About 50 Atlanta citizens staged a sit-in outside Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms’ office on Monday demanding that she do something about the city's affordable housing crisis.
Atlanta's population is rapidly increasing and so is the demand for housing, which has caused rent prices to sour. Unfortunately, Atlanta's average wages aren't rising nearly as quickly as the cost of rent, which is creating a huge gap between what people can afford and what people are making.
Home prices have more than doubled in the past three years in several south Atlanta neighborhoods, and as surrounding properties and neighborhoods are being revitalized, rent is rising and so are property taxes, making it impossible for some families to stay in their neighborhoods.
Another point of contention for the protestors is the city's decision to buy back several homeowners' properties in the Peoplestown neighborhood in order to fix the area's flooding problems.
Seven years ago, the city ordered dozens of Peoplestown residents to leave their homes to make way for the flood control project. The plan was to turn their land into a park and retention pond, so that people no longer had to deal with the constant flooding of their backyards. Since the removals, there are now only four people who still live on the block, and these four residents are refusing to sell their homes to the city.
Mayor Bottoms has rolled out a plan to address the affordable housing crisis. In June, Bottoms released her strategy which includes the redevelopment of vacant properties, developer incentives, and the creation of a "housing innovation lab."
Bottoms has pledged to leverage and raise $1 billion toward housing affordability to create 20,000 units of affordable housing in Atlanta by 2026. She says that in under two years, she has now reached nearly $160 million in public investment towards her $1 billion affordable housing goal.
While Bottoms never directly spoke to the protestors, her office did release a statement to them that day saying, “The Mayor and senior members of her Administration have met with affected families on numerous occasions to work towards a viable solution to address their concerns.”
Read more on this story here: https://www.ajc.com/news/crime--law/atlanta-loss-affordable-housing-subject-protest/5vFU9clJDdn6U6AabndVDP/