Abundant Housing Atlanta

Atlanta is in the midst of a zoning rewrite for the first time in 40 years. While the City has laid out a number of laudable principles and goals in documents like the Atlanta City Design, the zoning code serves as the actual rules of the road for how the built environment can and cannot change. This rewrite is a major opportunity for the City to lean into its values and create the type of City that we say we want to be: one that’s inclusive, one that’s diverse, and one that welcomes anyone to this City who wants to take advantage of our amazing culture, neighborhoods, and opportunities. We remain very critical of this rewrite - most of the changes are technical and linguistic updates that won’t create more affordability or bring us closer to the Beloved Community - and there’s lots that we think you should look into (you can read the full Zoning 2.0 draft here), but we want to dig into one update in particular.

In this new rewrite, the zoning draft defines who gets to live together based on who is defined as a “family”:

Updated the term family to a more modern term, household, and then reduced the maximum number of unrelated individuals allowed to live together in a household.

• The current definition of a family allows up to 6 unrelated individuals to live together, the proposed definition of household would allow up to 3 unrelated individuals to live together.
• This also includes updating the definition of group living to mean 4 or more unrelated individuals living together.

In layman’s terms: the draft zoning legislation would ban more than 3 unrelated people from living together in one house, regardless of size of house or anything else.

Let’s talk about the implications of this change. While it is difficult to know with certainty how many individuals will be impacted, there are likely thousands of households that would become illegal under this change, meaning thousands of people would have to find a new living situation, potentially having to move outside of the City of Atlanta to find somewhere that they can afford to live.

Today, only 18% of households are what we consider traditional, nuclear households - 2 parents with children. Yet, 72% of homes in the United States are large, single family homes catering to those nuclear households. Plus, homes are getting bigger and bigger. In 1950, the average square footage space per person was 292 sq ft; in 2017, it was 1012 sq ft - that’s an increase of 3.5x! When the types of homes available to folks are so out of sync with our current reality of housing types, no wonder people look for alternative types of living situations to be able to afford the homes available to them. (For more related data, check out this .