Atlanta is in the midst of a zoning rewrite for the first time in 40 years. While the City has laid out a number of laudable principles and goals in documents like the Atlanta City Design, the zoning code serves as the actual rules of the road for how the built environment can and cannot change. This rewrite is a major opportunity for the City to lean into its values and create the type of City that we say we want to be: one that’s inclusive, one that’s diverse, and one that welcomes anyone to this City who wants to take advantage of our amazing culture, neighborhoods, and opportunities. We remain very critical of this rewrite - most of the changes are technical and linguistic updates that won’t create more affordability or bring us closer to the Beloved Community - and there’s lots that we think you should look into (you can read the full Zoning 2.0 draft here), but we want to dig into one update in particular.
In this new rewrite, the zoning draft defines who gets to live together based on who is defined as a “family”:
Updated the term family to a more modern term, household, and then reduced the maximum number of unrelated individuals allowed to live together in a household.
- The current definition of a family allows up to 6 unrelated individuals to live together, the proposed definition of household would allow up to 3 unrelated individuals to live together.
- This also includes updating the definition of group living to mean 4 or more unrelated individuals living together.
In layman’s terms: the draft zoning legislation would ban more than 3 unrelated people from living together in one house, regardless of size of house or anything else.
Let’s talk about the implications of this change. While it is difficult to know with certainty how many individuals will be impacted, there are likely thousands of households that would become illegal under this change, meaning thousands of people would have to find a new living situation, potentially having to move outside of the City of Atlanta to find somewhere that they can afford to live.
Today, only 18% of households are what we consider traditional, nuclear households - 2 parents with children. Yet, 72% of homes in the United States are large, single family homes catering to those nuclear households. Plus, homes are getting bigger and bigger. In 1950, the average square footage space per person was 292 sq ft; in 2017, it was 1012 sq ft - that’s an increase of 3.5x! When the types of homes available to folks are so out of sync with our current reality of housing types, no wonder people look for alternative types of living situations to be able to afford the homes available to them. (For more related data, check out this Kronberg Urbanists Architects blog post.
So who lives in the type of housing set-up that the City of Atlanta is trying to ban? Let’s start with students. Given the types of available housing, of course many students rent rooms and live in single-family homes with roommates. I did that while getting my Master’s degree at Emory! I lived with another graduate student, an aspiring actor, and a political staffer in a large home in Kirkwood. Find me the small, 1-2 bedroom options within the City of Atlanta that are affordable to our college and graduate students.
Now let’s think about working class folks. Let’s say you’re a single person making $40,000 (about 55% of Atlanta’s area median income (AMI)) working in Atlanta. Given that you likely won’t qualify for a place without earning at least 3x the rent, that would mean that, ignoring taxes, you could afford ~$1,100 rent/month. Instead of finding an old 1 bed/1 bathroom, there are plenty of larger homes that you could split across several people, each bringing in $1100. This rewrite, though, would make this math quite a bit harder.
Finally, let’s think about LGBTQ+ individuals and their chosen families. If you’re polyamorous, if you’re queer and have multiple couples living together, if you’ve been kicked out of your family’s home and need somewhere cheap to live, you will be harmed by this definition. Hell, one of our City Councilmembers has shared that their large home has served as a safe haven for queer individuals who need somewhere safe and warm to live; are we really telling this Councilmember that we think what they’ve done for their community is wrong? That we think it’s so wrong that we want to outlaw it?
What even is this family that the City is trying to enforce? They have a very specific image in mind of a husband and wife with their 2.5 children and a white picket fence. But as we saw, 82% of us don’t fit into that mold! This is an anachronistic understanding of what a family and household can look like, and one that is inherently classist and homophobic.
Why would the City be making this change? Who’s asking for this? After scouring the survey results and public feedback that the City has received in response to its zoning rewrite, I can’t find anywhere that anyone has said “I think that the City of Atlanta should have a vested interest in what happens inside people’s homes, including when those choices are fully consensual.” This guidance seems to be coming directly from the Department of City Planning or the Mayor’s office, and it’s hard to imagine what the motivation is other than to make life more difficult for students, working class single individuals, and our LGBTQ+ community.
And for the record, other cities and states are moving in the opposite direction. Just this year, the state of Colorado prohibited local governments from having restrictions on the number of people who can occupy a single dwelling, regardless of their connection to each other. New York City similarly removed the zoning restriction on unrelated individuals living together just a few weeks ago. Colorado and New York City are moving forward while Atlanta is moving backward.
This zoning rewrite is an opportunity for the City of Atlanta to make structural decisions that will make Atlanta more affordable and inclusive. This is one example, on top of the other zoning rewrite amendments that will make it even harder to build more affordable housing types, of the decision that the City is making to make our city less inclusive, not more.
If you’re similarly perplexed and distressed by this ridiculous and discriminatory change, click here to let the Mayor Dickens administration, City Council, and the Department of City Planning know that you oppose this new regressive change.