Urban Renewal Alive and Well in the Suburbs of Atlanta

Joe Cortright writes: "For a couple of years now, we’ve been following the story of Marietta, Georgia, where local officials used $65 million in taxpayer funds to buy up and begin demolishing some 1,300 apartments along Franklin Road." A previous article by Cortright on the Marrietta case study explored the idea of suburban displacement. This time around, Cortright compares it to the poor example set by urban renewal practices of the mid-20th century.

The apartments are making way for a "verdant practice facility" to support a new Major League Soccer team, called the Alanta United. But as "hundreds of old but serviceable apartments were demolished to make way for these spacious fields," argues Cortright, the whole situation "is a striking case where the displacement of low income families was an explicit objective of public policy, rather than the side-effect of a changing real estate market." 

If that all sounds familiar, that's because Marietta is taking a page from the same urban renewal playbook that many planners and urbanists consider a relic of the regrettable past. Cortright documents the changes in Marietta as the demolitions move forward along Franklin Road, which has now been renamed as Franklin Gateway, by sampling Google Street View images.

For the record, this isn't the first time that the words "urban renewal" have made an auspicious appearance in the urbanism news cycle. As Emily Badger noted in a New York Times article in December, President Donald Trump has used the words to describe his proposal for a "New Deal for Black America"—seemingly unaware of their fraught history and the discriminatory practices they connote.