Comment by paimapi

10 hours ago

I fully reject this POV. There's currently a bill working through ATL City Council to rehash our Zoning laws. The people who show up regularly to the council meetings are not community members - they are lawyers representing private development firms, many of whom make five to six-figure political contributions to sitting council members. They're the ones pushing against any pro-social, community-oriented zoning practices (like ADUs, parking lot restrictions, and public transportation and pedestrian requirements).

Believing that neighborhood units are the largest impediment to effective and efficient planning is to believe the corporate landowners at their word. There's so much astroturfing that happens in these spaces, largely rejecting density and public transportation.

I can name off the top of my head a half-dozen community-oriented projects blown up by the very same groups, and even one instance where a former state ACLU director came in, pretended to be a movement-aligned mediator, and then proceeded to torpedo the drafted neighborhood deal. This same director later went on to be hired by the same private firm for a six-figure job.

The rot is real and rarely gets reported. David Simon was a rare one in his coverage of Baltimore, not all cities have skeptics like him who dig deep.

5 comments

paimapi

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phil21  8 hours ago

Not my experience at all in my neighborhood. Development gets torpedo'ed by current residents. Parking and traffic almost always being the primary one. As in, more parking minimums. Developers showing up are the only people trying to actually build anything at all, most community members are NIMBY.

Not sure what a private developer would have to do with public transit though. That's the city's job to provide and figure out the routes for. Developers bring projects accordingly, and the local residents veto 12 story apartment buildings built on current strip-malls 2 blocks away from train stations. Residents using transparently bullshit environmental and walking/biking infrastructure "concerns" as just another way to block things.

I'll take building stuff - even if flawed - over the current state of never building anything ever any day of the week.

epistasis  3 hours ago

So it sounds like perhaps this community process is not working to advance equity as you might hope?

Because I can assure you with 100% confidence, never having been to a single one of their meetings, that all the wealthy suburbs around you are using this "process" to keep their suburbs extremely exclusionary, while they siphon their fraction of the economic productivity from Atlanta into their own hands, and keep their tax dollars sequestered away from the city that allows them to make their high incomes.

What you see with your personal experience is only part of the picture, and the same process that seems to get abused to allow "non community" to exert development pressure in Atlanta is simultaneously used to keep middle class and poor people out of the wealthy suburbs.

treis  8 hours ago

Fwiw my experience at city council meeting was different. The majority of public comment was by residents and often seemingly insane ones.

ipaddr  9 hours ago

"The people who show up regularly to the council meetings are not community members"

They are community members just not the ones who share your point of view. Those community members who might share your point of view don't show up.

I've never seen community members fight for density either. We want to tear down our housing so large buildings blocking the sky can be built by corporate landowners. You know who owns large buildings? Corporate landowners. The people with little houses are average citizens.

Public transit doesn't need density. Public transit exists in places with little density.