Several local developers and architects worry recent staff departures will stunt the Atlanta City Planning Department’s already arduous zoning and permitting processes and make it especially tough to develop affordable homes and apartments.

Today in Atlanta, developing a property entails running through an extensive checklist: If rezoning a site is necessary, developers must first ask the community, including the local neighborhood planning unit, followed by the city’s Zoning Review Board. If they need a zoning variance, they have to go through a separate approval process closely examining the intricacies of a blueprint. If a project falls in one of the city’s special districts, like the Atlanta Beltline Overlay, they need to secure a special administrative permit. In historic neighborhoods, planners must obtain a certificate of appropriateness. Then, the city ultimately decides what’s allowed. And that’s all before applying for building permits.

Amanda Rhein, who heads the Atlanta Land Trust, an affordable housing developer, said intown urban developers rely on the city planning staff “to help you navigate [those systems] and resolve conflicts.” Establishing a rapport with those employees—important to keeping projects on track, she said—is “an art that requires experience.”

“You have to be a squeaky wheel in order to get anything done,” Rhein said.

So when seasoned city planners Christian Olteanu, Nathan Brown, and Alex Deus—who together have over 26 years of planning office experience—left the department’s Office of Zoning and Development at the end of 2022, some of the people and organizations working to provide housing for Atlanta’s lower-income residents started considering taking their business elsewhere.

The Atlanta Land Trust operates exclusively within city limits, so Rhein doesn’t have that luxury. But architect Eric Kronberg does. The head of Kronberg Urbanists + Architects told fellow urban designers and builders in a letter obtained by Atlanta Civic Circle that, even though the planning department’s zoning office has many employees, those three resignations “will have a significant impact on the department’s ability to function.” Olteanu, Brown, and Deus were known workhorses, capable of shepherding complex projects over bureaucratic hurdles.

“This level of internal staff departure and dysfunctionality makes us significantly concerned with the viability of our business model,” Kronberg said in an email, noting that about 80% of his firm’s work is in Atlanta. 

“We plan to start actively shifting to take on more work in other jurisdictions because the risk of permitting collapse”—crippling dysfunction at a crucial point in developments—“is just too high in Atlanta,” he added.

Olteanu, who’d been Atlanta’s assistant director of land development, left the planning department for work in the private sector after 15 years at City Hall.

“My departure, along with others’, might have only exacerbated an already chronic understaffing situation,” he said in a LinkedIn message.

The planning department did not respond to Atlanta Civic Circle’s requests for comment, but City Councilmember Marci Collier Overstreet, the newly reappointed chair of the council’s zoning committee, said in an interview that it’s “definitely” staffing issues that have intown developers and architects concerned. (It is the mayor’s office that fills vacancies at the planning department and other city agencies, she said.)

Although many housing experts say the best way to foster affordability is making more efficient use of land—by, say, building more housing units by way of smaller apartment complexes and accessory dwelling units in single-family neighborhoods—Rhein said the bottleneck at the city planning department, coupled with not-in-my-backyard mindsets, can dissuade developers from getting creative. 

“The easiest thing to do here is something that’s already been done; anything new is going to take a whole lot more time and effort,” she said.

Essentially, diversifying the housing stock in Atlanta, for some, is more trouble than it’s worth. That mentality could complicate Mayor Andre Dickens’ goal of providing 20,000 affordable housing units by 2026, one of his bestselling campaign promises.

Pavan Iyer told Atlanta Civic Circle that his design firm, eightvillage, recently got an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) permitted in Newton County in just two weeks. “If I’m trying to get an ADU permitted in Atlanta … it can take one or two months to even hear back,” he said.

Other cities and counties, he added, “have more flexibility on size and placement [of  residential development], and overall, most municipalities in the suburban metro are ahead of Atlanta when it comes to ADUs.”

Within Atlanta’s planning department, Iyer said, “We need leadership to instill a culture of affordability that allows for opportunities for a diverse range of housing types and does not discriminate against the way people choose to live.”

“The city has done a good job of acknowledging and celebrating that people are diverse and have different lifestyles,” he said. “But similarly, I think we need to take an approach to those lifestyles, and different lifestyles are going to result in different types of housing, and different types of housing are actually going to help solve our [affordability] problems.”

But the city’s planning department is treading lightly when it comes to allowing more density for residentially zoned areas. For the ongoing overhaul of Atlanta’s outdated zoning code, ATL Zoning 2.0, the planners are using an incremental, case-by-case strategy, according to the city’s new planning chief, Jahnee Prince.

Prince has told Atlanta Civic Circle she intends to take a piecemeal approach to reimagining the land-use rulebook, soliciting community input and making zoning code changes neighborhood by neighborhood. 

Since taking the job in October, she’s also declared she’ll protect single-family residential districts—flying in the face of her predecessor, Tim Keane, who endeavored to do away with zoning restrictions that permit only single-family dwellings for most of Atlanta’s residential property.

Councilmember Overstreet said Keane’s reformist approach to the zoning code rewrite was too much of a “broad stroke that I wasn’t comfortable with at all.” As a resident of a single-family neighborhood, where many of her neighbors have lived for decades, she said, “What we don’t want is someone right next door to have four [units on a single parcel].”

That’s an attitude many Atlanta residents share, as evidenced by Councilmember Amir Farokhi’s unsuccessful attempt just over a year ago to pass legislation that would allow accessory dwelling units and smaller apartment buildings in areas zoned only for single homes. 

In late 2021, facing opposition from most of the city’s 25 neighborhood planning units, the city council’s zoning committee—including Overstreet—tabled the proposal, effectively killing it and raising uncertainty about whether similar legislation would surface. 

While perhaps more politically palatable, this kind of caution—taking a fine-toothed comb to the zoning code rewrite process and carefully measuring what each neighborhood wants built—means ATL Zoning 2.0 will take years to complete, as city leaders like Overstreet and Prince acknowledge.

“I don’t mind cumbersome,” Overstreet said. “I don’t mind the process playing out.”

But Rhein said this incrementalist approach leaves her wary about the chances that ATL Zoning 2.0 will allow more affordable infill housing: “What this means at the macro level is that there is going to be less housing developed in the city of Atlanta,” Rhein said. “So the supply is going to be further constrained than it is today, and that’s going to exacerbate the existing affordable housing challenge.”

“I really appreciate that they’re trying to get robust public input, but I think it probably is more technical than it needs to be,” she added, alluding to a community outreach survey about ATL Zoning 2.0 issued by the planning department that activists called “really confusing.”

To properly confront the city’s housing affordability crisis, Rhein said, planning leaders “have to be courageous.”

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12 Comments

  1. Another title for this article could be “Office NIMBY infestation sends few remaining zoning heroes packing.” Sad day for ATL.

    1. “To properly confront the city’s housing affordability crisis, Rhein said, planning leaders “have to be courageous.”…..A planner’s courage ends at the place where future career ambitions are potentially threatened. Acting “in the public interest” is a long ago abandoned idea not followed by this latest crop of planners. Damn sad.

  2. “Prince has told Atlanta Civic Circle she intends to take a piecemeal approach to reimagining the land-use rulebook, soliciting community input and making zoning code changes neighborhood by neighborhood. ”

    Joy upon joy. Let’s make the zoning code even more complicated by having each neighborhood have its own zoning regulations.

    While we’re at it, let’s go ahead and implement an UDC-style review process that is unique to every single neighborhood so we can make good and sure that nobody is ever unhappy because nothing will ever be approved because the process is so byzantine that nobody can manage it on either side.

  3. There are really one major problem that needs to be addressed for all real estate development in Atlanta. The Building, Planning and Zoning Departments including Site Development are abysmally understaffed and underfunded to provide and sustain quality employees like those that are departing in droves. Our city is in crisis. We have projects that are over 6 months into permitting review and one that just went over the one year mark. This dysfunctional permitting review is chronic and could kill this city’s aspirations to continue to lead the southeast in growth and address the issues like affordability.

  4. It is not as if these people sat around all day considering nothing but affordable housing proposals. They spent a lot of time signing off on night clubs, gas stations, drive-through windows, and car washes that they should have simply (and quickly) said “no” to. Doing that would have freed up plenty of time to review housing proposals.

  5. “Developers’ affordable housing efforts.”

    Seriously? From 2012 to 2021, 48,200 apartments were built in ATL. Less than 3,000 were “non-luxury.” (See: https://atlanta.urbanize.city/post/new-apartments-for-rent-city-all-luxury-study-finds). So a hearty “well done” to all those developers and their affordable housing efforts. BTW, where was the city (Keane) when all this was going on if affordability was such a high priority for him?

    Answer: nowhere. Because “affordability” is just the latest movement/buzzword to be hijacked by the real estate industry for cover while they maximize their profits and don’t provide affordable housing. Not sure who is worse: a) the “true believer” new urbanists who have not a shred of evidence that up-zoning/densification does anything to solve the affordability problem and may accelerate gentrification and displacement or b) the developers, real estate agents and architects who so cynically exploit them to keep flattening ATL’s history (i.e., in-town neighborhoods and tree canopy) to build high-end, high margin McMansions and McGlass Boxes.

    Last: hooray for Marci Overstreet and Jahnee Prince! You keep on doing “cumbersome.” Listening to in-town neighborhoods – the things that make ATL so wonderful – what a concept. Now I remember: city officials work for the taxpayers who live in these neighborhoods. Not for developers and real estate agents and architects.

    1. ☝🏾 THAT! Thank you! While I agree we can’t keep using the same approach to solve our housing affordability crisis. The argument that densification is the answer has hardly ever been proven in this city. We’ve led in the number of units built over the last few years and now are leading

      1. (did finish my comment)…now we have one of the largest declines in rent growth for a city of our size, especially in the Sunbelt. Ppl are not paying these prices and developers are still building luxury apts under the guise of densification for sake of affordability but making little to no affordable units.

        Demand Cools for Atlanta Apartments
        https://product.costar.com/home/news/1404939725

  6. such a disaster. folks truly will never have the opportunity to live in the communities they serve. the window of opportunity that exist TODAY is small to make a real impact on this city. land remains scarce. the clock is ticking…..are you sure affordable housing is on the forefront in this city?

  7. Good for Ms. Overstreet and Ms. Prince. Keane and Farokhi tried to ram through massive land use changes with little community input during a pandemic, the very opposite of Mayor Maynard Jackson’s goal to empower local communities against forces like “urban renewal.” In my view, the “YIMBY” groups are fronts for Big Real Estate: https://www.housingisahumanright.org/what-is-a-yimby-hint-its-not-good/. They despise community input, which is grass-roots level democracy.
    Atlanta doesn’t have much that other cities offer: great waterfronts, dramatic views, gorgeous architecture. What it has to offer are: great neighborhoods with distinctive characters and longtime residents, a very diverse resident population with longstanding community traditions, a remarkable tree canopy, ready access to nature, and a way of life that combines the best of North and South: energetic and ambitious but still friendly and often very kind. The out-of-state developers who donate to Mr. Farokhi’s campaign fund (you can look it up) don’t care about any of that, or affordability, or Atlanta’s people. They just want to impose top-down, sweeping changes for their own profit. Then they’ll move on to the next city with their cookie-cutter “solutions” and buildings, and make it all look like their last project.
    And good riddance to Eric Kronberg, who would rather team up with developers to ride roughshod over longtime residents instead of addressing their legitimate concerns.
    The city owns hundreds of acres of unused or vacant land where truly affordable housing could and should be built. The Beltline has become a real estate boondoggle for developers. “Trickle-down housing” won’t benefit needy residents any more than trickle-down economics benefited the poor. Building luxury 1 and 2 bedroom apartments does nothing for Atlanta families, many of whom would like to live in single-family housing with a little greenspace. But I’m sure the city would rather attract affluent, childless young professionals who gentrify neighborhoods and don’t use city schools or services, than serve the needs of Atlanta’s families with children, or its senior citizens (who are driven out of their homes by rapidly rising property taxes, a feature of affordability that is conveniently ignored).
    I look forward to more constructive, actual dialogue with the new leadership of the Planning Dept.

    1. Christian was as useless as a fur coat in a Miami summer. I’m not sure he even knew the Code much less ever followed it.
      The Planning Department has lost 90% of the staff in the last 4 years due to its incompetent and difficult Director. What vision does a woman who owns and lives in a 4 sided vinyl siding house impart? Southside gang?
      Alex and Nathan were true assets who are truly missed.
      And, that’s the real truth.

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