Letters to the Editor
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Atlanta...the City That Doesn't Work
As a one time Chicagoan, that was may favorite refrain about "the city too busy to hate (but full of racism anyway)".
I also left Atlanta fairly recently, but I have to disagree with the last poster--people have been returning to Atlanta and the "intown" suburban areas like Decatur for quite a while and the condo market is too depressed for anything downtown to be all that expensive. Greater Atlanta has an oversupply of golf courses and just about every bad development idea imaginable. The forest canopy is disappearing, public greenspace is extremely lacking in comparison to many other major metros, and most of the new suburban developments are treeless wonders.
There have been efforts at water conservation in past droughts, although they have been poorly publicized and enforced--limits on lawn watering and the like. Beyond that, there have been none of the initiatives that would be familiar to people from Southern California or other places which have had to confront these problems. Yes, the rest of the sunbelt keeps growing recklessly, but every now and then, people notice. Unfortunately, virtually all of the jurisdictions in the Atlanta area are ruled by people heavily indebted to developer interests and with in absence of large employers with real roots in the community (for every Coca-Cola or Delta, both in trouble, you have a skeletal HQ like UPS or several branch offices of big companies with no real investment in the community), developers constitute a disproportionate amount of local business sector political influence. There's a lack of real grassroots organizing of any kind outside of a few pockets in Atlanta and some of the near suburbs. "Growth" continues to have a constituency and efforts to control it are small or only intermittent. There have been occasional glimmers of hope--even in Cobb County (Gingrich-land), people have organized against Wal-Mart and fast growing Cherokee County briefly had a county commission not in developers' pockets. But I wouldn't hold my breath. Perdue is a standard issue GOP gasbag and many of the Dems are major disappointments.