Dan Immergluck - Red Hot City: Housing, Race, and Exclusion in Twenty-First Century Atlanta

THIS BOOK IS PARTLY the product of decades of working in and studying urban places that had suffered from histories of racialized disinvestment, wealth extraction, predatory finance, and hostile public policy. Before becoming an academic, I spent over a decade working in community development and advocating against predatory finance and for responsible reinvestment. As an academic, I have continued to do research and policy-oriented work about places, including many Black neighborhoods, where disinvestment, population loss, and property abandonment persist.

Coming to Atlanta in 2005, I saw the familiar effects of disinvestment, predatory finance, and wealth extraction in many Black neighborhoods. Yet, I also quickly began to appreciate a set of more complicated, fast-moving trends occurring in the city. I noticed home prices rising rapidly in certain parts of town, especially around an area slated for a major, publicly financed redevelopment project called the Beltline. I noticed speculators buying up numerous parcels. Affordable housing advocates voiced concerns over displacement and gentrification. I began to educate myself on the citys history, read about emergent gentrification in the wake of the 1996 Olympics and public housing demolitions, and obtained a copy of a 2001 report by a citywide gentrification task force. While I certainly had seen gentrification while working in Chicago in the 1990s, the relative scale of speculation and property value increases that I saw in Atlanta were more widespread. Moreover, these changes were not just contained to certain parts of town adjacent to previously gentrified neighborhoods as I had often seen in Chicago.

As the subprime crisis began in 2007, I saw the devastation it wreaked on families and neighborhoods in both the city and suburbs, especially in Black neighborhoods. I had seen the damage that subprime lending had done before in the late 1990s in Chicago. So, knowing the greater scale of the 2000s subprime boom, the magnitude of damage in the late 2000s and early 2010s did not come as a surprise. Then, as real estate markets came roaring back after the crisis, especially in the city and around the Beltline, the unevenness of the recovery was striking. I had seen the Beltlines effects on speculation and land values before the crash. As real estate capital once again began flowing into the city, the patterns quickly reemerged, although at a grander scale and accompanied by more physical redevelopment.

Sometime around the early 2010s, I began thinking more about all that policymakers could do, but werent doing, to reset Atlantas development trajectory in a way that might generate inclusive, diverse spaces in which lower-income, primarily Black families could benefit more from growth instead of communities simply being recast as places intended for much different populations. Did the fate of neighborhoods that had experienced serious population loss and disinvestment in the 1970s and 1980s have only two paths, either continuing the one they were on or switching to one of rampant, racialized gentrification and displacement? Did policymakers and planners face a choice only between maintaining the status quo or retrofitting formerly cast-off neighborhoods into ones for whiter and more affluent populations, places where lower-income and more diverse families would be unlikely to afford? Wasnt it the job of policymakers and planners to advocate for a third way, one of responsible reinvestment providing for improvements in residents lives and housing options, instead of focusing on glitzy transformative redevelopment projects that result in dramatic increases in rents?