The Atlanta neighborhood of Buckhead is portrayed in advertising as a leafy, peaceful, exclusive destination — “the Rodeo Drive” of the South.
But during a two year-stretch of former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms’ term in office, Buckhead was also a nexus of carjackings, street racing, vandalism and murders.
There were the shootings at Lenox Square, at one point six in a single week. A father shot jogging on a Sunday morning. Three bystanders injured in a firefight in the Home Depot parking lot. A 7-year-old struck by a stray bullet as her family drove past Phipps Plaza during a Christmas shopping trip.
It all happened as COVID-19 lockdowns and protests spiked crime rates across the country. But as residents of mostly Democratic Buckhead consider the possibility of Bottoms becoming Georgia’s next governor, even lifelong Democrats say they are wrestling with their memories of Bottoms’ time as mayor during the neighborhood’s worst days.
Jim Durrett led the Buckhead Community Improvement District for 17 years and was president of the Buckhead Coalition for six. He is such a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat that he has never voted for a Republican in his life. He’ll do it for the first time in November when he votes for Jackson over Bottoms.
“The number one job elected leaders should be asking, ‘What are the problems and what can be done to solve them?’” Durrett said. “I saw none of that. So I feel Mayor Bottoms does not deserve the opportunity to fill this very important position in our state.”
Durrett led the prominent Buckhead groups for all four years when Bottoms was mayor. He said his biggest complaint was not just about the rising crime in Buckhead, but what he saw as the former mayor’s lack of interest in addressing it as the situation spiraled out of control.
For example, Durrett said he never heard from Bottoms during her entire time as mayor. By contrast, he said Mayor Andre Dickens called him the morning after he won election in 2021 and met with him later that day for an hour and a half.
“I once had a Buckhead Coalition member make the comment to me, ‘It feels like our mayor has been kidnapped,’” Durrett said of Bottoms. “And that was a really good way of saying she was just absent.”
In a meeting with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s editorial board, Bottoms said the crime in Buckhead was emblematic of a nationwide crisis. And she said the new Buckhead police precinct that Dickens cut the ribbon on early in his tenure was actually announced during hers.
“That precinct didn’t just come to be within, you know, his first week in office. That was something that was long in the works,” she said.
The discontent in the community during Bottoms’ term added gasoline to a long simmering effort to break Buckhead apart from the city entirely, with the primary goal of electing a separate mayor for the neighborhood and its business district.
But the newly energized “City of Buckhead City” effort was so ham-handed and misguided that Durrett, the Buckhead Coalition, and every member of the General Assembly who represented Buckhead fought against it and won. State leaders said the arrival of Dickens at City Hall was a turning point.
The entire chapter seemed closed until Bottoms announced last year she would run for governor and easily won the Democratic primary in May. But she won without help from Buckhead voters, who voted mostly for state Sen. Jason Esteves instead.
Now in the general election, the support for the former mayor in Buckhead has been mixed. Last month, Mary Norwood, who narrowly lost to Bottoms in the 2017 race for mayor and now represents Buckhead on the Atlanta City Council, endorsed Jackson over Bottoms. She said she believes the Republican “will best represent all our of our interests all the time.”
Developer Chuck Taylor, who grew up in Buckhead, is a Democrat and strongly supports abortion rights. But he’ll vote for Jackson, along with U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff and the rest of the Democratic ticket. “I have never, ever voted for someone who is not pro-choice,” he said. “But to me, honesty and integrity still matters.”
State Rep. Betsy Holland, a Garden Hills Democrat representing portions of Buckhead, supported Esteves in the Democratic primary. As she knocks on doors and attends community meetings in the run up to November, she said she hears excitement from voters about Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff and trying to flip control of the state House. But she hears almost nothing from voters about Bottoms at all.
“It’s not that I’m hearing them say she would be a bad governor, I’m just not seeing people get as energized or excited,” she said. “Frankly, I don’t think it helps that she’s not in Buckhead very much right now.”
Bottoms‘ campaign countered that she has been to Buckhead for a dozen events in the last three months for fundraisers or grassroots events. Bottoms said she was there three times last week.
“I’m not ignoring any community,” she said. “But I’m also not saying that one community is more important than any community. All of Georgia is important to me.”
No matter how often she campaigns in Buckhead, the passage of time and the man she is running against may be helping her among Buckhead Democrats who are still be sitting on the fence. Jackson’s promise to be “Donald Trump’s favorite governor” has taken on a life of its own for voters, no matter their party.
State Sen. RaShaun Kemp, a freshman Democrat who represents parts of Buckhead, said he hears from voters that they would like to see more of Bottoms since Jackson is dominating the airwaves. But the name that dominates every conversation he has is Trump.
“The thing that I hear most is, ‘The guy she’s running against wants to be Trump’s favorite governor. We don’t want that,’” he said.
Esteves echoed that. Although he ripped Bottoms’ record as mayor during the Democratic primary, he told me the choice for voters now is binary.
“Even from people who were concerned about the Buckhead City movement and may have been concerned about former Mayor Bottoms, they want to ensure that we have a governor that can protect Georgians from the failures of the Trump administration,” Esteves said. “There’s only one candidate who can do that and that’s the one who has fought against Trump in the past.”
Bottoms told the AJC she doesn’t change her message as she campaigns around Georgia, no matter which part of the state she’s in. She said she wants to be Georgians’ favorite governor, not Trump’s.
“I truly believe our best days are ahead of us,” she said.
The voters of Buckhead want to believe that, too.