Comment by epistasis

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.