The Guardian - Shortly after his election as mayor of Atlanta in 2021, Andre Dickens realized one of his core campaign promises – to create 20,000 new units of affordable housing – might be hard to keep. Estimates from his staff showed the city would fall more than 4,000 units short.
His options seemed limited. The low-income housing tax credit supports the building or restoration of much affordable housing in America, but the federal tax incentive is curbed by volume caps each year, and voters are often skeptical of other potential sources of funding, such as bonds.
While researching various models, Dickens and his team were inspired by Copenhagen. Four decades ago, officials in the Danish capital created a publicly owned, privately run corporation to redevelop public land and infrastructure.
In Atlanta, they inventoried all of the publicly owned land. Cities typically own large amounts of land, but as long as this public land remains siloed in different departments – the fire department here, the school district or transit authority there – it’s hard to see how all real estate assets can contribute to an overarching goal, like building more affordable housing. So they also created a housing strike force to break down silos between departments and then launched a new non-profit corporation, the Atlanta Urban Development Corporation (AUD), to attract private financing and expertise.
The result has been a surge of development – 40 public land projects are under way, with 10,000 new affordable housing units finished or under construction – that represents a striking example of how cities can use creative strategies to expand their supply of affordable housing. Staff in dozens of other cities around the country are said to be taking note.
“Atlanta has definitely cracked the code on public assets,” said Bruce Katz, co-founder and director of the Nowak Metro Finance Lab at Drexel University. “I think this will become a new model that gets repeated all across the country.” More
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