Book Review: Red Hot City: Housing, Race and Exclusion in Twenty-First Century Atlanta
“Red Hot City” by Dan Immergluck is about how changes in Atlanta, like the building of the BeltLine around the city, have made life harder for people who don’t, relatively speaking, have a lot of assets. This hardship is particularly acute in melanated communities. The book details with copious statistics how the city has grown rapidly, yet exclusively toward private lenders. Equally as striking, he outlines the myriad ways decisions made by elected city leaders and private-public partnerships contribute to the affordability crisis in homeownership.
Immergluck is a professor of Urban Studies at Georgia State, having studied and written extensively on housing markets, race, gentrification and urban policy for over 25 years. Witnessing the effects of 2008 subprime crisis, the origin of Beltline and the city’s destruction of public projects, he talks about how Atlanta redeveloped itself into a city that excluded lower-income families from benefitting from the growth incurred through large-scale private investment (Wall Street, Beltline, most notably).
As he stated in the preface, this book is “an effort to tell the story of the choices that have contributed to and shaped the racially and economically exclusionary patterns of development in the region over the last twenty-five years.”
He does this through four themes:
1) the intentional racial and economic restructuring of Atlanta’s residential geography
2) the failure of the city to capture a significant share of the tremendous growth in local land values
3) the crucial role of state government in constraining and enabling how development and redevelopment occur
4) the political economy of urban change in Atlanta
A glaring point to me, as mentioned in the first episode (go check it out as soon as you finish this post ), is his critique of the city’s development policies and tax systems, highlighting their role in perpetuating inequality. He also examines the broader political culture and its impact on policy-making, emphasizing Atlanta’s challenges in balancing growth with social justice.
The ramifications of this book are profound, offering insights into the complexities of urban development and its impact on communities, and calling for more equitable and inclusive approaches to city planning and policy-making. The book is particularly relevant for those interested in understanding the dynamics of urban development and its social implications.
Immergluck is not an Atlanta urban development fatalist, at least that’s not what I gathered. But he is clear-eyed and unsparing, with loads of data and contextual analysis. He was asked in a later interview if it was too late for Atlanta to get it right. No, he said, but it is a warning to other cities.
“I don’t know if it’s fair to say it’s ever too late because that implies it’s time to give up and go home. But the longer poor decisions are made, the more frequently they’re made, the more costly it is to reverse or slow exclusion. By costly, I don’t mean just in terms of dollars; politically, it’s going to be harder to fix things. If we don’t fix the tax problems in the city and get a lot more money for affordable housing and deal with our zoning issues and tenant protections, it’s going to be really hard to do it 10 years from now. It gets harder all the time.”
In the concluding words of his book, he writes: “The changes in Atlanta over the last twenty-five years, much like the changes throughout the twentieth century, are not the result of apolitical, impersonal, anonymized market forces. The city is a politically and socially constructed space, and its trajectories are the products of policy decisions.
“There is always an opportunity to do substantially better the next time.”
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