For over a month, the ACC Commission has fiercely debated the topic of housing and the benefits of building more homes in Athens.
Some commissioners have argued that allowing housing development, even if unaffordable for most people, will tend to lower housing costs across the city over time. Others argue that the economic theory of supply and demand may not apply to the Athens housing market and, just the opposite, that new construction will actually tend to push the less fortunate out of town or into homelessness.
Who’s right? Looking at housing costs relative to supply in other communities may provide an answer.
Proposed development off Barnett Shoals Road
Commissioners had a broad discussion about housing during a presentation on a proposed development off Barnett Shoals Road called “The Shoals.”
This ambitious proposal calls for four different neighborhoods to be constructed in several phases around Dekle Lake. It will include somewhere between 575 to 745 housing units, at least 20,000 square feet of commercial space, an arts and entertainment district, a mile-long extension of the Greenway and outlets for charging both electric cars and electric bikes.
The proposed development spans a wide variety of housing types including townhomes, duplexes, quadplexes, mansion apartments and some single-family homes. The designer of the project, W&A Engineering, is asking the commission to rezone the area to ‘commercial neighborhood,’ a request which was unanimously approved by the planning commission.
They’re also requesting a number of zoning waivers to allow things which are normally prohibited, including allowing accessory dwelling units, reducing the parking minimum, allowing smaller lots and also allowing multi-family options like duplexes and quadplexes. ACC planning staff support these waivers.
This development was originally proposed in 2004 but was delayed by the “great recession” of 2008. While some of the proposed units have been constructed over the years, the current plan is very different from the original design. This time around, W&A Engineering is working with Opticos, the design firm that helped prepare the local government’s missing middle housing scan a couple years ago.
The designer has provided the local government with hundreds of pages of design elements, causing commissioners and staff alike to remark on the scale and complexity of the new proposal.
“It’s very complicated. The request itself is the first of anything we have like this, certainly at this scale,” said ACC Planning Director Bruce Lonnee.
Who is the proposed housing for?
The proposed development lacks floor plans that are commonly seen in student apartments and seems mostly geared towards young professionals with high-paying jobs. Developer Jake Strickland explained that most of the units are rentals which would probably cost between $1,500 for a studio apartment to $3,000 or more per month for the larger units.
These price points caused some commissioners to express dismay over the state of affordable housing in Athens.
“Beautiful project,” said Commissioner Ovita Thornton. “But I am still trying to figure out when are we going to get to the folk we cannot afford these places? … I want these developers to make money. I want you to make money. But I don’t want you to make money leaving other folk on the street and increasing our homeless situation and our unhoused folk.”
Thornton called for revisiting the local government’s inclusionary zoning ordinance which provides incentives for developers to set-aside some new units as affordable. As it stands, the ordinance is almost never used.
Supply and demand
Commissioner Melissa Link had a more hopeful outlook on the proposed development, saying that it could help push home prices down simply by increasing the supply of housing in Athens.
“I wonder if this had been built out on schedule, fifteen years ago or whatever, we might not be in as much of a housing crisis as we are right now,” Link said. “We’re not going to see low-income housing in here [at this location], but by enabling the construction of more housing…the law of supply and demand kicks in. We see across the country in communities that do allow the construction of more housing, their costs start to go down.”
This comment seemed to irk Commissioner Tiffany Taylor, who expressed doubt that the economic theory of supply and demand is relevant to the current state of the Athens housing market.
“[It] seems to be like a talking point, ‘if we build more houses then either people are going to flock to the new houses or rent in the old places are going to go down,’ and I’m just not seeing it yet,” Taylor said.
Taylor then wondered if her colleagues weren’t supporting the development out of either a personal interest in things like electric cars or bicycling, or out of a class interest that makes them blind to the economic struggles many Athenians face on a daily basis.
“I feel like a lot of the reasons why we get excited about the pretty pictures and the amenities [in developments like this] is because it suits our interests. It suits our interests when they say we’re going to get three EV connections, when most of us drive cars that require gas and not battery. Or if it ties into the Greenway that most of us do not use,” Taylor said. “We [commissioners] don’t have to worry about being kicked out of our houses, or the fear of new developments possibly displacing us, so it kind of removes us from the reality of residents that are living here.”
Taylor then doubled-down on the idea that the construction of new homes can cause displacement of existing residents elsewhere in town.
“I won’t be supporting this because it could potentially be the seed of something that’s going to move and drive a lot of Athenians out,” she said.
Taylor also asked ACC staff to provide her with any data showing that rents in nearby counties have been reduced by new construction.
In fact, Link’s suggestion that the economic factors of supply and demand can have an impact on housing prices is supported by recent evidence from around the country. New construction that coincides with a reduction in housing costs can be seen in cities like Minneapolis but also closer to home in Atlanta.
“As Minneapolis or Austin have created more places for people to live, that’s provided a stabilizing influence on prices, community-wide,” said Mayor Kelly Girtz. “I would anticipate that this [development] would have a comparable effect.”
But let’s be real – focusing on the housing needs of the upper-middle class will probably not have a direct impact on the rents that working class Athenians are paying now. What it can do is help prevent an influx of professionals from competing for and bidding up the cost of housing that working class Athenians rely on.
Girtz explained one reason why home prices have been skyrocketing in Athens is that the city has been successful in attracting industries which offer high-paying jobs.
“One of the things we know as a body is that we’ve seen job generation, particularly in healthcare and biotech and higher education, so we want to make sure everybody who’s moving into those jobs at Meissner and Boehringer Ingelheim and the university has a place to live,” Girtz said.
The commission will vote on whether or not to allow this rezoning request on March 4.
If you’d like to find out what the ACC Commission has done for affordable housing in recent years, watch this video or read the transcript here.
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