Solving the housing shortage starts with this paper
It’s been more than 40 years since Atlanta updated its zoning code, since before the Beltline and even before the Olympics. A lot about this city—its people, culture, businesses, needs—has changed since then.
Zoning code determines what (and where) developers can and can’t build, often based on districts delineated by that code. This is why you don’t have warehouses in the middle of a residential neighborhood. It’s also why you don’t see duplexes, townhomes, or apartments in the majority of the city. But building more (and more diverse) homes is crucial to combat metro Atlanta’s housing shortage. A zoning rewrite can make it easier to do that.
“For the last couple decades, the number of people moving to the city has outpaced the amount of new housing, meaning we have more people than ever competing for the same limited housing stock,” explains Abundant Housing Atlanta chapter lead Anton Gudiswitz. “To avoid rising rents and home prices, we need to adjust zoning laws to allow more housing, especially in expensive neighborhoods where people most want to live.”
“For the last couple decades, the number of people moving to the city has outpaced the amount of new housing, meaning we have more people than ever competing for the same limited housing stock. To avoid rising rents and home prices, we need to adjust zoning laws to allow more housing, especially in expensive neighborhoods where people most want to live.” —Abundant Housing Atlanta chapter lead Anton Gudiswitz
Why can’t we build more homes now?
For a long time, Atlanta’s zoning preserved racial segregation by differentiating between “white” and “colored” districts. After the Supreme Court ruled this illegal, white districts effectively became single-family districts, relegating residents who could not afford detached single-family homes—many of whom were Black—to pockets of the city that were zoned for denser housing. Today, it is still illegal to build multifamily properties in the majority of Atlanta.
But even in places where multifamily developments are allowed, constructing them can be tedious. Developers need a special administrative permit to get a building permit. Getting an SAP is a lengthy process, especially with advisory reviews, like approvals from neighborhood planning units (the citizen councils that weigh in on planning in Atlanta neighborhoods). Even installing an outdoor storage cooler at a downtown restaurant requires an SAP. Converting empty office or industrial space into housing is also challenging. You’d often need to rezone the property, which costs time and money.
This is all part of what makes building affordable housing unaffordable: piecemeal code, the cost of lawyers, lengthy reviews, and bureaucratic bottlenecks.
What’s the fix?
One solution is to update Atlanta’s zoning code to welcome more diverse housing types and cut bureaucratic red tape. This has two parts: The first entails rewriting the zoning ordinance, the law that determines what can be built in the city and where. (This is what we’re talking about in this story.)
The second part is updating the City’s Comprehensive Development Plan, aka Plan A—the official document that the City uses to help steer Atlanta’s growth. The city puts it together and the state requires that it’s updated every five years; it was last updated in 2021. Plan A talks about the big picture—what we want to see—whereas the zoning ordinance rewrite should provide Atlanta with better tools to paint that picture. Plan A—itself influenced by yet another plan: the Atlanta City Design—emphasizes the need for affordable and missing middle housing. The zoning rewrite is the policy action to, hopefully, help make that happen.
A team of urban planning consultants is spearheading the zoning rewrite, the first draft of which was presented last May. The rewrite team hopes the city will adopt the new zoning code by this summer.
So what’s in the rewrite?
The secret sauce of this draft is zone strings.
Atlanta has ordinance-defined districts with set standards on how property can be used, what it can look like, and how much parking it should have. This can lead to inflexible “one-size-fits-all” zoning.
The rewrite team wants to try another approach: zone strings, which splits monolithic districts into separate pieces of urban policy, controlling each building’s form and frontage (the architecture and what’s on the street front) and use (what the property can be used for). Each building in the new code could have separate form and frontage and use codes. Basically, with this rewrite, any permitted building use can go with any permitted building form. This might make it easier to convert office or industrial space to housing.
Another advantage of the draft is that it aims to use plain English, with the general public in mind—not just lawyers. (For example, instead of “alternative fuel vehicle charging station,” it might simply say “EV charging station.”)
The rewrite will also take aim at SAPs—those special administrative permits—to streamline the permitting process. That may not sound exciting, but it’s a big deal. Atlanta’s notoriously slow and complicated permitting can dissuade developers from building housing in the city. Making the process a little simpler could encourage more residential development, helping to fill the housing gap.
What’s not in the rewrite?
In short: the game plan. The zoning rewrite provides tools to help solve the problem, but it’s largely up to Plan A to outline the solution. Here’s the problem: DCP released a draft of Plan A’s update (the game plan) in late May. The proposed zoning map in Plan A shows most of the city’s districts remaining the same. This is to the dismay of activists pushing for greater housing diversity, who want more missing middle housing in what are now single-family–zoned parts of the city. The zoning rewrite has the power to do this, but its plan as of now is for single-family districts to stay single-family.
Abundant Housing Atlanta chapter lead Anton Gudiswitz is also concerned about how “tremendously unrepresentative” public input in this process has been so far: Most people who have given feedback on Plan A have been white, and a lot were older with high incomes. This doesn’t reflect the demographics of the city. This could be because a lot of these meetings take place on weeknights when salaried 9-to-5 workers can attend, but many Atlantans—like those who work in restaurants or grocery stores, or who are janitors or firefighters—are still on the clock.
The zoning rewrite may make it easier to permit multifamily housing, but more public input on Plan A could influence lawmakers to consider bringing that housing to more parts of the city—and codifying it into the rewrite. Basically, one thing that’s probably missing from this process is you.
What can I do?
“Everything—every single thing—is subject to additional feedback from you, additional refinement from you,” Caleb Racicot, a principal and board member at the design firm TSW, said about the rewrite.
“Everything—every single thing—is subject to additional feedback from you, additional refinement from you.” —Caleb Racicot, a principal and board member at the design firm TSW
The next Q&A session is scheduled for March 17. On the agenda? The administration of the new zoning ordinance, including the code’s legal provisions, assorted rezoning, variance, and development review procedures. But don’t let the wonky topics dissuade you. Anyone can attend and ask questions. •