Anti-Transit Design in the Atlanta Suburbs: Aiming for Exclusion, and Failing
Many Atlanta suburbanites from past decades wanted to keep transit out of their communities in order to maintain a solid middle-class demographic, one that could be enforced through the prerequisite of car ownership. It didn’t work.
“Don’t let Atlanta’s environmental activists take away your right to live where you want and drive when you want. They’re trying to use laws and lawsuits to move families out of the suburbs and into downtown, and even insist we give up our cars. This is America. Know your rights for personal choices in transportation and where we can make our homes.”
This is the narration of a 2001 commercial from the Georgia Highway Contractors Association. The Association ran television spots that year as a reaction to the suspension of federal money for road building. Accompanying video footage for the spot showed “grim apartment blocks and black people getting off a bus” as a means of frightening largely-white suburban viewers with visions of urban, transit-oriented life.
Why all the disdain for environmentalists, transit and cities? Why the scare tactics (not to mention the slimly-veiled racism)?
Because in 1998, the Atlanta region was unable to produce a transportation plan that conformed to federal Clean Air Act (CAA) requirements. The resulting “conformity lapse” lasted more than two years, limiting Atlanta’s ability to use federal funds for both transit and highways.
Apparently the Highway Contractors Association was sore enough from the loss of federal funds that they felt the need to go to war, at least on a media battleground.
But was the ad even necessary? If they were trying to convince suburbanites, the Association probably could’ve saved their money. The “right to drive” was likely already held in high esteem given the intentionally car-centric built environment of the region.
The intentional design for automobiles-only growth in Atlanta
This car-orientation of suburban development was intentionally designed and enforced by zoning. A 1952 Atlanta regional plan titled Up Ahead clearly supported the development of a low-density, car-oriented region. The image above comes from that plan and shows a single-use neighborhood design that keeps uses detached (single-family homes all in one place, stores detached elsewhere) and channels car traffic all onto one to the major artery road.
In addition to the sprawl-driven perception of a right to drive, there was likely also a perceived “right” to prevent access to mobility options like transit, further enforcing car-only environments in suburbs like Cobb and Gwinnett Counties, where MARTA service was handily voted down.
A CNN report from 2000, titled “For a growing Atlanta, race has always mattered,” featured an interview with a couple who lived in the exurban sprawl north of Atlanta. They moved there because they felt confident that the lack of mass transit would ensure a solid middle-class demographic. Transit was viewed as a dangerous thing that could bring in lower-income families. They stated: “transit makes areas accessible for lower-income families that could otherwise not come out here because they don’t have transportation and that’s good.”
The gist: keep transit away and we’ll be able to exclude the poor and keep our suburban demographic solidly middle-class.
Riding the bus to steal suburban TVs
Voters in suburban counties rejected MARTA in 1971. The system would have served those suburbanites with rail and bus lines, but instead residents decided to stick with the limitation of car mobility. Why? Certainly the car-scale design of the suburbs made automobiles the logical choice for transportation and limited the ability of buses and trains to serve the area well. But there was another element at play: exclusion.
In 2013, Rep. Billy Mitchell, D-Stone Mountain spoke about the climate in 1971 when Cobb, Gwinnett and Clayton counties (all majority white at the time) rejected MARTA:
“Believe it or not, there were communities in the metro area that did not want it simply because they felt that there would be an undesirable element, citizens, who would evidently ride MARTA to their communities, steal their TVs, electronics and get back on MARTA to go home, apparently, because they did not wish for MARTA to be in their communities.”
Suburban switcheroo: middle-class, white dominance declines
Cut to 2017, when suburban poverty is an increasing problem in Atlanta. According to a POLITICO piece on the issue, poverty was evenly spread throughout the suburbs and the City of Atlanta in the 1970s. But things have shifted dramatically since then:
“There’s a lot about Atlanta’s suburbs that isn’t working. Suburban poverty exploded here between 2000 and 2011, rising by 159 percent. Now, 88 percent of the region’s poor people live in suburbs.”
It turns out that keeping transit away from the suburbs did not have the desired effect of maintaining a wall between middle-class suburbanites and lower-income familes. The fall of home values in outer edges of the region ended up being a strong draw for people in need of affordable housing. The sad irony is that people who are most in need of walkable places and transit (because of the expense of owning and maintaining cars) are living in the places that were built solely for cars: the de-valued homes of suburban sprawl.
The absence of transit also failed to maintain the white majority of the suburbs — diversity is now the rule. Here’s a map from 2010 of the majority-minory neighborhoods of the 20-county Atlanta region.
Looking back at the narration of that 2001 ad, how strange it is that “rights for personal choices in transportation” was viewed then as a choice to exclude mobilty options. Choice should be the inclusion of options, shouldn’t it? The percieved “right” to maintain the status quo by excluding people who are different from the majority crops up again and again in US history. And it’s visible very clearly in the history of our urban sprawl.
What effect will the growing diversity of the region have in reversing the exclusionary nature of both our development and our transportation? The shift has already led to Clayton County doing a 180 on its 1970s rejection of MARTA and joining the system a couple of years ago. Various surveys are showing a growing interest in transit expansion in Cobb and Gwinnett as well. It would be appropriate at this point for the suburbs to also embrace urban planning that helps to retrofit transit-friendly walkability into these neighborhoods that were very intentionally built at a scale for cars.
Planting a new seed for better growth
Look closely at this graphic that’s posted above — the one of sprawl patterns in the 1980s-90s. Focus on that thin outline in the center of the image. It’s not the city limits. It’s what was known at the time as the “railroad cordon,” but today we know it as the Atlanta BeltLine.
Suburban development and population growth during the 1980s-90s was intense, while population in the City of Atlanta only declined. The abandoned, unused railroad cordon was, at the time, a reminder of economic engines of the past — ones that had been replaced by an interstate-fueled decentralization of economic centers.
Geographically, that rail corridor represented the mid-point of residential losses in the face of suburban sprawl.
But now it’s the location of a massive amount of investment in apartments and retail and parks, with a BeltLine public transit line planned for the future. These developments are compact and they’re oriented toward pedestrian access from the street and toward the future transit route. The cordon is now the center of a very different kind of booming development and population gain in the region, and it’s a showcase of what anti-sprawl growth can look like (though the affordable-housing component has been seriously lacking, and needs attention).
From the view of the above graphic from the past, the cordon has the appearance of a seed, and I imagine it to be an idea for better growth, in a less car-centric format. Can it be a way of growing that embraces inclusivity and diversity of people and incomes? That’s for Atlantans to decide.
Instead of fighting against transit as a means of excluding groups from the suburbs, it’s time to embrace transit there. And it’s time to embrace a less car-oriented development style there as well, in order to serve the needs of all groups through access to multiple transportation types.
This de facto requirement for people to own cars, through automobile-oriented zoning and urban design, has always been (in part) an effort to “pull up the ladder” and exclude some groups from entry to the suburbs. Let’s put down the ladder and embrace the growing diversity of people in the region, with quality mobility options for all.
