“I don’t think most Atlantans are scared of having people live near them who don’t make as much money as they do.”
That’s Dentons attorney Sharon Gay, who recently kicked off her campaign for Atlanta mayor. Gay spoke with Atlanta Civic Circle about her goals for housing, including boosting affordability, rethinking the city’s zoning code and getting neighborhoods more involved in the way they grow.
Give the excerpt below a read to get a feel for Gay’s mayoral ambitions, and listen to the full interview in the embedded link. And, of course, check back next week to see interviews with more mayoral hopefuls.
Sean Keenan: The next mayor is going to have — like any major city mayor — a ton of issues to deal with, like this recent crime wave, police-citizen relations, pandemic recovery, income inequality, education, everything. But a lot of the urban planning experts I’ve been talking to say that a lot of these issues can be approached from a housing perspective. So, I’m curious if you think working for housing affordability could be a gateway to fixing some of the city’s most pressing problems, and help me understand your thinking behind that.
Sharon Gay: Yeah, that’s actually part of the reason I first started thinking about running. I started thinking about a little over a year ago, before [the pandemic] — you know, public safety is now ascendant. But before COVID, and before that, and I can go back and tell you a little bit more about my long history in the affordable and mixed-income housing world. But I was concerned that the city was adrift, and that we weren’t really… there wasn’t enough leadership around the big issues that are creating a challenge for long-term viability in a lot of our neighborhoods, and affordable housing being paramount. And partly because that’s the field I’ve worked in for almost 20 years. But I totally agree that it is the linchpin for a lot of other things. But what my big-picture focus is on is what I think of as healthy neighborhoods — that the way that you talk about income inequality, or access to transit, or access to jobs, or quality schools, or decent housing at a price that people can afford at various ages and stages of life. It all ties into we, we have a lot of inner-city neighborhoods; we’ve got a lot of great neighborhoods, but we’ve got a lot of neighborhoods that have not seen the kind of progress they need. And typically, many of those components are missing, but nearly always, decent, affordable housing, or quality, affordable housing is part of the challenge. And there’s a lot of detail in that recent City Housing report, sort of by the neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis. But what I think what I felt like was missing is there was no leadership from the city government, and particularly the mayor’s office, around convening all the parties that are working on it and developing a strategy. You know, let’s say you get a billion dollars, money is not a strategy. There are a lot of ideas and goals, but not a real implementation strategy around figuring out what you need to do and getting it done.
So before we dive into the strategy, something you said kind of caught my ear about public safety being ascendant. Do you think that, because of what Mayor Bottoms is calling the “COVID Crime Wave,” do you worry that that could distract from some of the important housing conversations or just conversations we need to be having about other policy issues. Are they being overshadowed?
Well, I think that depends on how you guys cover it. Yes, but. It’s an acute problem. And what people are experiencing is different from anything I’ve seen in my 42 years in Atlanta, in that there are murders and shooting all over town, including in broad daylight. It’s not three people who know each other getting in a fight in a parking lot at 3 in the morning. It’s happening all over the city. It feels different. There are daytime carjackings all over the cities are. You know, carjackings in parking lots, carjackings in a gas station; they’re random things. I was mugged two blocks in my house, 8 o’clock on a Tuesday night. And I’ve lived here in Inman Park 35 years, and that has never happened. So what people are experiencing, and then you layer that in with the street racing and all that donut stuff going through. It’s just a system of lawlessness. That is different from just, quote, “an uptick in crime.” And it is dominating. It’s the first thing everybody brings up. It’s dominating every conversation. We are in an emergency. There were things that should have been done a year ago; there are things that should have been done six months ago; there’s some things that are finally beginning to be done right now. I would hope, for the sake of our city, that by just the inauguration in January, it is not a crisis. But, to sort of tie back to housing, we do have this acute problem right now, but you can’t just address it by hiring a bunch more police. Policing alone doesn’t deter crime. If you really want to make a dent in the things that lead to crime, you’ve got to get back to this point of healthy neighborhoods. And housing is one of those things. And, you know, the neighborhoods that have the all the stress issues that end up causing people to turn to crime, safe, affordable housing is one of them. But it’s not just in those neighborhoods. We’ve done a different type of housing supply issue around the city. But we need more housing at all price points, but affordable being the one that’s harder for the market to do on its own. So yes, there’s an acute crisis of public safety right now. But we’ve got to be able to do more than one thing.
So this is a good segue to the strategy conversation. I mean, what does affordable housing advocacy look like to you at the executive level? You mentioned that the billion-dollar investment is not the golden ticket to housing equity, but do you plan to further Keisha Lance Bottoms’ One Atlanta action plan? Do you think that needs to be expanded on?
Well, let me let me back up a second, just review a little bit. You may know some of this, that should give you a little bit of context. Because I’ve done it at kind of the 10,000 foot level in the on the ground level. I chaired the entity board up on this board and chaired it for a couple of years. You know, I worked with ANDP, which has been sort of our premier nonprofit for promoting and developing and financing affordable and mixed-income housing. I chaired the Mixed-Income Communities Initiative and then chaired the [ANDP] board itself. And we — and that was during the recession — we implemented a whole new approach to the model ANDP is still following today. I co-chaired the ULI affordable housing task force a few years ago that put up a report that really was the foundation for HouseATL, the sort of interdisciplinary entity that exists today. And a lot of the framework of HouseATL is…
…what turned into the One Atlanta plan, right?
Yeah. I’m not prepared to say today they have it all, or that everything that needs to be covered is in there. But a lot of what needs to get done has been put out there by HouseATL or in the One Atlanta plan. What I see missing is a lean-in led-from-the-top effort to actually implement it. And, you know, what are the steps that I did this week? What are the steps you’re going to do next month? What is our six-month plan? What is our one-year plan? How do you do this to scale? How do you take all those goals and translate them into an actual strategy that involves public sector, the private sector, the philanthropic sector, and all the different entities that are out there now working on it? And, of course, HouseATL got formed because there was a leadership vacuum. And that’s part of what I see as needing to be addressed.
Yeah. Sorry, did you say leadership vacuum?
Yeah. I mean, you know, the city could have convened, what — the effort that became HouseATL. But the nonprofit sector that — not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s…
It took somebody else.
Yeah, yeah. For the ARC and various nonprofits that said there is a leadership vaccum in here; we need to step up. And this predates the Bottoms administration. I mean, the Reed administration didn’t do much, either. Maria [Saporta] has covered — I think quite well, and sort of shockingly — the fact that the Atlanta Housing Authority has basically not built a new unit in, I think, we’re pushing 12 years. So the lack of attention has been not just in the last year.
So you’re not saying you need to go back to the drawing board [with the One Atlanta plan], but more so that we need some leadership reform to actually see some of these goals achieved.
And go back to the drawing board. I think a lot of the is the ideas and the goals that are out there now are the right ones, but it takes an implementation strategy that requires the intentional engagement of the executive branch and city government.
So what about the planning departments zoning overhaul? like Tim Kaine says the goal is to densify the city by way of accessory dwelling units and better use of vacant land, and essentially just rethinking the way that we develop to be more vertical and compact. But there’s always going to be people who don’t want to see their quaint single-family communities transformed; they don’t want to see apartments or especially affordable housing or public housing. So what’s your stance on the reform of our zoning code?
I think, unfortunately, very different ideas have gotten all mixed up, and it’s created some confusion about how we talked about it. And what I have done in my private practice for a number of years is to rezone properties and give incentives to build higher density, multifamily mixed-use developments in places where it makes sense. Whether it’s Ponce City Market or Atlantic station or housing around Centennial Olympic Park, or transplant, a lot of what I’ve worked in is transforming affordable housing projects like West Highland. We need more housing; we need a wider range of housing; need a wider range of price points. We don’t have enough good places to live for the people who live here today. And if another 700,000 people are coming in the next decade or so, we certainly need more housing for them. So let’s think about what what we need versus what we have, which is really how we started the analysis for this task force. And where does it make sense to add more housing? And when I say make sense, where do we have infrastructure? Where do we have jobs access? Where we have transportation access? Where we have transit access? Where you have access to schools? And that that’s how we ought to focus how we think about updating our zoning code and our planning documents to be consistent with where Atlanta needs to go. So the zoning code is not the goal. Planning the future development and design of the city — which the planning department has done a lot of good work on that. First, you do that. Then, you figure out a logical place to start in our main corridors and thoroughfares, and you match your zoning to what your your planning vision is.
But can the zoning code reform be done piecemeal? You’re never gonna be able to satisfy everybody if the goal is housing affordability and equity. But would it be cumbersome or maybe counterintuitive to think of this on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis?
Well, yeah, and that gets back to my point about healthy neighborhoods. Part of the puzzle of Atlanta is, we are a city of neighborhoods. And we have a lot of interesting neighborhoods. A lot of neighbors that are very different from one another. And it’s hard if all the decision-making is top-down; it’s hard to get things right for every neighborhood, then I would like to have a more robust engagement by neighborhood planning around teachers. And that’s not just zoning; its transportation, its sidewalks, because not every neighborhood needs the same thing. I live in Inman Park, where we’ve got sidewalks. They’re not all in great [condition]. But not every neighborhood needs the same thing. So having the neighborhoods engaged in a more robust collaboration with city departments about what they need, I think, is part of the purpose. Part of the reason Sandy Springs was created is the people who live there didn’t like the zoning decisions the Fulton County commission made. But when they created the city, they just carried forward the Fulton County zoning ordinance. And it took them a while to figure out where to go. But what they did was made a citywide planning document that figured out where they needed more density, where it was appropriate to have more density, and it’s not just housing, but commercial property, too — where you need office, where you need retail — and focused on their corridors and tried to preserve the core of neighborhoods as they existed. And then, they redid the zoning code, so that they had new zoning classifications, and a new zoning overlay that was consistent with that visioning plan. And so I would prefer that that not be done piecemeal, and it all be done as part of a comprehensive strategy.
Sure, but when you talk about bolstering neighborhoods’ influence in the way that they are developed and the way they evolve, I immediately think of the NPU system. So does that need to be more robust? How do you get neighborhoods to be more involved?
Well, yeah, and I’m just beginning to work on a plan for that. I don’t have that all ready to talk about today. And there are lots of different ways you could do it. It’s as much a way you organize and deliver the services of the city. And, you know, maybe there [could be] a Deputy Chief of Staff for neighborhoods, but it’s a more intentional bottom-up, not just top-down, way we approach helping neighborhoods figure out what they need to be a healthy neighborhood.
Shifting gears a little bit, but also in the vein of like, you know, talking about NIMBYism and people who would just be horrified to learn that there was maybe an affordable housing complex going up down the road from them: Something that I’ve talked with CEO Gene Jones a lot, at Atlanta Housing, is the term “public housing” and how it’s been incredibly stigmatized, for some reasons that carry water, but then for some that are unsubstantiated. People think poverty attracts crime. They think Section 8 apartments drag down property values. What can Atlanta do to shed that stigma? I don’t suppose it’s so easy as just not using the term anymore.
Yeah. A lot of the work I’ve done has been around trying to change the way we think about that. And that was when the Mixed-Income Communities Initiative, for example, that we had ANDP; that arose out of the work [former CEO] Renee Glover did when she first came to the [Atlanta] Housing Authority, which was to take advantage of the new types of funding the federal government had to reimagine the old public housing projects as communities that have a mix of income and had services and resources beyond just housing. You had a quality school, you had a grocery store, you had a YMCA, you had a library, we began to build a community, not just a building with housing that people didn’t make much money lived in. And there are people who are passionate about using the term affordable housing. Workforce housing became a term a few years ago. I don’t think most Atlanta’s are scared of having people live near them who don’t make as much money as they do. I think maybe a better way to think about it, though, is just think of it as places for people to live. And we need more places for people to live at all ages and stages of their lives. Sometimes people call it life-cycle housing. But rather than getting mired into the ‘Who owns it, who lives there?’ and to have a healthy city that isn’t just a place where only rich people can live, we need to embrace and place appropriately lots of different kinds of housing.
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This is the first installment of a Q+A series with Atlanta’s mayoral hopefuls to discuss their plans for our city’s future. Check out our second installment with Councilman Andre Dickens, and stay tuned for more discussions.
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