Does Atlanta's Dickens Administration Really Deserve All of the Affordable Housing Kudos It's Getting?

The City of Atlanta has been all over the news and social media in the last couple of years about their victories on the affordable housing front, receiving substantial kudos not just in local media but also from such outlets and organizations as Governing, The Guardian, National Housing Crisis Task Force, the Nowak Metro Finance Lab at Drexel University, and Harvard University’s Bloomberg Center for Cities. (Gardner, 2025; Humphries and Katz, 2025; McAdams and Fike, 2025; Romeo, 2025; Simama, 2025). Media stories point to the administration of Mayor Andre Dickens being on track to reach its goal of 20,000 affordable housing units before the target date of the end of 2029, which will be the end of Dickens’ second and final term, assuming he wins reelection this fall, which seems likely.

Major Initiatives

On coming into office in January 2022, Mayor Dickens already had a track record on affordable housing, having sponsored the city’s targeted inclusionary zoning ordinance. Affordable housing advocates were generally optimistic about the prospects for stronger action on the issue. He had campaigned on a goal of building or preserving 20,000 affordable housing units in the city within eight years but had not attached dollar amounts to the pledge as Bottoms had (Nobles and Capelouto, 2022). As recalled by one of Dickens’ key staff on affordable housing, Josh Humphries, city staff informed the mayor that, at current projections, the city would be able to produce about 15,000 affordable units over eight years, despite the Mayor’s campaign pledge of 20,000 (Humphries and Katz, 2025). This realization, according to Humphries, led to the creation of a “Housing Strike Force.” The Strike Force included the heads of all public agencies that affect affordable housing production. The Strike Force met quarterly with the mayor. One key focus of the group was to utilize publicly owned land more effectively as a tool to create affordable housing.

A second component of the Dickens Administration’s affordable housing strategy was a new entity, sometimes referred to as a “social housing developer,” to develop publicly-controlled or owned affordable housing, employing a blend of market-rate and affordable housing in the same developments to allow for some cross-subsidization of the affordable units with income from the market-rate units. This new entity, called the Atlanta Urban Development Corporation (AUDC), is a subsidiary of the city’s public housing authority and follows earlier models in Montgomery County, Maryland, and Seattle. Nationally, these social housing models represent an effort to reengage the public sector in the provision of publicly owned housing with new resources less reliant on the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program (Aiken, Murphy, and Raitz, 2024). One issue that often arises in such models is whether, unless there is access to deep subsidy, such entities are unlikely to provide the sorts of deeply affordable housing that is most needed, i.e., rental housing affordable to families with incomes below 50 percent, and especially below 30 percent, of the metropolitan median income.

A third component of the Dickens housing agenda was the creation, together with philanthropic partners, of a combined $300 million of pledged funding for affordable housing, with $200 million coming from the philanthropic and private sectors and the remaining $100 million coming in the form of additional Housing Opportunity Bonds (HOBs) (McAdams and Fike, 2025). The $200 million commitment from philanthropic and corporate sources includes a $100 million pool of social impact debt financing at below-market rates (3 to 6.5 percent). The second $100 million pool provides very low-interest debt (e.g., 0 percent) and sometimes grants to projects with the intent of providing deeper affordability. The $100 million commitment in HOBs, follows earlier HOB issuances by the city in 2007, 2017, and 2021, under mayors Franklin, Reed, and Bottoms. Generally, housing opportunity bonds provide affordable housing projects with below-market-rate loans but are limited in their ability, by themselves, to deliver deep affordability.

Looking at the City’s Own Numbers on Affordable Housing Production

As of September 7, 2025, the city’s “Affordable Housing Tracker,” a website that tracks the number of affordable housing units developed since January 2022, shows that the city has developed over 11,800 units, including 67 multifamily projects and 1,000 single-family units (City of Atlanta, 2025). Therefore, the city is well over half-way to its goal of 20,000 units over eight years, at 3 years and 8 months into the period. This equates to annual production rate of over 3,200 units per year, compared to the original goal of 2,500 units per year, on average. This is encouraging.

Now let’s compare this activity to that under Mayor Bottoms. Unfortunately, the Dickens Administration removed the Bottoms Administration’s affordable housing tracker, which was almost identical to the current one but began in January 2018. Fortunately, I was able to find one version of the old tracker via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.[i] This tracker showed that the city had developed a total of 10,671 affordable housing units. Given the uncertainty of the timeframe covered (either four years, or four years and eight months, see note 1), annual production under Mayor Bottoms was between 2,290 and 2,668 units. Therefore, the Bottoms Administration was already producing roughly enough units to meet a goal of 20,000 over eight years. However, it appears that annual affordable housing production increased significantly during Dickens’ first term, somewhere between 20 and 40 percent, certainly a nontrivial increase.

What About Deep Affordability for the Lowest-Income Atlantans, those Most at Risk of Eviction and Homelessness?

Notwithstanding the improved overall production of subsidized affordable housing units in the city under the Dickens Administration, a key concern is whether many of these units will actually house very low-income Atlantans. When governments set what appear to be ambitious affordable housing goals such as “20,000 units” and do not set targets for specific affordability levels under such overarching goals, they can discourage the building of deeply affordable housing for households at the lowest income levels, including under 50 percent of area median income and, especially, under 30 percent of area median income. There are several reasons for this. First, the largest supply-side subsidy program, LIHTC, is primarily designed for households at just under 60 percent of area median income; subsidy programs that serve deeper affordability levels are scarcer. Moreover, developers and landlords, even when receiving subsidy, are often less interested in renting to very low-income families. Eugene E. Jones, the former head of Atlanta Housing, the city’s public housing authority, has argued that one advantage of using project-based vouchers (versus tenant-based vouchers) in Atlanta was the ability to provide them to relatively higher-income households, those at just under 80 percent of area median income (Jones, 2024). Landlords, he argued, were more willing to participate in housing authority programs if they did not have to serve very low-income households. Another reason that deeper affordability is discouraged by setting only blanket numerical goals is that it costs more dollars per unit to subsidize a household with an income of, e.g., $40,000 per year than one with an income of $75,000 per year.

The housing tracker provides a breakdown of affordable units by income level. Of the more than 11,700 units claimed by the Dickens Administration as of September 2025, only 2,051, less than 18 percent, were affordable to households with incomes below 50 percent of area median income and, of these, only 667, or 5.7 percent of the total, were affordable to extremely low-income households, those with incomes below 30 percent of the area median income. These are the households most at risk of severe housing instability, eviction, and homelessness. Given the severe lack of sufficient subsidy dollars, local governments should prioritize such households when allocating any subsidy that they control. The persistent failure of the city, before and during the Dickens Administration, to prioritize the development of deeply affordable housing calls into question whether local municipal and civic leadership is committed to producing large quantities of such housing. The city’s track record with demolishing public housing beginning in the 1990s revealed a penchant for dispersal of the poor, including to locations outside the city, over housing them. The paucity of affordable housing resources devoted to those with the lowest incomes suggests that perhaps not that much has changed in this regard.

Is the City Investing Enough Local Dollars in Affordable Housing?

The city’s housing tracker also reveals that the city, despite all of its public relations victories and despite continuously surging land values, did not spend a great deal of its own financial resources on affordable housing during the first term of the Dickens Administration. Over the three years and eight months of the Dickens Administration as of early September 2025, the tracker shows that the city has actually invested (not just “pledged”) $108 million in local dollars towards affordable housing. This included $61 million in HOB financing (it is unclear what portions of this were from issuances under the Bottoms or Dickens administrations), $38 million in tax allocation district funds, and $9 million from the city’s housing trust fund. All in all, local funds accounted for less than six percent of the funds committed to affordable housing developments from January 2022 through September 7, 2025. The bulk of the rest were federal funds.

The city’s Housing Trust Fund (HTF) has been a point of particular criticism from housing advocates and one that has called into question Mayor Dickens’ commitment to increased funding for deeply affordable housing. The mayor’s first budget, proposed in 2022, neglected to fund the HTF at all, despite 2021 legislation requiring a contribution of 1 percent of the city’s general revenue fund to the HTF (Stokes, 2022). Only after advocates drew media attention to this apparent flip-flop  from the “housing mayor” did the Administration agree to allocating the minimum required funds. Then, in his second budget the mayor again attempted to short-change the HTF, proposing only $8 million, $3.5 million short of the legally required $11.5 million. After more criticism from advocates, city council increased the amount to the full $11.5 million (Nobles, 2023).

The original intent of the HTF was to provide more desperately needed deep subsidy to affordable housing projects that would allow for more deeply affordable housing units, those affordable to the lowest-income households. However, by September of 2025, out of the $35.8 million to the Trust Fund, only 26 percent of that went into actual affordable housing development projects. Journalist Sean Keenan (2025) reported that Trust Fund dollars had gone to grants for food assistance nonprofits, city staff salaries, and even paying off some of the interest on the HOBs, none of which were consistent with the original intent of the Trust Fund. Longtime housing advocate William McFarland commented, “From the very beginning, this looked too much like a slush fund, and not enough like a housing trust fund” (Keenan, 2025).

And What about Zoning Reform?

One area outside of investment in affordable housing programs that deserves mention here is zoning reform. To her credit, Mayor Bottoms allowed her planning commissioner, Tim Keane, to propose a citywide rezoning package that would allow for higher densities in single-family lots throughout the city (Immergluck, 2022). Previously, incremental efforts had expanded the ability to do things like build accessory dwelling units in some neighborhoods, but zoning shielded wealthier, exclusionary neighborhoods from these changes. Moreover, Keane’s proposal called for increased densities everywhere in the city near transit stops. Unfortunately, these efforts were firmly rejected by many of the neighborhood planning units (NPUs) across the city and therefore failed. Under Dickens, the city rolled out its “Zoning 2.0” proposal that avoided any controversial, citywide densification proposals. As one critic noted, “This Zoning 2.0 process seems to be trying to change our zoning language without…changing any of the existing zoning” (Dolan, 2025).

A Continued Failure to Capture Rising Land Values for the Atlantans Most Harmed by Them.

The most telling indicator that calls into question whether the Dickens’ Administration affordable housing activities represent a fundamental shift in the Atlanta Way is that a faux austerity continues to plague the city’s public finance system and severely limits the local funding available for affordable housing, a problem I wrote extensively about in Red Hot City (Immergluck, 2022).  More than 94 percent of public dollars invested in affordable housing are flowing from the federal (mostly) and state government. The routine underappraisal and undertaxation of large commercial properties remains the biggest barrier holding the city back from investing more in deeply affordable housing, education, and basic services, as well as the excessive tax breaks given to firms by its two competing development authorities, particularly the Development Authority of Fulton County (Immergluck, 2022). Early in 2022, after the Dickens’ Transition Committee (which I served on) discussed the problem, the city commissioned yet another study on the issue. The findings were basically consistent with the previous studies during Mayor Bottoms’ tenure: large commercial properties were being underappraised and undertaxed by almost 40 percent, costing the city, county, and public schools, hundreds of millions annually (Zickgraf, 2023). Then, in making a public speech on his housing agenda in October 2022, Dickens said, “I will be working with my team and the county to capture and deploy this revenue” (Buckner, 2023). Yet to this date, nothing substantive has been done about this problem. After almost a decade of continual media coverage of the issue, the severe undertaxation of commercial real estate remains the most important reason that this fast-gentrifying city can never seem to find enough dollars to substantially increase its funding for deeply affordable housing.

Key Indicators of Affordable Housing and Citywide Gentrification

Notwithstanding the increased production of subsidized housing in the city, the net number of low-cost rental units in the city continued to decline. The most recent data from the American Community Survey show that the number of rental units with gross rents under $1,250 in 2023 (equivalent to under $1,000 in 2019 after adjusting for inflation) declined precipitously from 2019 to 2023, despite the Bottoms and Dickens Administrations developing on the order of 2,500 to 3,200 subsidized units per year. The number of low-cost rentals (including unsubsidized and subsidized) in the city dropped by 27 percent, from about 38,400 to just under 27,750 over this four-year period, representing an annual net loss of over 2,600 low-cost rentals.[ii]

Over the same period, the ratio of the median-family income of the city of Atlanta compared to that of the entire metropolitan area, the ratio continues to climb. It had increased from 87% in 2012 to 110% by 2019 (Immergluck, 2022). As of the 2023 American Community Survey, it has now reached 120% and shows no signs of plateauing. The city’s median family income now exceeds $125,000 (as of 2023). The city continues to lose low-cost rental units, despite the increase in subsidized units, and experience greater levels of gentrification.

Despite the national hype that Mayor Dickens has received in the national media, the evidence suggests that, while his term represents a notable uptick in affordable housing activity when compared to the Bottoms Administration, there has not been a sea change in the city’s actual investment in affordable housing, and especially not in deeply affordable housing. The city continues to contribute only a very small share of public funds invested in affordable housing developments, with 94 percent of public subsidy dollars coming from federal and state sources. Moreover, the City has made no significant progress under this administration on reducing exclusionary zoning policies, a step back from the Bottoms Administration’s (unsuccessful) efforts. Most importantly, the fundamental problem of faux austerity – limits on public revenue due to a dysfunctional public finance system that undertaxes and oversubsidizes commercial property – remains. The public sector captures too little of the property wealth generated in this gentrifying city, dollars needed to provide housing support to the households and families who are most hurt by such gentrification – low-income renters.

References

Aiken, C., Murphy, M., and Raitz, H. 2024. The emerging spectrum of government-led and publicly owned housing development models. Furman Center at New York University. October. https://furmancenter.org/files/The_Emerging_Spectrum_of_Government-Led_and_Publicly-Owned_Housing_Development_Models_V5_(2).pdf.

Buckner, H. 2023. Is Atlanta losing out on millions of dollars in revenue each year in property taxes? Atlanta Magazine. January 6. https://www.atlantamagazine.com/news-culture-articles/is-atlanta-losing-out-on-millions-of-dollars-in-revenue-each-year-in-property-taxes/.

City of Atlanta. 2025. Affordable Housing Tracker. Downloaded as of September 7, 2025 at https://www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/bd9a133a63c849eab0a721a0bb5d9475.

Dolan, M. 2025. Straight talk on Atlanta’s zoning rewrite from a housing advocate. Thread ATL. February 19. https://www.threadatl.org/blog/straight-talk-on-atlantas-zoning-rewrite-from-a-housing-advocate.

Gardner, R. 2025. Innovating in Atlanta: A social housing model for the US. Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University. March 26. https://datasmart.hks.harvard.edu/innovating-atlanta-social-housing-model-us.

Immergluck, D. 2022. Red Hot City: Housing, Race, and Exclusion in Twenty-First Century Atlanta (Berkley: University of California Press).

Jones, E. 2024. Linked-In Post. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/eugenejones1_atlanta-housing-to-award-2000-rent-vouchers-activity-7126186301359300608-yEST.

Keenan, S. 2025. Dickens admin uses Housing Trust Fund to pay bonds, employee salaries. Atlanta Civic Circle. May 25. https://atlantaciviccircle.org/2025/05/26/investigation-affordable-housing-trust-fund-pays-bonds-payroll/.

McAdams, B. and Fike, B. 2025. Atlanta’s $300 million public/philanthropic housing impact fund. June 25. Nowak Metro Finance Lab at Drexel University. https://drexel.edu/~/media/Files/nowak-lab/Atlanta%20Case%20Studies%202025/300mm%20fund%20overview_Final.ashx.

Nobles. W. 2023.Atlanta council OK’s law to fully fund city’s affordable housing trust fund. Atlanta Journal-Constitution. July 7.

Nobles, W., and Capelouto, J.D. 2022. Mayor embraces peacemaker role: Dickens has worked to soothe strained relations with state, police and Buckhead community. Atlanta Journal-Constitution. April 17. A1.

Romeo, N. 2025. Affordable housing is in short supply across the US. Atlanta may have found a way forward. The Guardian. February 9. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/09/atlanta-affordable-housing.

Simama, J. 2025. Atlanta's housing approach offers a model for other cities. Governing. April 4. https://www.governing.com/urban/atlantas-housing-approach-offers-a-model-for-other-cities.

Stokes, S. 2022. Not in Atlanta’s budget: money for the city’s first recurring housing fund. WABE News. May 11. https://www.wabe.org/not-in-atlantas-budget-money-for-the-citys-first-recurring-housing-fund/.

Zickgraf, R. 2023. Georgia’s tax appeal “loophole” means big money for big corporations. Atlanta Civic Circle. November 16. https://atlantaciviccircle.org/2023/11/16/georgias-tax-appeal-loophole-means-big-money-for-big-corporations/.

[i] While it was dated August 28, 2022, it is unclear whether this version represented data for just the Bottoms Administration tenure (January 2018 through December 2021), or through to the August 28 period.

[ii] These figures were calculated from the American Community Survey 2019 and 2023 for the City of Atlanta, using www.socialexplorer.com To adjust for inflation, using CPI less shelter for the Atlanta metropolitan area, all units with gross rents of less than-$1,000 were calculated in 2019, which corresponds to a gross rent of $1,222 in 2023. For 2023, all units with gross rents under $1,250 were calculated.