For a growing Atlanta 'race has always mattered'

By Douglas S. Wood
CNN Interactive

(CNN) - At breakneck speed, Atlanta's growth is expanding outward, unhindered by geographical barriers and stoked by the region's pro-business attitude. But while Atlanta has sold itself as "the city too busy to hate," it's no accident that the region's northside is mostly white.

The majority of Atlanta's African-American population is concentrated into two counties while counties surrounding the central city are overwhelmingly white. Those growth patterns were shaped by being part of the once-segregated South.

"If you look at the development of Atlanta and the Atlanta metro area, race has always mattered. Race was an integral part of the white flight from the city to the suburbs," said Robert Bullard, a professor of sociology at Clark Atlanta University and head of the Environmental Justice Resource Center there.

The Atlanta metropolitan area, encompassing 20 counties, now stands at 3.8 million, with 880,000 residents added in the last decade alone. But the actual city of Atlanta, like many other cities surrounded by thriving metro areas, has lost population as residents headed to the suburbs.

Indeed, the Atlanta region began to boom in the 1960s when legalized segregation came to an end, and blacks began moving to the city while whites began leaving. In 1960, the city's population was 487,455 people, with 300,635 white people and 186,464 black people. By 1970, African American's had edged slightly ahead, 225,040 to 223,914 whites. The most recent estimates had the city's population at 431,126, with minorities composing two-thirds of the population.

That exodus of whites, known as white flight, first headed north, causing the counties north of Atlanta to explode as the region has grown. Cobb County's population went from 114,174 in 1960 to 583,541 in 1999 while neighboring Gwinnett County jumped from 43,541 to 545,632. The population growth is spilling over into the counties even further north. Cherokee County, above Cobb, had 31,059 people in 1960 and that is now up to 141,686.

Those counties remain overwhelmingly white as Africa Americans have remained concentrated in Dekalb and Fulton counties, core areas of the region that the city of Atlanta.

The move to the suburbs was part of the overall nationwide shift that turned America into a suburban nation. But racial fears, manifested by concerns over issues like education and transportation, helped fuel the dynamic that push most of Atlanta's white population into the suburban counties surrounding the region's urban core.

Voting with their feet

Douglas Bachtel, a demographer at the University of Georgia, prefers to use the term "bright flight" instead of white flight, citing recent trends of middle-class and upper-class African Americans leaving the city for the suburbs. "With the fantastic job opportunities in the Atlanta metropolitan area, there's a growth of black middle-class, although it is not near what it should be," he said.

Bachtel said schools are a key issue because people move away from what they perceive as bad education, and his studies have shown that when a school district becomes 60 percent African American, whites begin to leave.

"When it starts to get 60 percent, you really have people flooding to the suburbs," he said. "See, they have the economic wherewithal to do that because it's expensive to move. You've got to buy a new house and move and all that stuff, and you just can't do that if you've got a lower income."

Bachtel said long-standing social problems affecting African Americans don't help, like a high births-to-unwed mothers ratio, which he said spells disaster for school systems. "Middle-class people, they just want to flee that situation and they vote with their feet. That's what happening in Atlanta," he said.

Bullard says the perceived quality of the schools is at the heart of urban issues, but he also said that white flight from urban areas continues even as affluent and middle-income blacks move to the suburbs. In south Dekalb County, the black population has steadily grown but the white population has dropped. The county recently elected its first black chief executive officer, in part due to large black voter turnout.

"You can see that suburbanization pattern occurring and that white flight scenario is still occurring," Bullard said.

Bachtel said the Atlanta's growth patterns were historically influenced and exacerbated by race. North Georgia, he said, did not have many African Americans because it was a subsistence agriculture area and did not have plantations with slaves. As a result, there were few blacks living there when whites began to leave the city for those emerging northern suburbs.

However, Bachtel warns these issues can be difficult to publicly debate because they deal with race, class and discrimination, controversial subjects in any society. "So we're trying not to add value judgments but just to understand these demographic trends," Bachtel said.

Traffic, race and public transit

But while the topic of how race and schools combine to influence Atlanta's development dilemma, may be difficult to discuss, the intersection of public transportation and race in Atlanta's growth problems may be even more controversial.

The Atlanta area is currently grappling with the negative effects of its growth and nowhere is that more apparent than the area's clogged freeways, cited as having has the fourth-worst traffic in the nation by the Texas Transportation Institute. Three of its interstate highway interchanges were rated as some of the worst bottlenecks in the nation by the American Highway Users Alliance.

But public transit offers limited relief to the congestion because only three counties offer mass transit in a metropolitan area that includes 20 counties, according to the Census Bureau's definition.

The Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) is the region's primary transit system but it serves only Dekalb and Fulton counties because voters in those counties in 1971 approved a one-cent sales tax devoted to MARTA. Clayton, Cobb and Gwinnett counties rejected it, and Gwinnett, one of the nation's fastest growing counties in the 1980s, rejected MARTA again in 1990. Both votes were seen by many observers as being racially tinged.

"Race was the overriding factor as to why those counties turned it down," Bullard said.

Wayne Hill, a Gwinnett County native and the current chairman of the Gwinnett County Commission, believes it was more than race involved in his county's rejection of MARTA. Hill said he believes a lot of the vote dealt with the costs of MARTA, which uses a version of rapid transit known as heavy rail, among the most expensive to develop. Gwinnett voters did not want to pay for MARTA's development, he said.

"I think folks just didn't want MARTA and you know, I think you can get all kinds of rationales on it," he said. "But basically, they said we don't want a rail line out here."

The other transit system is Cobb County's bus system, created in 1989. Gwinnett is in the process of starting up its own bus system while voters in Clayton recently approved a referendum creating a bus service. Cobb's system is linked to MARTA's but only in a few places. Bullard said the outlying counties prefer to create their own systems rather than accept MARTA because its ridership is mostly minority, mainly African-American.

"The attitude is, 'We're proud that we're not MARTA and we're going to create our own system in Gwinnett but it's our own system,'" Bullard said. "It's the same thing in Cobb County and Clayton County."

Will rail bring crime?

Fears that MARTA would bring crime were cited for the suburban rejection of MARTA, and that perception still exists among suburban residents. Judy and Brad Punch live in Cherokee County and spend several hours a day fighting Atlanta's traffic, but Judy Punch said one of the reasons the couple moved to Cherokee was they felt mass transit would never come there.

"I think that mass transit makes areas accessible for lower-income families that could not otherwise come out here because they don't have transportation and that's good ... in that a lot of the service industries around here need to offer employment but it also brings crime," she said.

Brad Punch says that mass transit attracts people lower on the socioeconomic ladder and crime is associated with poverty.

"There's nothing you can do about that," he said. "You can try all you want but it's been that way for thousands of years. Things aren't going change overnight just because you want it to be better."

But Bullard countered that these arguments are "bunk" based on stereotypes about minorities and without empirical evidence to back them up.

"The dominant view in this society among many whites is that public transit will bring crime, will lower property values, will change the quality of life and the character of an area in a negative way," he said. "And there's not a single study that documents this. But having the facts is not enough to dispel attitudes that still exist."

Catherine Ross, the executive director of the newly created Georgia Regional Transportation Authority (GRTA), agrees that the association of crime with mass transit is an unfair argument with racial dimensions.

"I think that to a large extent that's a fear factor, that's a card that's been played in the game for a very, very, very long time," she said. But she added that security issue must be addressed for people to feel safe when using mass transit.

Bullard pointed to the MARTA station at Lenox Square, a shopping mall in Buckhead, a central shopping and entertainment district, and there were fears that the mall would suffer once MARTA was linked to it. "But the fact is, it's booming," he said.

'Atlanta didn't invent this'

These attitudes are not new as Americans have long held a hostile view of mass transit, according to Kenneth Jackson, a history professor at Columbia University in New York City and author of "Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States."

Attitudes about mass transit are ingrained and go back a long time, Jackson said, citing an example from Chicago in the 1890s. The suburb of Oak Park opposed the trolley coming from Chicago because the nickel fare might attract the wrong element. "Atlanta didn't invent this. Atlanta is just following a tradition," Jackson said.

But Hill points out that a MARTA line may not make the most sense for Gwinnett because of its distance from downtown Atlanta.

"Part of the thing you got to remember, and everybody wants to miss this, we sit almost as far north of Atlanta as Baltimore does of D.C. There's two transit systems there. We may be having the same thing down the road," he said.

Bachtel said for many people, any perceived negative aspects that suburban communities have are outweighed by the positives, despite the worsening commute times. "But many people are willing to pay that price because of the schools, the lower crime rates and that sort of thing. It's just depends on how much they're willing to put up with," he said.

For Brad and Judy Punch, the positives of their life in Cherokee County outweigh the time they have to spend in traffic daily.

"I feel safe out here," she said. "I feel like my kids are safe. I feel like they can play outside. I'm not worried about a drive-by shooting. I feel like most of the people that they're gonna come in contact with in their schools are gonna come from families with similar values."

The future

As Atlanta grapples with the effects of its expansion, one local business leader believes race is no longer a factor. John Williams, the CEO of Post Properties, said Atlanta's three black mayors have worked to ensure that the city continues to develop and that crime stays down. Williams, an Atlanta native, founded Post Properties, an apartment development firm, and is on the board of the directors of the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce.

"Atlanta has been very fortunate with the great political leadership we've had and it's mitigated race to the point where, today, I don't think it is a factor," Williams said.

Bullard sees things differently, saying the region's leadership has failed to deal with the issues of growth and race. "Any time you deal with race, you have to have strong leadership that's willing to really lay it on the line and talk about the fact that the city of Atlanta, Fulton County and Dekalb County cannot deal with transportation by themselves."

But if schools play such a strong role in determining where people live, Atlanta has long way to go in convincing people like Brad Punch that its public schools can compete with those in the suburbs.

"The Atlanta public schools are abysmal. They have been and will continue to be for quite for some time," he said. "They have not brought anybody in who's really done anything significant with that school system in decades."

Part of Atlanta's troubles with growth stem from its lack of a central regional governing authority. The area includes multiple city and county governments plus other governmental organizations that make decisions affecting growth.

"In this environment, you have a large turnover of local officials," Bachtel said. "So there really isn't a continuity and that's what you need, you need continuity with regional planning. Race exacerbates the whole thing."

Responding to Atlanta's growth, Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes spearheaded GRTA, a powerful superagency which has the power to build and veto roads and transit systems.

Hill, however, raises the possibility that GRTA could be challenged in court on constitutional grounds that it violates a local government's right to make decisions on issues like transportation and land use on behalf of its citizens.

"I was hoping that would play out in Clayton County but it didn't. Well, if the citizens hadn't voted that bus system in, it sound like they (GRTA) were bent on putting it in. I think that would have been the time you would have seen something like that," he said.

Bullard, however, says the idea of local control is used by local officials to block solutions to regional growth-related problems like air quality. "We all breathe the same air in this region. There's no white air, there's no black air," he said.

But Hill also pointed out that people have the freedom to move and live where they want in the United States.

"The one thing you're going to have to remember is that we live in a country that's free. If you decide to move to Gwinnett County tomorrow, I can't stop you. And I think we miss that sometimes, we want to control everything. We have freedoms that not many countries have," he said.

Bachtel believes part of the solution is to help develop a larger African American middle class. "We have to get African Americans and other minority groups educated and participating in this growth economy, so they can begin solving their own problems," he said.