“It’s time to move from discussion and talk to action,” Atlanta Regional Commission CEO Anna Roach said.
In September, the ARC will release its comprehensive strategic plan, the Housing Strategy for the Atlanta Region, to address the region’s growing housing affordability challenges. It will lay out what housing needs to be built or preserved, who it will serve and where it will need to be built. Once complete, it will guide development for the entire 11-county region.
Roach previewed the strategy at the annual Regional Housing Summit on April 30.
“The strategy will complement all the local housing plans that are either underway or have already been written and adopted by our local communities,” Roach said.
Once finished, the region will have a coordinated plan of action and framework for monitoring progress. But first, ARC needed to determine how much housing the region actually needs.
Sharon Carney, a principal at HR&A Advisors, laid out findings from months of data gathering and analysis. The need is significant: Regional job growth will drive demand for 367,000 homes between now and 2035, as 400,000 new jobs are expected to enter the metro.
But many of those jobs will be moderate-wage jobs. Roughly 63% of the region’s new households will earn less than $115,000 per year. Current market production trends show the region is on track to meet demand for households earning between $55,000 and $155,000, but the market would only meet a quarter of demand for households earning below $55,000.
“The good news is the region is building homes, but not at prices that are going to be needed to meet household demands,” Carney said.
In the past five years, the region lost 250,000 homes with rent below $1,250 as housing gets pricier. By 2035, the region could lose over 100,000 more homes affordable to households earning below $55,000.
Meeting future demand will require both new production and preservation, according to Carney – at least 367,000 new homes and the preservation of at least 100,000 homes by 2035. But where the housing is built matters.
Current growth patterns push homes away from jobs, not towards them. Most new households will face commutes longer than 30 minutes, and few will live near transit.
It creates major priorities for the ARC strategy: aligning housing with jobs by locating homes within 30 minutes of employment, lowering housing and transportation costs by locating housing near transit, increasing economic mobility by adding more mixed-income communities and promoting client resilience by avoiding development in areas at risk for extreme heat.
Currently, ARC leadership is working to outline the necessary steps to reach goals. Then the ARC will develop tools to address the gaps and track progress, and eventually enhance the commission’s role in supporting progress toward housing goals.
“We bring diverse stakeholders together to the regional table to tackle issues that are pressing for our region, and that includes housing,” Roach said. “There’s no way we are going to be able to solve all the other things we’re trying to solve for without addressing housing.”
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