Dana Blankenhorn

Atlanta Density Done Right

If you want housing density, make neighborhoods more attractive.

That means adding small parks and amenities people can enjoy within an easy walk before you add housing. If the area doesn’t have them, build commercial-office structures with apartments on top. If you do this backwards, you’re building a slum.

Cities are changing. So is transportation. If I can get most of what I need within a mile, I can use an electric bike unless I need Costco. Maybe I won’t even need Costco. Then rent a van for vacations, use something like Uber for nights out, and we’re good.

Lots of urban people already live this way. The idea of maintaining a car when you’re only using it an hour per day (or less) is wasteful.

But this only works if your area is walkable. This only works if you can get coffee and essentials around the corner, if your lawyer or accountant is nearby, if you can walk your dog and find a park in 10 minutes, with trees and benches to sit on.

Atlanta knows this.

It’s All Biden’s Fault

I have a friend who is mad as hell at Joe Biden right now.

There’s a job waiting for him overseas. He’s fully vaccinated. But he can’t prove it to his new employer’s satisfaction. Even if the host country lets him in, he’ll have to be in quarantine for 2 weeks, at great expense, before he can start work.

How can this be, he asks? Why hasn’t the President mandated vaccine passports?

We all overestimate what a President can do. The media treats him as magic, the final authority, the one person responsible for everything.

But the President’s powers are severely circumscribed. Especially in this case.

There is no national medical database. There’s no federal control over health insurance. Under the McCarran-Ferguson Act , passed in 1945, health insurance is a state function. Even the decision upholding the Affordable Care Act held that states didn’t have to take its Medicaid expansion. Many still don’t.

Atlanta Politics: Still All About Race

For the first time since I moved here 40 years ago Atlanta finally succeeded over the last four years.

It attracted a huge Microsoft development. It built parks. Its population grew.

The reaction by the city’s leaders has been panic.

The reason? Developers moved in near the coming Microsoft offices and built housing for upper-income people who might work there. The white gentrification of the west side, starting at Georgia Tech, has accelerated. Until recently this was the heart of the ghetto, and of the Atlanta machine’s political strength.

The response has been two-fold. First, Atlanta isn’t really fighting Republicans’ efforts to extract Buckhead, with 20% of the city’s population and 40% of its tax base, from the city. Buckhead is nearly all-white. They will complain, but they will let it go.