The Trump administration’s rejection of evidence-based housing policies and its threats to sharply cut funding for housing programs have dealt a devastating blow to metro Atlanta’s response to the growing affordability crisis. Abrupt federal funding reversals, shifting regulations, and administrative upheaval threaten to shrink or even derail long-established programs that metro-area governments rely on to house low-income people.
The choices that metro Atlanta housing leaders make in 2026 will determine how many people struggling with housing insecurity fall through the cracks.
Since President Donald Trump reclaimed office, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has rolled back fair-housing laws and regulations over the objections of Democrats in Congress and national housing nonprofits. In the administration’s most recent move to upend housing policy, HUD rewrote the application terms for $3.9 billion in Continuum of Care grants to house unsheltered people, with little notice to local governments and nonprofits — and without any approval from Congress, even though it holds the power of the purse.
But amid chaotic policy reversals and draconian funding cuts, metro leaders are not powerless. The challenge for the Atlanta region is deciding how and where to deploy the policy and funding tools that its leaders still control.
State and local tools at hand
At the state level, the Georgia legislature must strengthen tenant protections and restrain institutional investors, who now own roughly a third of all single-family homes in metro Atlanta, driving up rents. But that’s not likely. Legislative efforts to confront Wall Street’s growing dominance of the housing market largely stalled in 2025. In both Georgia and Congress, proposals for landlord registries, corporate homebuying caps, and anti-price-fixing measures failed.
Georgia lawmakers will reconvene in January to finish the two-year legislative session — but if the tenor of last year’s politicking is any indication, few meaningful housing reforms will find their way to Gov. Brian Kemp’s desk in 2026.
That means it’s up to cities and counties to keep their residents housed. Local governments’ path forward isn’t about finding a silver bullet — it’s about stacking and enhancing available local tools to protect tenants and produce more affordable housing through public land use, modernized zoning laws, and better property-tax enforcement. None are sufficient alone. Together, they determine whether the region enters 2026 merely absorbing federal chaos, or actively insulating itself from it.
Fulton County, for instance, should rethink how it assesses commercial properties to stop leaving tax revenue on the table that both the county and the city of Atlanta could use for housing. Fulton chronically undervalues commercial properties, allowing deep-pocketed developers to build hulking projects without the stress of hulking tax bills.
In fact, a team of Georgia Tech researchers determined that Fulton, Atlanta Public Schools, and the city of Atlanta, combined, are missing out on at least $290 million in commercial property tax revenue every year, because Fulton is appraising Atlanta commercial properties at just 61% of their actual market value on average. What’s more, when commercial property owners appeal their assessment increases, they generally win. And if they don’t, the appeal still freezes the property’s valuation for three years, due to a loophole in Georgia law.
Atlanta’s toolbox
The city of Atlanta has an opportunity to sink at least one layup: it could adopt a new zoning code that eliminates residential parking minimums and welcomes missing-middle housing — duplexes, triplexes, tiny homes, and small apartment complexes.
These long overdue reforms would give Atlantans more dense and affordable housing options, in a city where about 60% of the land is currently zoned for single-family housing. To achieve transformative zoning reform, though, Atlanta’s Department of City planning and the Atlanta City Council will have to ruffle some feathers. A vocal and influential not-in-my-backyard contingent of homeowners is sure to protest major land-use changes in the city’s more established residential neighborhoods. But with election season in the rearview, the city council now has political room to ruffle those feathers.
Tougher still will be retooling the city’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund to direct the bulk of the $19.5 million in annual funding toward producing deeply affordable housing, which households earning less than half of the area median income (AMI) can afford. The AMI for a family of four is currently $114,000. (50% of the AMI is around $57,000.) However, the Atlanta City Council just passed legislation that allows the Mayor’s Office to use the fund to service existing housing bond debt instead.
In the most serious threat to housing stability, the Trump administration has put public housing authorities, including Atlanta Housing, on notice to expect funding cuts. It also wants to impose a two-year limit on rent subsidies. HUD subsidizes rents for about 11,000 Atlantans through its Housing Choice Voucher (Section 8) program — and there are over 20,000 people on Atlanta Housing’s waiting list.
In its FY 2026 budget, Atlanta Housing has already preemptively cut $51.1 million from its Section 8 voucher program, reducing the funding to $338.6 million. The anticipated loss of federal support from HUD will saddle the city and its private housing partners with a far heavier load than they’ve ever carried.
That makes using the Housing Trust Fund, which is funded by a 2% annual appropriation from the city’s general fund, to produce affordable housing even more urgent. Atlanta was already behind on its promise to produce 500 permanent supportive housing units for unhoused residents by the end of this year, when HUD in November announced that it would slash 70% of its Continuum of Care funding for those projects. That would be an almost $10 million loss to Atlanta nonprofits that provide this housing and supportive services, such as job training and substance use treatment.
In a housing ecosystem critically disrupted by federal volatility, metro Atlanta leaders will be judged not by their rhetoric, but by their willingness to act — to upzone where it’s uncomfortable, to tax where it’s overdue, and to preserve affordability before it disappears. In the current environment, the margin for error has vanished.
The Trump administration may throw national housing policy and funding into a tailspin in 2026. But the extent to which that turbulence causes displacement for lower income people in metro Atlanta will depend largely on decisions made close to home.
I am so glad you are raising this issue. Atlanta was going to be short homeless funding even without the poor decisions by our curren Administration. Atlanta was ‘overly blessed’ with Federal funding, including Stimulus funding to properly address homelessness during COVID. The sector must convince more people to invest in proper community solutions with donations and increased taxes – it must prove and communicate better the impact and value of these investments. Another strategy we recommend is one that Atlanta Land Trust came up with in 2001 and Partners for Home used at Melody – place land owned by the City in the land bank then into a land trust and have affordable housing built with experienced affordable housing developers with the aid of HomeAid Georgia and possibly donated materials from Lifecycle Building Center.