I asked Dickens recently about his plan to concentrate redevelopment in seven target neighborhoods and what it meant as a political and economic strategy. He replied succinctly, “You can’t have a strategy for everything. That means you have a strategy of nothing.”
David Edwards, the mayor’s senior policy adviser for neighborhoods, emphasized the economic importance of investment concentration and its connection to transit and tax increment financing (known in Georgia as “tax allocation districts”), noting that “value capture only works when investment is concentrated enough to drive measurable property appreciation.”
This is a substantive policy claim, not just a management preference, in part demonstrated by other historical programs such as the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Choice Neighborhoods and HOPE VI, along with enterprise zones. Despite good intentions, those efforts demonstrate that diffuse investment underperforms targeted investment. Tax allocation districts depend on rising values to generate the incremental property tax revenues that amortize the bonds: The momentum from a carefully planned, concentrated growth strategy generates revenue that funds additional investment.
Dickens articulated an explicit framework for selecting neighborhoods: overlap with an existing opportunity or enterprise zone; government-owned land available for control; public assets such as parks, trails and transit; and existing public safety infrastructure. These place-based criteria become a replicable model that lets mayors choose neighborhoods based on stacked assets rather than political feel. One of Atlanta’s targeted neighborhoods, Thomasville Heights, serves as the proof of concept: The city intentionally selected it as the state’s lowest-income census area with 100 acres of publicly owned undeveloped land and a history of property ownership by bad actors.
This is a unique decision and will be an interesting test for the city. Most place-based programs select second-tier neighborhoods where success is more likely. But the geographic logic rests on an uncomfortable premise. Edwards put it directly: “Atlanta is already two cities. There is the north and east side — defined by capital, growth and connectivity. And there is the south and west side, where access to jobs, food and basic infrastructure remains limited. The gaps in homeownership, education, safety and life expectancy are stark.” Dickens also argues that adjacent neighborhoods will benefit from spillover effects, gaining access to amenities such as grocery stores and early learning centers alongside reductions in crime and blight.
That two-cities diagnosis is also why the plan is specifically focused on preserving accessibility for existing and future low-income residents. Edwards stressed that “without deliberate affordability preservation, the market will overrun these neighborhoods, just as it has elsewhere.”
Beyond financing and site selection, two design choices distinguish the Atlanta plan. The first is its grounding in research on social determinants of health related to green space, transit access, fresh food and walkability. The Morehouse School of Medicine’s partnership for community screenings also underscores the importance of combining investments in housing, parks, transit and groceries rather than treating them as separate line items.
The second is a bias toward execution. The mayor convened a cross-jurisdiction strike force to coordinate investment — including the city’s Housing Authority, the Beltline park management, the city’s economic development authority Invest Atlanta, the public schools and the regional transit agency — all in one room. Meetings are about problem-solving, not just reporting. Permits, financing gaps and even such esoteric details as retaining-wall change orders get resolved at the table. Pulling $2 million from the city’s housing opportunity bond mid-meeting to close a financing gap, for example, is the kind of decision that in most cities would take a month of memos.
Atlanta is hardly alone in experimenting with concentrated place-based investment, and the most durable models tie neighborhood revitalization to education and economic mobility. The Harlem Children’s Zone pioneered the cradle-to-college approach in a 97-block area of Manhattan, and StriveTogether’s national Cradle to Career Network applies the same logic through a data-driven, cross-sector partnership aimed at moving more young people onto a path to economic mobility. Atlanta’s own East Lake neighborhood, the inspiration for the well-respected national redevelopment intermediary Purpose Built Communities, remains one of the country’s best-known success stories.
Yet sustaining these gains at scale and across decades has proven elusive almost everywhere they have been attempted. The test for Dickens’ Neighborhood Reinvestment Initiative is whether its disciplined site selection, financing mechanics and execution culture can do what most place-based efforts have not: hold the gains long enough for the next generation to inherit them.
Governing's opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing's editors or management.
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