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City of Cameras
Atlanta is the most surveilled city in the United States. With 124.14 surveillance cameras per 1,000 people, we not only lead the country, we have more than twice as many cameras per capita as 2nd ranked Washington, DC and more than four times as many as 3rd ranked Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. But no matter how surveilled we are here in Atlanta, it never seems to be enough for our city’s leaders.
A few years ago, the city council considered requiring all new commercial and residential buildings within the city limits to install surveillance cameras. Another proposal was targeted at ensuring a working surveillance camera was mounted on every single 24-hour gas pump in the city. Wealthy white neighborhoods in the city have taken to raising money themselves to install more of these devices. We’ve even got privately-run apartment complexes employing robotic AI surveillance dogs monitored by low-wage laborers in Colombia. Despite all the ways that surveillance has shifted to focusing on the digital traces produced by our phones and social media activity, video monitoring of our collective existence in, and movements through, public space remain central to the modern carceral state. And the City of Atlanta has latched onto basically every surveillance technology that exists for precisely this purpose.
But for all the ink spilled about Atlanta’s expansive and ever-growing surveillance network, journalists, academics and activists haven’t previously been able to identify where these cameras actually are. That’s because the Atlanta Police Department (APD) has, to my knowledge, rejected every single open records request for this information (including my own!) on the specious grounds that releasing it would lead to terrorism. Given that the purported promise of these surveillance cameras is creating a comprehensive, real-time view of the city, it’s deeply ironic that the city obstructs the public’s view of the system itself. As long as I’ve wanted to follow the geographer Brian Jordan Jefferson’s suggestion to use “the digital infrastructure of the racial state against itself, turning its tendency to document everything into a vulnerability, scrutinizing its datasets, producing data on the practices it seeks to hide,” because of the city’s intransigence about sharing this data, we’ve had no way to turn the proverbial camera around and get the same kind of comprehensive picture… until now.
About a year-and-a-half ago, the good folks at the Atlanta Community Press Collective reached out because they’d seen me griping online about my aforementioned open records request being denied. Turns out that, in the course of fulfilling a separate, unrelated open records request, the APD had shared with them an Excel spreadsheet with a list of 1,755 video surveillance cameras and automated license plate readers (LPRs) and their approximate locations. Combining that dataset with another 152 proposed locations for cameras and LPRs that I was able to get my hands on via an open records request, we were able to deduce locations for 1,878 of these devices. All in all, we had the location for 1,158 video cameras and 568 LPRs, along with 68 proposed video cameras and 84 proposed LPRs.
Of course, this number pales in comparison to the total of over 60,000 cameras attributed to the city in their #1 ranking, or even the nearly 45,000 cameras listed as “connected” or “integrated” on Connect Atlanta’s website as of writing. That’s because the vast majority of the cameras in the city that are connected to the Atlanta Police Foundation (APF)-funded Loudermilk Video Integration Center (VIC) are not owned and operated by the city itself. Instead, these larger numbers include cameras that are privately-owned and/or operated, whether by individual homeowners and businesses, or by larger institutions, like the 140 cameras owned and operated by the Midtown Alliance, 1,100 operated by Georgia State University (not to mention countless others on Atlanta college and university campuses), or even the 20,000+ cameras owned and operated by MARTA. These cameras are then either fully integrated into the VIC for real-time monitoring or are registered with the APD such that footage can be accessed on demand.
This means that what we’ve been able to map here represents no more than 4.2% of the City of Atlanta’s total surveillance capacity, and probably even less. But given that our total number of locatable cameras is only off by two from this August 2023 snapshot of the system, we think it represents a reasonably good proxy for the cameras owned and operated by the city itself (at least as of a couple years ago), and the geographies that APD has prioritized for continued surveillance. Any better picture of the geography of surveillance in Atlanta would require a successful lawsuit challenging the APD’s claim that such records are exempt from the Georgia Open Records Act, or an insanely herculean effort to crowdsource the locations of an additional 58,000 cameras (which probably isn’t the best use of anybody’s time).
So where are all of these cameras located? As the table below shows, Downtown Atlanta is the most surveilled neighborhood in the city, with most of the rest of the top 10 neighborhoods being located on the city’s predominantly Black west and south sides. Of the 411 cameras Downtown, 93 are located at APD’s headquarters and another 68 are in City Hall, potentially making these two buildings the most surveilled places in the entire city. And yet, that doesn’t seem to stop some of the people who work there from doing all kinds of nonsense that is substantially more criminal and damaging in both its intent and its effect than whatever the surveillance cameras they’ve got embedded throughout the rest of the city are picking up.
Neighborhood Total # of Cameras #1. Downtown 411 #2. Perkerson 52 #3. English Avenue 50 #4. Vine City 49 #5. Old Fourth Ward 42 #6. West End 40 #7. North Buckhead 39 #8. Atlanta University Center 38 #9-T. Midtown 31 #9-T. Tuxedo Park 31 Top 10 Neighborhoods by Total Number of City-Owned Surveillance Cameras Given how much these interior cameras can distort our geographic picture, we’ve filtered them out and broken down the following maps by type of surveillance device. The map on the left in green represents the concentrations of just those exterior-facing conventional video surveillance cameras, while the one on the right shows the locations of LPRs on their own. Even still, Downtown and the neighborhoods surrounding it continue to show up as the primary hotspots, with some barely perceptible differences between their respective geographies otherwise.
By putting the two data sources into conversation with one another via calculating an odds ratio as we do in the map below, we can suss out some of the finer distinctions between the geographies of video cameras and LPRs. This also allows us to compare the relative balance of the two types even though there are roughly twice as many video cameras as LPRs across the full dataset. So here, any of the areas marked in green have a higher-than-expected concentration of video cameras, while those in shades of purple have more LPRs than one would expect based on the overall balance of the two device types. Though the pattern isn’t dramatic, the biggest clustering of LPR-dominant areas is located throughout Buckhead, while most of those more generally surveilled areas in and around Downtown have either a balance of cameras and LPRs or more cameras than expected. While nothing more than speculation, it seems this could reflect a strategy of APD seeking to surveil the city’s most populated neighborhoods, along with those that are otherwise predominantly Black, with video cameras pointed at street level, while the LPRs concentrated in wealthy and whiter neighborhoods reflect a means of drawing a boundary around these spaces, assuming that any crime will be captured by cars entering or exiting the neighborhood.
But do these cameras actually do anything to help prevent or solve crime? Or do they just record it? Several years ago, APF claimed that these cameras reduce crime 20-50% in their vicinity, but more recently they’ve revised that figure down to just 5%. The only evidence that’s been shared publicly to support these claims is entirely anecdotal. Given that the APD won’t release the full data necessary to fully evaluate these relationships – not to mention the fact that data on crime is extremely unreliable, if not functionally useless, in the first place – there’s no reason for us to take these claims seriously. The people responsible for managing these cameras don’t even know how many of them there are. APD has even admitted to something like 10-20% of their cameras not working at any one time, either because of problems with the technology or their own administrative incompetence. So if these cameras don’t actually stop crime or help to solve it, what are they for?
The City of Atlanta’s massive investment in surveillance technology represents both a strategy of counterinsurgency and a kind of “extractive abandonment”. That is, it is a means of criminalizing and repressing social movements, political protest and dissent, as well as a way to commodify the general neglect of certain people and places into a publicly-funded revenue stream for private corporations when those dollars could be better spent actually providing the kind of meaningful services to Atlantans that prevents “crime” from happening in the first place.
Even if these maps represent just a fraction of the full surveillance infrastructure blanketed across the city, they represent the first time that we’ve been able to visualize the geography of Atlanta’s surveillance cameras in this way. And if the APD believes this data is an insufficient or inappropriate sample, they’re more than free to release the full dataset on surveillance camera locations to the public for everyone’s benefit.
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Banking on Location
Access to banking and credit are the kind of mundane concerns that exist in the background of our everyday lives, right up until the moments when we really need them, like when we need a mortgage to buy a house or a short-term loan to cover the next week’s expenses. Unfortunately, like so many other aspects of life in America, access to banking and sustainable sources of credit is geographically uneven, split across lines of class and race with wealthier and whiter communities served by institutions that help them build long-term wealth, while poorer communities and communities of color are served primarily by more predatory alternatives. Atlanta is no exception here, and as the city with the largest racial income inequality in the country, and a similarly large racial wealth gap, accurately measuring whose neighborhoods and communities have reliable access to financial services is an important step in creating a more equitable city for all.
This editorial cartoon by Doug Marlette appeared in the May 3, 1988 edition of The Atlanta Constitution alongside Bill Dedman’s series “The Color of Money” Banking and lending inequalities are not a new concern here in Atlanta. Indeed, it was AJC journalist Bill Dedman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning series “The Color of Money” in 1988 that documented the extent of racist mortgage lending in Atlanta and led to significant reforms in mortgage lending around the country. However, lending requirements are only one part of banking access. Just as important is the issue of where banks are actually located. And as recent work from the Atlanta Regional Commission has shown, bank branch closures since the Great Recession have created a number of so-called “banking deserts” across the metro where communities are spatially isolated from banks. However, focusing on banking deserts only looks at where banks aren’t located. It doesn’t tell us what areas of the metro have lots of banks (and thus many options) and those that have only a few, nor does it show us where other potentially predatory financial services are located, and how the two might be related.
In a newly published article with Taylor Shelton in the journal Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, we map the differences in where conventional banks and alternative financial services (or AFS) are located across the Atlanta metro. Starting from the ARC’s 10-county definition of the Atlanta metro, we identify a total of 972 banks and 492 AFS, including everything from check cashers and pawnshops to payday lenders and title loan offices. We were particularly interested in these AFS because many researchers and activists argue that they create barriers that prevent economically vulnerable communities from building healthy savings and credit opportunities while targeting them with predatory, high-interest loans that lock people into debt spirals. So, given the fact that there are almost twice as many banks as AFS in the metro area, we might assume that Atlanta is doing pretty well on the financial opportunity front, but the geography of these services tells a very different story.
The map above shows us the difference between conventional bank and AFS accessibility around the Atlanta metro. Blue areas are served predominantly by banks, while red areas have more AFS. Areas in the darkest colors, like central Fulton County and along the Buford Highway/I-85 corridor to the city’s northeast, have large amounts of both, and areas in gray have very few of either service. The northern portion of the metro area clearly has better access to conventional banks, while the southern-central areas are overwhelmingly served by predatory alternatives, and a number of places in the outer reaches of the metro area have very few financial services of any kind. The map below shows this same thing in a more straightforward way by comparing an area’s ratio of bank-to-AFS to the ratio for the whole metro, or what’s known as an odds ratio. Areas in pink have more banks than the metro average, while areas in green have more AFS than average. In total, these maps complicate the somewhat simplistic idea of banking deserts, instead showing that even in places where there are banks, the banking and finance industry provides fundamentally unequal services that tend towards the more predatory end of the spectrum.
Long-time readers of this blog – or even those of you with just a passing familiarity with Atlanta – will have noticed some clear demographic differences between these different geographic areas served by banks and those served by AFS. Unsurprisingly, we see a consistent pattern where wealthier, whiter areas have higher access to banks and lower access to AFS, and poorer, predominantly Black areas have relatively little access to banks and higher concentrations of AFS. To put it somewhat differently, across the wealthier and whiter areas in the northern part of the metro, people have abundant access to capital. But in the predominantly Black, southern part of the metro, capital has access to people. While living near different kinds of financial services certainly doesn’t necessarily mean that they are equally available or harmful to everyone, we can clearly see that exclusion from (or predatory inclusion into) this system follows the same time-worn patterns of racial and class exclusion we’ve come to expect here in Atlanta and across the country.
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Food Halls For Who?
It feels like every week there’s a new food hall concept being opened or announced somewhere across metro Atlanta. Sometimes, a new food hall opens, then gets closed down within a couple months, then reopens again under new management less than a year later. This flurry of food hall openings in recent years has given metro Atlanta a total of 15 different food halls, with another nine in the planning or development stages.
Atlanta is, of course, not alone amongst US cities in getting swept up in this latest fad. The US currently has upwards of 360 food halls scattered across the country, and another 127 more expected to open this year. Given the figures cited above, this does mean that metro Atlanta is home to more than 4% of all food halls across the country, despite having less than 2% of the country’s total population.
While we can’t be entirely sure whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, there is definitely some truth to the headline on local food writer Beth McKibben’s Eater Atlanta rundown of all of the city’s food halls: “Like It or Not, Food Halls Are Here to Stay in Atlanta”. But the reason food halls are here to stay isn’t necessarily because they offer the best food in the world or the most ideal dining experiences. Food halls are here to stay because the food hall has become a fundamental piece of 21st century real estate development.
On the one hand, it’s only natural for food halls – or something like them – to pop up alongside other kinds of new residential and commercial development. People need somewhere to eat after all, and why not give them a greater diversity of options to choose from? But food halls also represent a hedge by real estate developers who might otherwise face trouble when a full-service restaurant on their property doesn’t pan out. Food halls allow for more rapid turnover of tenants because it minimizes the overhead on the part of each individual restauranteur. So instead of a prominent restaurant space sitting completely vacant for months on end, food halls allow for an “out with the old, in with the new” ethos with minimal constraints.
This preference for newness and change also mirrors the logic of real estate and urban development more broadly. And it’s certainly reflected in the form of change we’re perhaps most accustomed to talking about here in Atlanta: gentrification. Even as all of the new development taking place across the city is rejuvenating certain neighborhoods and replenishing the tax base, it isn’t uncommon to look at it all and wonder: who is this actually for?
Mapping the locations of Atlanta’s food halls yields a clear answer to the aforementioned question: if a food hall isn’t located in or immediately adjacent to a heavily gentrified or gentrifying neighborhood, it’s in an neighborhood that’s already so wealthy and white that gentrification isn’t even possible.
Of the 14 open or planned food halls within Atlanta’s city limits, just one – Citizens Market at Phipps Plaza in Buckhead – is not in, or immediately adjacent to, a census tract that has lost a significant chunk of its Black residents in the last two decades. Meanwhile, the city’s two most famous food halls – Ponce City Market and Krog Street Market – are practically the posterchildren for the massive gentrification that’s taken place along the Eastside Beltline in the last decade-plus. So the location of all these food halls is no accident, but the latest manifestation of the larger process of gentrification that’s been reshaping the city for the last decade-plus.
Perhaps the lone exception to this rule is in the city’s oldest (and only publicly-owned) food hall, the Sweet Auburn Curb Market, which was initially founded in 1918 before establishing a permanent home in its current building in 1924. The curb market is one of just two existing food halls across metro Atlanta to be located in a majority Black census tract, along with the recently opened Lee + White Food Hall along the Beltline’s Southside trail in the West End neighborhood (which only further confirms the more general rule described above).
So while new amenities and some halfway decent (and at least a few genuinely good) restaurants can be a nice thing for some of us, it’s always important to ask who these things are meant to be for and who they benefit – even if the answer rarely changes.
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Atlanta’s Shifting Solar Geographies
In 2019, the City of Atlanta adopted its Clean Energy Atlanta plan, which called for the city to achieve 100% clean energy generation by 2035. While increasing the production of clean and renewable energy is an absolute necessity in the face of global climate change, the city has made minimal tangible progress on this goal in the years since.1 The state of Georgia has nonetheless done a good job producing solar power, though public policies meant to protect utility companies like Georgia Power have meant that over 90% of this power is generated by large commercial solar farms, rather than the rooftops of everyday citizens.
In a new paper published in the journal Energy Research & Social Science, my former graduate student Carys Behnke and I examine how and where residential rooftop solar is being adopted across the City of Atlanta, and who ultimately benefits from it.2 Using data on rooftop solar installation permits from 2018 through 2022, we mapped the locations of all 539 confirmed installations across the city. As the map below shows, the rooftop solar generation is considerably uneven, collecting mostly in affluent and white eastside neighborhoods like Kirkwood, Lake Claire, Morningside-Lenox Park, Virginia-Highland, and Ansley Park, mirroring nationwide patterns.
These aggregate numbers give Atlanta one of the lowest solar adoption rates of any major US city. But the city’s rooftop solar market has grown substantially over the past five years, going from approximately 50 residential solar installations in 2017 to at least 539 by the close of 2022, for an 860% increase in these five years. This growth has been especially concentrated in just the last couple of years of our data. From 2018 through 2020, the city saw a total of just 151 residential rooftop solar installations. That number was exceeded in both 2021 and 2022, which saw 215 and 173 new installations, respectively.
But amid this general growth in residential rooftop solar across Atlanta, it’s worth noting how much of a spatial shift has occurred in where these installations are located. Unlike the early adopters on the city’s eastside, a majority of new residential solar permits in 2021 and 2022 have been in majority or plurality Black neighborhoods on the south and west sides. While there had been a total of just 20 residential solar installations in such neighborhoods through the end of 2020 – good for just 16% of the city’s total – of the 388 solar permits added in 2021 and 2022, 56% were in predominantly Black neighborhoods, a pattern that’s evident in the map below.
On its face, this would seem to suggest that through a spatial redistribution of rooftop solar into the city’s predominantly Black neighborhoods, Atlanta maybe making progress in closing the racial gap in residential rooftop solar adoption and evening the solar-generating playing field. It’s important to remember, however, that just because rooftop solar is being installed in a majority Black neighborhood doesn’t mean that it is necessarily Black people who are doing it or benefitting from it. The concentration of rooftop solar moving from one part of the city to another doesn’t tell the whole story when people and capital are moving at the same time and in the same direction.
Indeed, as our paper suggests through an in-depth analysis of property records associated with these rooftop solar installations, much of the growth of rooftop solar in majority Black neighborhoods is being driven by wealthier (and likely whiter) newcomers rather than longstanding locals. So instead of the arrival of rooftop solar meaning lower energy bills and a cleaner environment, in Atlanta’s majority Black neighborhoods it is more likely to mean gentrification and displacement.
From higher rates of owner turnover to histories of foreclosure and speculative investment, the same homes that are installing solar across Atlanta’s Black neighborhoods provide further evidence of broader inequalities in urban housing markets, especially with regards to the historic and ongoing exploitation of Black people and places. So while the spatial shift of rooftop solar out of the almost exclusively wealthy and white neighborhoods may seem to be a good thing, our evidence suggests that this spatial shift has done little to change the social profile of rooftop solar adopters or make the transition to clean energy more equitable.
- Indeed, Atlanta saw its climate actions plans achieve the ignominious ranking as one of the five worst among US cities. [↩]
- If you don’t have access to paywalled academic journal articles, you can always download a copy of the paper from my personal website. [↩]
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Housing Atlanta’s Public
Atlanta sits at the center of the history of public housing in America. We were home to the country’s first-ever federally-funded public housing complex, Techwood Homes, in 1936. A little over half a century later, Atlanta had the 5th largest public housing program of any city in the country, with a total of 45 different complexes and roughly 15,000 units housing over 50,000 residents, despite being considerably smaller than many of the cities both ahead of and behind it.
But then, in the wake of the 1996 Olympics, we were the first city to demolish our public housing to pilot the HOPE VI model of mixed-income development, ironically enough, in order to demolish the very same housing project that started the whole thing off. And another decade-plus later we became the first city in the country to completely demolish all of its conventional low-income public housing developments.
While Atlanta’s public housing was plagued with many of the same problems that public housing across the country faced due to underfunding and neglect, it also represented a cornerstone of life in Atlanta. It was one of the key means by which Black women in the city built and exercised political power. It gave rise to some of the city’s best-known artists and cultural producers. But in a city that’s rapidly gentrified since – and in part because of – the demolition of this extensive public housing stock, it’s really the loss of those 13,000 or so units of housing affordable to the city’s poorest residents that hits the hardest.
Like so many other things we’ve touched on here on the blog, analyzing the geography of Atlanta’s public housing – past and present – helps us to understand the full scope of what was lost, what could’ve been and what still could be. Drawing on numbers from my friend and colleague Katherine Hankins’ research into public housing in Atlanta, the maps and figures below provide an alternative visualization of the city’s public housing geographies.
Of the nearly 13,000 units of public housing demolished by the city in the 1990s and 2000s, over half of these units were within two miles of the city’s center at Five Points. Another nearly 2,000 units sat within another mile out from the city center. So the loss of Atlanta’s public housing didn’t simply represent a net loss of affordable housing within the city, it especially represented a net loss of affordable housing in the city that was actually accessible by foot or by transit.
Not all of the city’s public housing was so accessible though. In fact, as others have previously written, starting in the 1970s many of the Atlanta Housing Authority’s developments began to be built further out from the city’s urban core precisely because local leaders were worried about so many poor Black folks living in close proximity to the central business district. Indeed, while the average public housing complex in Atlanta built in the 1930s and 1940s was barely a mile as the crow flies from Five Points, this distance increased to 2.75 miles for complexes built in the 1950s and 1960s, and then further to 3.79 miles for complexes built in the 1970s and further to 6.16 miles for complexes built in the 1980s. And yet, even as the city commenced building projects further away from the urban core, they failed to deliver the infrastructure that was necessary for those residents. This is most infamously the case with Perry Homes, which was promised – but never delivered – an extension of MARTA’s green line train.
In addition, many of the later-constructed developments began to shift in both their form and target population. Rather than low-rise, garden style apartments for families, 12 of the last 15 developments constructed by AHA in the 1970s and early 1980s were high-rise buildings meant for the elderly. While not all of these buildings survived the wrecking ball, these senior high-rises represent just about all that’s left of the conventional public housing stock within the City of Atlanta, totaling just over 2,000 units, though they’re now managed by third-party property managers. Ironically, because this kind of senior high-rise housing was pretty much the only kind of public housing built in Atlanta’s whiter and wealthier northeast quadrant, we’re actually in a position today where this part of the city is home to most of the truly public housing left in the city.
Even though some of the sites were replaced by new developments, these have all been mixed-income communities meant to “deconcentrate poverty” by limiting the number of poor people who live within them. Even if each replacement project had the exact same number of units as the one it is replacing – and they rarely do – only a small number of the total replacement units are set aside for low income residents, and an even smaller proportion for the very low income residents who traditionally made up AHA’s clientele. Part of that gap is filled through the use of Section 8 vouchers, but which are again limited in number and rely on the beneficence of landlords to participate in the program, which they are under no obligation to do because source of income is not included in the Georgia Fair Housing Act. And finding someone to take a voucher is no guarantee that the unit will be centrally located or accessible in the same way that much of Atlanta’s public housing once was.
So what’s the solution? Well, build more public housing!
And, ironically, because the city demolished so much of its public housing in the 1990s, it actually has quite a bit of room to grow its public housing stock. The Faircloth Amendment, passed in 1998, caps the number of public housing units a city can have at the total it had on October 1,1999. Atlanta’s Faircloth Limit sits at 11,965, or nearly 9,800 more units of public housing than the city currently has. So whereas other cities are unable to grow their public housing portfolios even when they have the will to do so, Atlanta has considerable room to use this as the most direct tool in the city’s toolkit for expanding the supply of deeply affordable housing.
The fact that the city is openly toying with the idea of European-style social housing like that found in Vienna is a positive indication, though the reality remains that the need is greatest for the poorest residents who were once served by the city’s public housing. But as long as the number of housing units, their price and location is dictated by the private market and the pursuit of profit, the needs of regular people are going to continue to go unmet. Just as Atlanta was a leader in earlier eras of public housing experimentation – both good and bad – the city not only could be a leader in developing a new era of high-quality housing for everyone, it needs to be.
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The Real Outside Agitators
For the last several months, the mayor, chief of police, state attorney general and local media have been at pains to paint the struggle to Stop Cop City as one comprised primarily of so-called “outside agitators”. A classic ploy of reactionaries seeking to maintain their power, the outside agitators narrative is meant to muddy the reality of intense local opposition to Cop City, as seen in both virtual and in-person public comment at council meetings, as well as in polling by Emory University political scientists.
In arguably the most definitive example of this genre when it comes to Cop City, the AJC’s chief in-house purveyor of nonsense not only called protestors “privileged, transient warriors”, but also decided to engage in a bit of bean counting, noting that of “a total of 48 people have been arrested…five were Georgians and three were Black”.1 But for some reason, Bill Torpy and other Cop City apologists haven’t decided to apply that same logic to those who are responsible for forcing Cop City on us all in the first place. Indeed, if there are any outside agitators to be found in this struggle, they’re to be found among the project’s boosters.
With the help of my graduate student Ryan Pardue, we used a combination of publicly accessible property ownership records, voter registration data and online directory information to identify and map where the people responsible for Cop City actually live. Surprise, surprise! It isn’t anywhere close to the site in unincorporated south DeKalb where they’re proposing (and have already begun) to tear down hundreds of acres of forest in order to build a playground for the police. That is, the countless points made by the opposition about the negative effects of the project on the surrounding community can be easily ignored because the people pushing the project aren’t going to have to deal with the constant sounds of gunshots or increased flooding due to deforestation that are sure to come with it.
In our investigation, we’re particularly interested in four organizations that are at the center of Atlanta’s governing regime and the push to build Cop City: the city’s elected officials, the Atlanta Police Foundation board, the Atlanta Committee for Progress and the Buckhead Coalition. Perhaps accidentally, perhaps not, these institutions mirror the corporate, political and military interests at the heart of sociologist C. Wright Mills’ mid-20th century expose of the nation’s “power elite”. Regardless, they have been the primary institutional vehicles responsible for constructing the current panic around crime and policing in Atlanta, especially in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, and tend to be made up of representatives from Atlanta’s most powerful corporations and non-profits.
We’ve also added to our analysis the mayor’s recently announced “South River Forest and Public Safety Training Center Community Task Force”, which is officially responsible for representing Atlanta’s citizens when it comes to the planning for Cop City.2 That being said, it’s important to recognize that the members of this task force aren’t really key players in the Atlanta power structure, but have been assembled together in order to launder the reputations of those who are under the guise of ‘community participation’. And so while these individuals tend to be somewhat more representative of the larger Atlanta community than the business leaders who are calling the shots, many of them nonetheless maintain close ties to these organizations and other powerful individuals.
Cumulatively we identified a total of 293 individuals listed as members of the organizations in question (in a number of cases individuals belong to more than one), and were able to identify likely home addresses for 291 of these. We then calculated the distances between them and the proposed site of Cop City in the Weelaunee Forest, as well as the average demographics of the neighborhoods in which these people live. While the geographic makeup of these different organizations’ membership exists along a spectrum, it is universally true that the people charged with pushing this project through are in no way representative of the community where the project is being sited, and in most cases aren’t representative of Atlanta in general. Given fact that (with the exception of elected officials) anywhere from 35-45% of these various organizations actually live outside of the city itself, there’s no way they could be representative of a place they aren’t even from!
One particularly salient example of such an outsider is Dave Wilkinson, the executive director of the Atlanta Police Foundation and arguably the primary individual driver behind Cop City, who lives basically a full hour outside the city in southern Fayette County. Wilkinson is hardly an outlier though, as the average individual in our dataset lives 25 miles away from proposed site, with the average distance for the Atlanta Committee for Progress being over 90 miles due to the number of non-local business representatives who sit on the board.
All Orgs Atlanta Police Foundation Atlanta Committee for Progress Buckhead Coalition Community Task Force Elected Officials Total Individuals 291 87 34 124 41 17 Within City of Atlanta 184
(63.2%)52
(59.8%)19
(55.9%)74
(59.7%)27
(65.9%)17
(100%)Within Buckhead 117
(40.2%)39
(44.8%)8
(23.5%)71
(57.3%)2
(4.9%)2
(11.8%)Within 5 miles 13
(4.5%)1
(1.1%)1
(2.9%)0
(0%)8
(19.5%)3
(17.6%)Within 10 miles 67
(23%)15
(17.2%)11
(32.4%)5
(4.0%)25
(60.9%)11
(64.7%)Within 15 miles 196
(67.4%)54
(62%)20
(58.8%)76
(61.3%)33
(80.5%)17
(100%)Within 20 miles 244
(83.8%)64
(73.6%)28
(82.4%)109
(87.9%)36
(87.8%)17
(100%)Within 25 miles 257
(88.3%)74
(85.1%)28
(82.4%)112
(90.3%)37
(90.2%)17
(100%)Within 50 miles 281
(96.6%)84
(96.6%)30
(88.2%)120
(96.8%)41
(100%)17
(100%)In Majority Black Census Tracts 33
(11.3%)4
(4.6%)23
(5.9%)1
(0.8%)18
(43.9%)8
(47.1%)Of the 291 individuals we were able to map, less than a quarter live within 10 miles of the proposed Cop City site and only 13 live within five miles. The only individual who actually lives within a mile of the proposed site is Marc Bolden, president of the Boulder Walk Neighborhood Association and a media darling for those who want to further the outside agitator narrative. But Bolden himself is a newcomer to the neighborhood, having moved from Brookhaven in 2018 before being promptly installed as neighborhood association president by another pro-Cop City resident who has been instrumental in providing cover for the APF and city through her role on the original Community Stakeholder Advisory Committee. So even where the distance is smaller, the makeup of these organizations is still heavily tilted towards those who are otherwise connected to or dependent upon the larger power structure.
Beyond their sheer distance from the proposed site of Cop City, the vast majority of these individuals live in communities that are fundamentally different from the one they’re forcing this facility on. According to 2015-2019 American Community Survey data from the Census Bureau, the neighborhood surrounding the proposed Cop City site is over two-thirds Black, has a median household income of less than $45,000 (with over a third of residents living below the poverty line) and a median home value of less than $170,000. Meanwhile, the average member of the Atlanta power structure lives in a neighborhood that is just 20% Black, where the median household income exceeds $115,000 and the median home value is over $550,000. While these numbers are less stark for Atlanta’s elected officials and the members of the Community Task Force, they’re even more significant if you look at the members of the APF’s various advisory boards (especially if you exclude the members of their Young Executives Board, who are also a bit more geographically and demographically diverse than the rest of the organization’s leadership), the Atlanta Committee for Progress or the Buckhead Coalition, who live in even whiter and/or wealthier neighborhoods.
Tract 238.02 City of Atlanta All Orgs Atlanta Police Foundation Atlanta Committee for Progress Buckhead Coalition Community Task Force Elected Officials Average
Median Household Income$44,675 $59,948 $116,523 $120,642 $108,024 $137,301 $81,444 $69,745 Average
Median
Home Value$168,800 $290,400 $553,568 $565,779 $519,088 $693,388 $303,395 $290,565 Average %
Black Population67.5% 51.0% 20.0% 15.4% 13.4% 9.4% 48.6% 56.7% In fact, even for those individuals who do happen to live within the Atlanta city limits, nearly two-thirds of them live in Buckhead, making them hardly representative of the city as a whole. And even though each of these entities have a number of Black members, with the exception of the Atlanta City Council and the Community Task Force, almost none of these Black folks live in Black neighborhoods. Indeed, more members of the Atlanta Police Foundation’s senior leadership live 50+ miles away from the Cop City site than live in majority Black neighborhoods around Atlanta. But these are apparently supposed to be people we should trust when it comes to doing what’s best for long-marginalized Black communities like those in unincorporated South DeKalb. These are neighborhoods that have never gotten the benefits of infrastructure improvements or political representation that could come with being annexed into the city proper, but which are now receiving all manner of new problems because of their exclusion from the city.
Considerable ink has been spilled dissecting “The Atlanta Way”, the name given to the practices of the city’s multiracial power structure that emerged in the mid-20th century. We’ve known that this power structure exists and how it operates. But it’s important to recognize that this power structure also has a spatial structure. It doesn’t take much to know that Buckhead runs the show around here, but these maps show that Atlanta’s power structure isn’t just based in what Dan Immergluck has called the city’s “favored northern quarter”. Indeed, a good portion of that power structure lies outside the city itself, stretching across the Atlanta metro, the state of Georgia and even further afield, accommodating regional, national, and global capital as much as its local counterparts. And yet these individuals and institutions choose to use that power to push more militarized police as the solution to practically every social problem, against the wishes of regular Atlanta residents.
So who are the real outside agitators after all?
- It has, of course, widely been documented that of the people initially detained by the police, nearly all of those with Atlanta or Georgia addresses were released specifically in order to cultivate this narrative. [↩]
- We made the choice, however, to leave out the “Community Stakeholder Advisory Committee”, due to the difficulty in knowing exactly who is on it, as well as the fact that the problems plaguing the CSAC were largely resolved through Dickens’ creation of the “Community Task Force” to replace it. [↩]
- The two members of the Atlanta Committee for Progress who live in majority Black census tracts are the two presidents of Spelman and Clark Atlanta University, who live in their universities’ respective on-campus presidential houses. [↩]
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Corporate Landlords Redux
Last month, we shared a snapshot of the landscape of large corporate single family landlords across metro Atlanta, showing that just the top ten of these companies own over 30,000 properties here in the five core counties. Since then, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution published an investigation into these landlords that lends additional credence to the countless other pieces of evidence about these investors and their exploitation of tenants across Atlanta and the rest of the country. Using a more extensive set of records of property ownership across six additional counties, the AJC ultimately arrives at a figure of over 65,000 single family homes owned by these institutional investors across the metro.
The AJC story even scooped a bit of work we’ve been doing – again in partnership with friend and colleague Eric Seymour – that shifts from treating all of these corporate landlords under one big umbrella to looking at them one-by-one. In the maps in the AJC’s investigation, they focus in particular on the five biggest single family landlords around Atlanta – Invitation Homes, Pretium Partners, Amherst Holdings, American Homes 4 Rent and Tricon American Homes – but also include other similar companies under one catch-all banner.
Like the Dangerous Dwellings series from last summer – that we also added some more geographic context to – this latest investigation does an excellent job at telling the stories of the tenants who have been so negatively affected by the predatory and exploitative practices of these corporate landlords. But in our eyes, the story also makes one subtle mistake when it comes to characterizing the geographic logic behind these companies’ property acquisitions. In their initial story, Brian Eason and John Perry write that “…disproportionately, investors buy in places with entry-level homes and in communities of color”. This isn’t wrong per se, but it also isn’t entirely true either.
Not all corporate landlords target communities of color. Some do, but some tend to stay away from them as much as possible and instead prefer to buy in predominantly white neighborhoods. While all of these corporate landlords follow a similar script in their overall business models, they’ve also developed unique spatial strategies for their property investments that mean we can’t paint them all with the same broad brush. Essentially, these companies have learned to target different kinds of neighborhoods with different demographic characteristics in order to avoid competing with one another, which in turns allows each company to maximize their market power and their profits.
Because of these differences, it’s important to tease apart these spatial strategies in a more comprehensive way rather than treating any individual firm as a synecdoche for the broader phenomenon. Even cartographically speaking, the way that the AJC mapped all of the properties for these firms as individual dots ultimately obscures just how concentrated investments are in certain places, and makes it harder to untangle the particularities of each firm’s investment strategies.
To examine these patterns in more detail, we mapped an odds ratio for the properties held by each of the ten largest corporate single family landlords across the five core counties of metro Atlanta,1 which you can see in the maps below. In effect, an odds ratio is a measure of local-scale concentration relative to a baseline value for a larger population at a broader scale. Values greater than 1, signified in the green shading in the maps below, mean that there is more of that thing in that place than we would expect if everything were distributed perfectly evenly across space. Values less than 1, shown in purple here, mean that there’s relatively less of that thing than we would have expected in that place.
So in this case the odds ratio lets us see where each corporate landlord’s investments are geographically specialized relative to the overall number of single family rental properties across the metro area which, as you can see, differ dramatically from firm to firm. It is important to note that just because a given firm is underrepresented in a given place doesn’t mean that that firm doesn’t own any properties – or even a lot of them! – in that place. It just means that they own a smaller share of the properties there than we would have expected.
Despite the subtle variations from firm to firm here, one major geographic trend holds true across all of these different companies: private equity-controlled firms are significantly more likely to concentrate their investments in predominantly Black and more working-class suburbs in the southern parts of the metro, while publicly-traded REITs tend to invest in whiter (but still fairly diverse) and more middle-class suburbs in the more northern parts of the metro across Cobb and Gwinnett counties. If we aggregate the three publicly-traded REITs (Invitation, AH4R and Tricon) together and the other seven private equity-controlled firms together and compare them directly using the same odds ratio measure, we can see this pattern quite clearly in the map below.
This is, in short, yet another instance of Atlanta’s ur-choropleths in action. Like practically everything else about this city, the geographies of corporate landlords respond to – and reinforce – the racial divisions that have been inscribed into Atlanta’s landscape for roughly a century and a half (even though they have, of course, evolved over this time).
And so while we think it’s important to understand precisely which companies are making their money off of targeting Atlanta’s working-class Black families, this isn’t meant to absolve any of these other companies for their less explicitly racist, but no less exploitative business models. But without knowing who we’re targeting and why, we’ll continue to struggle to make inroads in fully understanding the effects and fighting against these corporate behemoths.
- Our top ten list here is ever so slightly different than the one in the map we posted back in January. Here we’ve replaced properties owned by Home Partners for America with those owned by Starwood Capital. All other companies remain the same, though some of the values for each firm have also changed in that time as we’ve ironed out some kinks in our methodology. [↩]
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Atlanta’s Corporate Landlords
For the last decade, the Atlanta metro has been ground zero for corporate investors buying up single-family homes to turn into rental properties. Studies have consistently shown that more so than any other single metropolitan area across the country, these firms have focused on Atlanta and its suburban fringes, leading Dan Immergluck to label Atlanta a ‘private equity strike zone’.
The emergence of corporate-owned single-family rentals was fueled initially by the glut of homes held by banks and the federal government in the wake of the foreclosure crisis. Eager to rid themselves of these properties and their potential liabilities, these various institutions sold off hundreds and even thousands of properties directly to corporate investors who were more than willing to take them off their hands for bargain bin prices.
But one of the features of this incredible flow of corporate cash into Atlanta is that it never really stops. Even though a number of studies have looked at the concentration of corporate landlords across Atlanta, these studies are outdated almost as soon as they’re published because these investors are constantly snapping up more and more properties. At the same time, new firms have popped up seeking to emulate these business models, further expanding the reach of these corporations into the housing market. This has led to the point where corporate investors made up more than 40% of metro Atlanta home purchases in the latter months of 2021. And as Elora Raymond has shown in her recent research here in Atlanta, more corporate ownership of housing almost invariably means more evictions and more displacement of Black residents.
Using the most up-to-date property ownership data available, I have – along with my friend and collaborator Eric Seymour – been working on mapping the largest of these corporate single-family landlords across the five core counties of metro Atlanta. Based on our analysis, just the ten largest single-family rental companies1 operating in the Atlanta metro own a total 29,785 homes across these counties, the concentrations of which are shown in the map below. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a good portion of this spatial pattern mirrors the racial geographies of the Atlanta metro, with more corporate landlords coming in and buying up homes in predominantly Black neighborhoods.
While it’s commonly stated that these institutional investors tend to avoid buying inside the perimeter or the City of Atlanta for a variety of reasons – one article even called it “a clear donut hole” – our analysis shows the situation to be a bit more complicated. These companies undoubtedly are much more concentrated on buying in the suburbs further out from the city center where properties tend to be cheaper, but they’ve also invested considerably within the city limits. Just within the City of Atlanta, these ten companies own 1,146 single family homes. Again, that’s only a small percentage – about 3.8% – of the total number of properties they own in the five core counties, but it’s nothing to shake a stick at either. More than avoiding the City of Atlanta altogether, it’s fairer to say that most of these corporate landlords tend to avoid buying in affluent and white neighborhoods whether they’re within or beyond the city limits. This is, however, variable depending on which company we’re talking about, as different firms tend to concentrate their property holdings within different neighborhoods in order to avoid directly competing with one another (a subject for a future post!).
What’s most remarkable about these top line numbers is not just that these companies represent by far the largest owners of residential property across Atlanta, it’s that they’ve achieved this status in incredible short order. Just a dozen or so years ago these companies didn’t even exist, much less own a considerable share of Atlanta’s – or the nation’s! – single-family rental stock. And yet, local groups like Housing Justice League have been calling attention to these new corporate landlords since at least 2014, with little to no attempt at intervention from policymakers. And now, with the problem of corporate control of housing considerably worse than it was back in 2014, the best we seem to be able to muster up are suburban municipalities’ foolhardy attempts at regulating these landlords via bans on rental housing, which have the unintended (?) effect of demonizing renters rather than the landlords that exploit them. Even still, the state steps in to quash these half-measures at slowing the pace of more and more corporate incursion into our everyday lives and the ownership of the land and housing in which we live and on which we depend.
- Ordered by the size of their holdings in metro Atlanta, the firms included in this analysis are: Invitation Homes, Pretium Partners, Amherst Holdings, Cerberus Capital, American Homes 4 Rent, Tricon American Homes, Home Partners for America, Avenue One Residential, Sylvan Homes and Vinebrook Homes. [↩]
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Placing the Police
For the last two-plus years, the place of the police in our society has been at the forefront not only here in Atlanta, but nationwide. But given the murder of Rayshard Brooks at the hands of an APD officer in the summer of 2020 and the city’s total lack of a meaningful response, followed by their steadfast refusal to consider that maybe tearing down hundreds of acres of intact forestland in order to build a playground for cops isn’t the best idea, or that maybe the solution to overcrowding in county jails isn’t more incarceration, these issues are especially prominent here in the city.
All of the love for – and desire to throw money at – the police amongst our city’s leadership belies the fact that Atlanta is already heavily invested in the police. We are already the most surveilled city in the United States, with nearly 50 surveillance cameras for every 1,000 people (NOTE: this is something we can’t map because the APD denied our open records request for data on the locations of these surveillance cameras, suggesting that sharing this data would lead to terrorism). On top of that, we’re also subject to a complex and overlapping set of police and security agencies with the power to control our everyday lives and subject us (and definitely some of us more than others) to violence with impunity.
As my friend and collaborator Steve Sherman notes in his recently published paper about policing in Atlanta, “in only the three square miles of central Atlanta, Georgia, USA, there are 11 different patrol agencies of fully sworn public sector ‘real cops’ with boots on the ground, guns at their hips, and full arrest powers”. On top of that, he documents the role of the private ‘non-sworn’ business improvement district security forces of Central Atlanta Progress and the Midtown Alliance, but doesn’t even get to touch on the DeKalb County police just a few miles to the east of downtown. Cumulatively then, when we’re talking about the police in Atlanta, we’re talking about not one, but FOURTEEN separate police and security agencies just within the city limits. Using some of the information from Steve’s paper and what resources we could find online explaining the boundaries of these overlapping jurisdictions, we mapped these 14 different agencies and their geographic remit within the City of Atlanta.
While some of these boundaries may be a bit fuzzy, we’ve opted to lean more towards a conservative definition of each jurisdiction. For instance, MARTA’s police force apparently has jurisdiction across the entirety of Fulton and DeKalb counties, but we’ve opted only to map their jurisdiction at MARTA stations and along train and bus routes. Similarly, while Emory’s police mirror the Georgia Tech and Georgia State University police in having jurisdiction anywhere within 500 yards of a university-owned property, they go a step further. According to the Emory Police website, their remit also extends to within “one-quarter mile of any public street or sidewalk connecting different buildings and campuses”. When you take into account that Emory’s main campus and Midtown Hospital location are a full five miles apart with countless roads connecting them, it doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch that Emory’s police could claim jurisdiction anywhere in that entire part of the city, rather than just the most direct route we’ve included going from Briarcliff Road to Ponce de Leon Avenue. Add onto those cases that one of the most consistent elements of the various definitions of police jurisdiction is the fact that they can seemingly be deputized to operate in other jurisdictions practically instantaneously, making all of these borders subject to change in practice.
In addition to looking at the specific boundaries of each of these police agencies, we can also look at them quantitatively to understand which part of the city have the most jurisdictional overlap. No matter where one is in the city, you’re always subject to at least two different police agencies in the form of the Atlanta Police Department and either the Fulton County or DeKalb County Police. But throughout much of the city’s central core, there is even more overlap. Based on our analysis, there are multiple places across Downtown and Midtown where a person would simultaneously be subject to seven different police agencies. This is perhaps most notable around Emory’s Midtown Hospital location, where the combination of APD, Fulton County Police, Emory Police, police from Georgia Tech or Georgia State and MARTA Police, along with the Midtown Blue and Downtown Ambassadors security forces, would all have jurisdiction. In fact, as the map below shows, pretty much all across the north-south spine that connects Downtown and Midtown, there are rarely fewer than five different police forces with jurisdiction.
It should be noted that these overlapping jurisdictions represent just one way of measuring and mapping the expanding presence of the police in our city and our everyday lives. Across countless neighborhoods in and beyond the City of Atlanta, police are unevenly distributed in their patrols, focusing on some areas more than others even when there are only one or two agencies with jurisdiction in that place. Nonetheless, these maps help to show that far from defunding – let alone abolishing – the police in Atlanta, our city’s elected officials and other leaders continue to invest in the police and entrust them with solving society’s problems, in spite of overwhelming evidence that they not only can’t solve them, but in fact actively make them worse.
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Landownership Inequality in Georgia, Past and Present
From 1897 to 1910, the eminent American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois was based at Atlanta University, where he worked to establish what is now considered the first real ‘school’ of sociology in the United States. During his early years in Atlanta, Du Bois and his students prepared a series of hand-drawn data visualizations for the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris, demonstrating the achievements of Black Americans in the face of centuries of slavery and decades of Jim Crow segregation. Given his residence in Atlanta, Du Bois used Georgia as a focused case study for many of the issues he was examining across the country. While these visualizations, like the rest of Du Bois’ work, are incredibly compelling and were extraordinarily cutting-edge for their time, there’s always been one visualization that particularly irked me as a cartographer.
Plate 20 in Du Bois’ exhibition – “Land Owned by Negroes in Georgia, U.S.A. 1870-1900.” – is a bright and colorful map of Black landownership across the state during the period following emancipation, through Reconstruction, its end and the beginnings of Jim Crow segregation. Given that one of my primary areas of interest is the ownership of housing and land, this map has always stood out to me as an artifact capturing the importance of landownership to broader fights for equality.
But as a cartographer, this map is a bit of a disaster. Long story short, the map breaks a whole lot of the conventions that I try to teach my students about how data should be visualized in map form. But chief among these crimes against cartography is the fact that Du Bois’ beautiful color scheme isn’t actually used to show variation in the underlying data. Instead, colors are assigned more-or-less randomly to counties, which you can tell if you look closely at the labels on the map. Even if the colors were used to classify the data into a series of classes, they don’t follow the kind of sequential change in value we expect with choropleth maps in order to make their patterns comprehensible. On top of all of that, the values in Du Bois’ map are in total number of acres, making them inappropriate for mapping via a choropleth anyways.
Given all of these issues, I took it upon myself a few months back to remake DuBois’ map with a little more appropriate visualization style. Well, a few more appropriate visualization styles. Thanks to the Du Boisian Visualization Toolkit and the Newberry Library’s Atlas of Historical County Boundaries, I was able to easily replicate both Georgia’s county geographies from 120 years ago and the particular colors and typography of Du Bois’ original maps and charts.
The first map in the series starts by normalizing the total number of acres owned by Black Georgians by the total land area of each county to show the percentage of Black land ownership, but still using something that approximates the richness of Du Bois’ color scheme. The second takes the same data but applies a more appropriate sequential color scheme, again replicating some of the same general hues that Du Bois used. Finally, the third map takes the most straightforward solution to the issues of Du Bois’ original map and represents the total number of acres as a proportional symbol map, which is more appropriate for mapping total count data. As opposed to Du Bois’ original, this trio of maps not only (mostly) follow cartographic convention, but they actually make it easy to identify the counties where Black Georgians had made the most headway in acquiring land in both absolute numbers and as a proportion of a given county’s total land area.
While remaking Du Bois’ original map of Black landownership at the turn of the 20th century should probably be sufficient enough material for one post, I couldn’t help but go an extra step further. Unfortunately, because the USDA doesn’t actually collect or share granular information on the race of America’s farmers or farm owners, we can’t just make a contemporary map showing the same patterns for the present day. But given that we know that 98% of US farmland is white-owned and that Black ownership of agricultural land is just 2% of what it was in 1910 – when it was at its peak – it isn’t hard to imagine how dire those county-level numbers might be today.
The USDA does, however, share data on the flip-side of agricultural land ownership in the form of the annual Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act Database, which tracks how much land is owned by foreign investors across the United States. So using the same visualization styles as before, I mapped this more insidious form of landownership that speaks to the reproduction – rather than amelioration – of social and economic inequality. It didn’t hurt that, like with Du Bois’ original map, the USDA’s own maps of this data don’t necessarily follow cartographic convention and are a bit of a disaster themselves.
Comparing the two sets of maps, one can see that there isn’t any real clear spatial clustering of either Black landownership in 1900 or foreign investor ownership in 2020, and neither do the two patterns seem to overlap in a meaningful way. That said, when looking at the outliers and the statewide geography of landownership across the last century-plus, one can see just how much broader racial injustices and capitalist exploitation are reflected in and reproduced through landownership.
In 1900, based on Du Bois’ figures, Black Georgians owned a total of 1,065,239 acres across the state, or just about 2.8% of the total land area. Liberty County just south of Savannah had the highest rates of Black landownership at just 7.5%, and only a dozen of Georgia’s then-137 counties had rates of Black landownership higher than 5%. Meanwhile, today, 23 of the state’s 159 counties have more than 5% of their total land area owned by foreign investors, with eight of these having foreign ownership rates over 10%, even reaching an astronomical high of nearly 42% in Monroe County.
Across the state today, 1,120,314 acres of agricultural land, or about 3% of the total land, are owned by foreign investors who own the land not as a way of sustaining life and livelihood, but as financial assets to be mined for profit. Given that our figures from 1900 are close approximations of the peak of Black landownership in the United States, we can say with a fair bit of certainty that foreign companies now own more land in Georgia than Black Georgians ever did.
Charles Sherrod – the recently passed co-founder of New Communities, Inc., the country’s first community land trust in Albany, Georgia, which was meant to ensure precisely that kind of livelihood-sustaining connection to land for Black communities – once said that “all power comes from the land”, speaking to its fundamental importance for all manner of other social structures and inequalities. If we take Sherrod at his word, rectifying these contemporary and historical imbalances in who owns land – agricultural or otherwise – is of the utmost importance if achieving any meaningful equality in this country is ever going to be a reality.
