launch coordinated zoning reform efforts with the urgency this moment requires.
Scott Markley, an Atlanta resident, is research director of the National Zoning Atlas and lecturer at Georgia Tech.
Sara C. Bronin is the founder of the National Zoning Atlas, a George Washington University law professor and author of “Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World.”
