Category: original maps
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Atlanta’s Corporate Landlords
For the last decade, the Atlanta metro has been ground zero for corporate investors buying up single-family homes to turn into rental properties. Studies have consistently shown that more so than any other single metropolitan area across the country, these firms have focused on Atlanta and its suburban fringes, leading Dan Immergluck to label Atlanta […]
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Placing the Police
For the last two-plus years, the place of the police in our society has been at the forefront not only here in Atlanta, but nationwide. But given the murder of Rayshard Brooks at the hands of an APD officer in the summer of 2020 and the city’s total lack of a meaningful response, followed by […]
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Landownership Inequality in Georgia, Past and Present
Across the state today, 1,120,314 acres of agricultural land, or about 3% of the total land mass, are owned by foreign investors who own the land not as a way of sustaining life and livelihood, but as financial assets to be mined for profit. Given that our figures from 1900 are close approximations of the peak of Black landownership in the United States, we can say with a fair bit of certainty that foreign companies now own more land in Georgia than Black Georgians ever did.
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University Lands
Over the course of the next week, colleges and universities across Atlanta will restart classes for the fall semester. But teaching classes and offering degrees is only one – sometimes small – aspect of what universities do nowadays. While fielding sports teams is obviously one element of this larger project, universities are just as oriented […]
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Appraising Gentrification
If you’re a Fulton County homeowner, it’s that time of year to have just recently received your latest property tax assessment. And chances are, that assessment has gone up, meaning you’ll be paying more in property taxes. But those increases in property taxes aren’t equal across the county. Thanks to the fact that Fulton […]
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Quad-lanta
Last month, I happened upon a tweet from an Atlanta newcomer inquiring about the logic and utility of Atlanta’s street naming conventions. You know what I’m talking about: the ordinal directions appended to the end of the city’s street names, always letting you know which of the city’s four quadrants you’re in at any given […]
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Absentee Exploitation
Over the past week, the AJC has been running an excellent multi-part investigation of the housing conditions at some of Atlanta’s most notoriously dilapidated complexes, broadening out from the case of the now-condemned Forest Cove Apartments. While the whole situation is infuriating, I was particularly taken with the second part of the series investigating the […]
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Storage Spaces
In a recent piece in The Architectural Review, Marianela D’Aprile examines the significance of one ever-proliferating element of our collective urban landscapes: the self-storage facility. D’Aprile draws a parallel between self storage units and luxury condos, another use of urban space that’s largely devoid of human life, and yet similarly important for the functioning of […]
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Peach Streets
There are approximately 217 total miles of Peach Streets across the state of Georgia. But these Peach Streets aren’t evenly distributed across all 159 of Georgia’s counties.
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Atlanta’s ur-choropleths
To begin this indefinite experiment in mapping all things Atlanta, I thought it worth starting with what I already know to be Atlanta’s ur-choropleth; the one variable whose spatial pattern will be mimicked by so many other spatial patterns, regardless of how tangential the two may seem.
mapping atlanta 