Atlanta’s delicate balance of urban conservation and affordable housing

Photo Credit

Cassandra Johnson, USDA Forest Service

Illegally dumped tires in Atlanta's Rebel Valley Park. This public property is adjacent to land the City of Atlanta is repurposing for affordable housing. Tire dumping occurs frequently in communities on the city's southside and is indicative of environmental injustices faced by residents in lower wealth neighborhoods in the city.

This exploratory study begins to unpack the links between civic environmental stewardship and involuntary neighborhood transiency.

The study focuses on four neighborhoods adjacent to urban forest patches in the City of Atlanta, Georgia.

These forests emerged on the sites of former public housing communities after the city razed housing projects in the first decade of the 2000s.

Today, early forest succession is evident on some of these sites. These young forests are providing ecosystem services, and we might expect neighborhood-level inquiries into the plans for these properties, but there is no indication of popular interest in the sites.

The neighborhoods surrounding the patches are inhabited mostly by low-income African American renters, a highly transient population.

The research team gathered data through primary, door-to-door conversations. These conversations revealed complex neighborhood-level burdens, including transiency. The researchers operationalized transiency in terms of eviction rates and Housing Choice Voucher units. They conducted a geospatial cluster analysis that, which indicates that both measures concentrate in the neighborhoods adjacent to the forest patches and are positively associated. Given these associations, the study supports further research on how various forms of involuntary moving may ultimately inhibit civic environmental stewardship.