Since its 2021 creation, Atlanta’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund has funneled over $80 million to initiatives ranging from affordable housing production to city employees’ salaries to interest payments on city-issued housing bonds — often with little public transparency. City Councilmember Matt Westmoreland wants to change that.
Westmoreland authored the legislation creating the fund, which he said was intended to bankroll affordable housing production and preservation. Now, he has introduced a resolution urging Mayor Andre Dickens’ administration to produce annual reports that detail how much affordable housing it has created, versus how much it has spent on auxiliary housing programs and expenses, starting with the city’s new fiscal year on July 1.
The council’s Community Development and Human Services Committee unanimously approved the resolution on April 28, teeing it up for a full-council vote next week.
The Affordable Housing Trust Fund will receive an estimated $20 million for FY 2027 — 2% of the city’s general fund — so boosting transparency is critical for a municipal purse that’s drawn criticism for its past uses, Westmoreland said. “There’s a universal desire to have a better and more publicly digestible explanation for how these dollars are getting used every year.”
For Westmoreland, the expenditure report will address a fundamental question: Does the city primarily use the trust fund to produce affordable housing or, more broadly, to fund a variety of housing-related programs and expenses?
“My goal has always been [housing] units,” he said. “The whole point of creating the trust fund was for us to be supplementing, and not supplanting, previous efforts on housing.”
The expenditure report would require the mayor’s office to tally how much is spent on affordable housing production and preservation, including the number of units funded, their location, rent prices relative to area median income, and the duration of time they’ll be priced below market.
The report would also break out the amount spent on auxiliary housing programs by type. That could be housing security initiatives, like eviction defense or emergency rental assistance, or repairing properties in substandard conditions.
It would also break out debt service on the city’s housing finance instruments, such as Housing Opportunity Bonds, and administrative and staffing costs
An Atlanta Civic Circle investigation last year found the Dickens administration had mostly used $17 million from the housing trust fund in FY 2025 to pay city salaries and housing bond debt, instead of to actually produce affordable housing.
The city spent about $4 million that fiscal year to pay staff who worked on housing-related initiatives and $8.8 million to service housing bond debt — accounting for over three-quarters of total trust fund expenditures.
Stricter spending guardrails
Westmoreland tried late last year to impose stricter guardrails around trust fund spending. He introduced an ordinance that would have required it to spend more each year on low-income housing construction than on paying salaries and servicing housing bond debt.
The effort backfired when the mayor’s office retooled Westmoreland’s legislation to instead reinforce the administration’s authority to tap the fund as it sees fit for housing-related expenditures. The city council unanimously approved the watered-down measure in December.
Atlanta’s chief financial officer, Mohamed Balla, said in November that Westmoreland’s proposed reforms would have stymied the city’s ability to issue additional bonds to finance housing development.
Balla said on Tuesday that the Dickens administration has no qualms about Westmoreland’s new legislation. “Anything that enhances transparency we are fine with and supportive of,” he said.
Atlanta’s chief housing officer, Amanda Rhein, echoed Balla’s support, noting that the city does not currently offer a publicly accessible ledger of the trust fund’s expenses: “This legislation would put us in a position to be more transparent about how we use the trust fund in the future,” she said.
Westmoreland has acknowledged that some trust fund expenditures may not produce new housing units, but can still keep people housed. Last week, he proposed a measure to donate $75,000 from the trust to HouseProud, a nonprofit that helps homeowners fund needed repairs to avoid code enforcement violations and displacement.
Westmoreland calls the new reporting requirements a first step in shaping how the Affordable Housing Trust Fund should operate. By requiring clearer expenditure data, he hopes to spark an informed debate among council members, the administration, and the public about whether the fund is meeting its core mission of producing affordable housing — and if not, how its spending rules should change.