Gentrification, Displacement, and “Social Cleansing” in the Atlanta Suburbs
I grew up in the Atlanta suburbs. Some time around 2014, I noticed that an apartment complex I had regularly passed since I was a child was being torn down. I dug into the matter further and discovered that this was but one instance of a region-wide phenomenon. City councils across Atlanta’s northern suburbs were approving plans to raze older residences to make way for upscale “in-town” communities. These developments often followed New Urbanist design principles, and local officials championed their potential to reverse the tides of suburban disinvestment hastened by the Great Recession. Central to these efforts was the destruction of thousands of relatively affordable apartment units that housed a large portion of the region’s Hispanic population. The economic development plan, it would seem, was to replace one set of people with another. In the prescient words of Neil Smith, municipal suburban governments across the region appeared to be carrying out a “social cleansing strategy.”
The map below shows the locations of apartment demolitions between 2010 and 2017 across five suburban municipalities north of Atlanta: Brookhaven, Sandy Springs, Roswell, Smyrna, and Marietta. The size of the dots corresponds with the number of people living in the apartments before demolition. Clicking on a dot will show the racial/ethnic breakdown of that apartment’s residents, while clicking on a city boundary will show this information for that city in 2010 and 2020. Zooming into a demolition site will display a recent satellite image showing what is currently in that spot.
Map Zoom
Data first reported in Atlanta Studies
The racial/ethnic breakdown of displaced residents is also shown in the chart below. Over 9,000 people lived in the 18 apartment complexes that were bulldozed. Of those displaced, 59 percent were Hispanic and 29 percent were Black in a region where Hispanic and Black residents each comprised less than 20 percent of the total population at the time of demolition.
Source: Parametric Press
Read More
More on suburban Atlanta’s gentrification and displacement initiatives can be found here:
- Markley, S. and C. Allums. (2020). Postfascist (sub)urbanism: ‘social cleansing’ in the age of Trump, in B. Warf (editor), The Political Landscapes of Donald Trump. New York: Routledge.
- Markley, S. (2018). Suburban gentrification? Examining the geographies of New Urbanism in Atlanta’s inner suburbs. Urban Geography 39(4): 606–30.
- Markley, S. (2018). New Urbanism and race: an analysis of neighborhood change in suburban Atlanta. Journal of Urban Affairs 40(8): 1115–31.
- Markley, S. (2018). From exclusion to expulsion: demolition, displacement, and race in Atlanta’s northern suburbs. Atlanta Studies (October 30, 2018).
- Markley, S. & M. Sharma. (2016). Gentrification in the revanchist suburb: the politics of removal in Roswell, Georgia. Southeastern Geographer 56(1): 384-408.
If you would like free access to any of this material or if you have any other questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to me at scott.markley@cornell.edu.
The Fight Against Displacement
Many local organizations are fighting against displacement and for affordable housing in the region. Here are a few doing this important work:
Atlanta Area
Athens Area