Food Halls For Who?

It feels like every week there’s a new food hall concept being opened or announced somewhere across metro Atlanta. Sometimes, a new food hall opens, then gets closed down within a couple months, then reopens again under new management less than a year later. This flurry of food hall openings in recent years has given metro Atlanta a total of 15 different food halls, with another nine in the planning or development stages.

Atlanta is, of course, not alone amongst US cities in getting swept up in this latest fad. The US currently has upwards of 360 food halls scattered across the country, and another 127 more expected to open this year. Given the figures cited above, this does mean that metro Atlanta is home to more than 4% of all food halls across the country, despite having less than 2% of the country’s total population.

While we can’t be entirely sure whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, there is definitely some truth to the headline on local food writer Beth McKibben’s Eater Atlanta rundown of all of the city’s food halls: “Like It or Not, Food Halls Are Here to Stay in Atlanta”. But the reason food halls are here to stay isn’t necessarily because they offer the best food in the world or the most ideal dining experiences. Food halls are here to stay because the food hall has become a fundamental piece of 21^st century real estate development.

On the one hand, it’s only natural for food halls – or something like them – to pop up alongside other kinds of new residential and commercial development. People need somewhere to eat after all, and why not give them a greater diversity of options to choose from? But food halls also represent a hedge by real estate developers who might otherwise face trouble when a full-service restaurant on their property doesn’t pan out. Food halls allow for more rapid turnover of tenants because it minimizes the overhead on the part of each individual restauranteur. So instead of a prominent restaurant space sitting completely vacant for months on end, food halls allow for an “out with the old, in with the new” ethos with minimal constraints.

This preference for newness and change also mirrors the logic of real estate and urban development more broadly. And it’s certainly reflected in the form of change we’re perhaps most accustomed to talking about here in Atlanta: gentrification. Even as all of the new development taking place across the city is rejuvenating certain neighborhoods and replenishing the tax base, it isn’t uncommon to look at it all and wonder: who is this actually for?

Mapping the locations of Atlanta’s food halls yields a clear answer to the aforementioned question: if a food hall isn’t located in or immediately adjacent to a heavily gentrified or gentrifying neighborhood, it’s in an neighborhood that’s already so wealthy and white that gentrification isn’t even possible.

Of the 14 open or planned food halls within Atlanta’s city limits, just one – Citizens Market at Phipps Plaza in Buckhead – is not in, or immediately adjacent to, a census tract that has lost a significant chunk of its Black residents in the last two decades. Meanwhile, the city’s two most famous food halls – Ponce City Market and Krog Street Market – are practically the posterchildren for the massive gentrification that’s taken place along the Eastside Beltline in the last decade-plus. So the location of all these food halls is no accident, but the latest manifestation of the larger process of gentrification that’s been reshaping the city for the last decade-plus.

Perhaps the lone exception to this rule is in the city’s oldest (and only publicly-owned) food hall, the Sweet Auburn Curb Market, which was initially founded in 1918 before establishing a permanent home in its current building in 1924. The curb market is one of just two existing food halls across metro Atlanta to be located in a majority Black census tract, along with the recently opened Lee + White Food Hall along the Beltline’s Southside trail in the West End neighborhood (which only further confirms the more general rule described above).

So while new amenities and some halfway decent (and at least a few genuinely good) restaurants can be a nice thing for some of us, it’s always important to ask who these things are meant to be for and who they benefit – even if the answer rarely changes.