While Atlanta is no contradiction to America’s ongoing housing crisis, the magnitude of the issue in a metro region experiencing rapid population growth in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic was unknown. In light of this new reality, ULI Atlanta, along with consulting partner KB Advisory Group, set to update its 2018 housing study to see how much, if any, progress had been made on factors affecting the Metro’s affordability and supply issues. The new report, Housing at its Core, was released in November 2023 and revealed that while decent progress had been made on expanding capital resources for affordable housing and providing regional leadership on affordability, growth in cost-burdened households is rapidly outpacing overall household growth. The Metro has seen an increase of 50,000 additional cost-burdened households since 2018, which means the Metro’s affordable housing need grew twice as fast as expected to nearly 400,000 households. Additionally, the Metro is losing affordable units in part because of a steep decline of 20,000 “missing middle” housing units – properties containing between 2 and 19 units on the same lot. In response, ULI Atlanta’s Programs Committee began planning a new Housing Innovation Summit to highlight work being done and the need for more of it in the small-scale development (SSD) space.

Jim Heid, award-winning small-scale advocate and author of Building Small: A Toolkit for Real Estate Entrepreneurs, Civic Leaders, and Great Communities, brought a message of creativity and collaboration to the stage as roughly 150 real estate professionals huddled at 42West Entertainment in West Midtown last Thursday. Similar to the newest ULI Atlanta study, he explained how a decades-long emphasis on large-scale and master-planned developments by corporate partners has left a great need for the sort of smaller, case-by-case development that occurred in America through the first half of the twentieth century. But building small must go beyond merely scaling between single-family homes and hi-rise apartments; community must be at the heart of such developments.

Each SSD should start with and be responsive to voices within the communities they would inhabit. The conversation on a development “cannot start with your project,” explained Heid, who discovered this firsthand prior to developing his idea for what became the Riverhouse cottage community in his hometown of Healdsburg, CA. After hearing the needs and concerns of his neighbors at a community meeting, he was able to explain what a new SSD may look like and the purpose it would serve in the context of the broader community. Then, with the community heard and on board, he was able to begin designing the innovative project. He encouraged similar discussion among not just developers and communities, but public sector professionals and the neighborhoods and districts they serve in order to deliver more projects that meet needs and have buy-in above all else. Such discussions are only the beginning of the delivery process, though.

For too many would-be SSDs, there are far too many barriers to entry, including issues with zoning, financing, regulations, and more. The good news is that many of those issues can be remedied by public officials; the bad news is that public pressure, lack of education, and general bureaucratic inertia can keep many officials from taking the actions necessary to create a more fruitful and responsive development environment. This reality has led Heid to call for less regulators and more thought partners. If those on the public side are as serious about addressing housing affordability and supply issues as they claim to be, they must be willing to be more flexible when working with developers seeking to bring innovative projects to the communities they cherish. Speaking from the experience of the Riverhouse project, Heid explained how he worked with professionals from the city’s planning department to its fire department to get creative in maneuvering archaic regulations that would have otherwise halted something the community was asking for. Above all, he emphasized that public sector officials must realize that it is the developers who inherit the risks of such projects, not them.

Many of Heid’s sentiments were shared and expounded upon in the panel discussion that followed, which included four thought leaders trying to drive housing innovation throughout Metro Atlanta – Joel Dixon, Eric Kronberg, Ashani O’Mard, and Commissioner Ted Terry. Dixon, an Atlanta native and co-founder of Urban Oasis Development, stressed a similar need for greater housing diversity and creative solutions in bringing it about. “We’ve become too focused on building types of housing when, in reality, housing is just housing…. We never hear about an affordable vehicle crisis because we have a diversity of vehicles,” he exclaimed, and later called on developers and public officials to embrace proven solutions, like leveraging public land to allow deals to fast track. “We don’t have a crisis; we have a lack of urgency.”

DeKalb County is in the process of taking such an approach by studying how much of its land is undeveloped and could be used as part of the housing solution, explained Terry, who sits as Commissioner of its Sixth District. The former mayor of Clarkston is seeking to “bring back ‘the village,’” akin to what Heid did with his Riverside project, by giving more agency to community members. For the public sector professionals in the room and beyond, he advocated for a ‘tell us what you want, and we’ll work through it’ approach to community development, which played a vital role in the deliverance of the Cottages on Vaughan, an award-winning testament to innovative SSDs in the town he used to lead.

The creativity and collaboration preached by Heid and the panelists were welcomed by a demographically and professionally diverse room of individuals anxious to help create a more affordable Atlanta. Whether private, public, or nonprofit, any professional whose work touches the real estate industry can afford to use the open-minded approach that’s needed to bring down SSD barriers and create a more diverse housing stock. Without it, we are destined to stay stuck in the crisis that stagnancy has created, as Dixon alluded to.