Want to help Atlanta update its urban planning roadmap? Here’s how.

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Want to help Atlanta update its urban planning roadmap? Here’s how.

The city of Atlanta is updating its Comprehensive Development Plan, the sprawling policy document that will determine how the city can be built out for years to come — and officials want your help.

Called “Plan A,” the state-mandated Comprehensive Development Plan translates the overarching Atlanta City Design Plan crafted in 2017 into actionable policy goals that are being incorporated into the city’s massive zoning code overhaul, which is currently underway. Atlanta adopted Plan A in October 2021 and is now working on the five-year update. 

The actual zoning code, last updated over 40 years ago, dictates how public and private entities can create housing, expand transportation infrastructure, and otherwise reimagine our built environment.

If it sounds like the city is developing a plan within a plan, that’s because it essentially is. Tim Keane, Atlanta’s planning commissioner until Jahnee Prince took over in late 2022, put it this way in a 2021 interview with Atlanta Civic Circle:

The way we’re approaching reform is based on Atlanta City Design, the document that sets the framework for everything else. Everything else is a reflection of that. Period. So now the [Comprehensive Design Plan or Plan A] is supposed to be a reflection of that, and basically puts in place general policies about land use and zoning. It’s not the law itself. CDP is the state-mandated requirements that set forth policies that then become law. 

So Atlanta City Design, that’s the framework and the guiding document. Then you have CDP, which is one of a number of different policies that the city adopts related to land use and zoning and transportation. And then the third part is the actual [zoning] ordinances, which is kind of the implementation — how you actually put those ideas into law.

State law requires Georgia cities to update their respective Comprehensive Development Plans every five years. That includes Atlanta’s Plan A. 

Meanwhile, the Atlanta zoning code overhaul is on hold while the city works on the Plan A or Comprehensive Development Plan update. The city’s planning department commissioned architecture firm TSW Design last year to draft the update to Atlanta’s new zoning code, but Prince told Atlanta Civic Circle in January that that process “is on a little break right now, until we finish the first round of Comprehensive Development Plan meetings.”

Community engagement sessions for the Plan A update kick off next Tuesday, March 19, at the Dunbar Neighborhood Center and will continue through April at various intown locations. (For a full list of upcoming Plan A meetings, click here.)

Will Atlanta embrace denser zoning? 

Development density in residential neighborhoods has emerged as a hot-button issue as Atlanta rethinks its urban planning roadmap, especially as the city becomes increasingly unaffordable for low- and even middle-income renters and homeowners.

Urbanists have encouraged the city planning department to embrace density. One way to do that is by relaxing zoning restrictions on properties zoned single-family residential to allow for smaller apartment complexes and accessory dwelling units (ADUs) — such as apartments above a house’s garage or a tiny home in the backyard. 

Currently, the vast majority of Atlanta’s residential property is zoned exclusively for single-family homes. Prince has said rethinking the city zoning code to allow for greater density will require her office to assess the wants and needs of each neighborhood individually.

Skeptics of increased density worry that allowing apartment buildings or ADUs in traditionally single-family neighborhoods would jeopardize their historic cultural fabric. But zoning reformists argue that resisting denser zoning will worsen the city’s housing affordability crisis.

The Atlanta Planning Department says community input is crucial to how Plan A and, ultimately, the city’s new zoning code will take shape. However, the planning department has not responded to Atlanta Civic Circle’s questions about how residents’ suggestions will factor into both the Plan A update and the zoning code rewrite.

Read our 2021 interview with Keane on Atlanta’s big-picture zoning reform plans here and our recent discussion with Prince when she became the city’s new planning head here.

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