Study: City unaffordable for middle class

Finding a place to live in Atlanta is not just a plight for the poor but for much of the middle class, too, according to a long-anticipated study to be released at the end of June.

The 500-page, five-year analysis — conducted by the Atlanta Neighborhood Development Partnership, funded by the Ford Foundation and endorsed by the city — boils down to one daunting statistic, according to Jeff Rader, who sits on the committee that oversaw the study. Forty percent of Atlanta households can’t find affordable housing. That 40 percent represents all households earning less than $40,000 a year.

Rader says that for housing to be “affordable,” it should cost no more than a third of the residents’ net income. That means that in a home where wage earners make $40,000 before taxes, anything more than $750 in rent or mortgage payments is too much.

In Atlanta, Rader and others say, $750 is an anachronism.

“What really is affordable has become a misconception,” says Atlanta City Councilman H. Lamar Willis, who is also a member of the study’s committee. “We need work force housing, and there has to be a way to create it.”

To replenish the supply of affordable housing, the study calls for “mixed-income” development — or development that offers a certain portion of units with subsidized rents, based on income. The push for mixed-income housing should come as no surprise, given the name of the study’s committee: the Mixed-Income Communities Initiative.

Committee Director M. von Nkosi says he hopes the study will spur local and state government to promote mixed-income communities.

But mixed-income housing has not always benefited those who need less expensive housing. The Atlanta Housing Authority, for instance, adopted the mixed-income model and tore down thousands of affordable housing units over the past decade — only to replace them with far fewer subsidized units in new mixed-income developments.