I have an assignment to write an article on affordable housing in Decatur, Ga. It’s been a while since I surfed through Zillow to see what things are selling for in the city’s Oakhurst neighborhood. I nearly fell out of my seat when I saw this map.

I can recall that in 2014, Oakhurst’s first million-dollar house went on the market. I can’t imagine a house on Maxwell Street selling for 2.75 million or another one a block away from where we once lived selling for 1.28 million.

For a taste of what Oakhurst’s Maxwell Street looked like a little over a decade ago, here’s a video I cobbled together documenting the transformation of one lot, one of the first teardown-mansionization conversions. Many of the houses pictured in the driving scene at the end are now gone. So, too, are the people who once lived in them.

I made the Maxwell Street video two years before a different builder transformed another one of the lots into a spectacle by tearing down a small home built in the 1940s and building what he dubbed a “1,000 Year House.” The builder live-tweeted and blogged about the project, from start to finish. The real farce was how city officials and others bought into the hype that the new brick manor was somehow affordable and sustainable.

There are many more examples over on the Ruined Decatur site.

©2023 D.S. Rotenstein

In February, a consultant delivered a report to the City of Decatur (Ga.) on teardowns and their impacts in the community. Tucked away in the report were two pages on how the city was meeting affordable housing objectives laid out in a 2008 report by the same consultant.

Affordable housing was one of several topics in the consultant’s report, Decatur Infill Housing Analysis. New homes, wrote the consultant, are “more expensive” than the older homes torn down. “This is resulting in a shift in the economics of the respective neighborhood and in what income levels are needed to reside in the community.” Consultant Market+Main added, “More cities are focused on this side of the infill issue and in wanting to preserve viable housing opportunities for the income levels represented by the older homes.”

But not Decatur, Ga.

According to the 2014 report, the City has implemented only one out of ten affordable housing objectives. The City’s consultant wrote,

The Decatur Affordable Housing Study was completed in 2008 and provided a thorough review of the affordability of housing in the City of Decatur. Even as the nation and the region emerge from the economic setback of “the Great Recession,” this analysis and its recommendations are still applicable today. The following highlights from this study support the need for housing affordability in Decatur. Many of these are also un-implemented to-date and all steps should be taken to act upon and implement the findings of this study.

• Generate and/or allocate a dedicated public funding stream to provide a partial grant and/or loan to mortgage eligible workforce affordable potential home buyers for home purchases within Decatur. NOT IMPLEMENTED.
• Create an allocation of local public grant and/or loan funding for renovation of existing Decatur homes and purchase by mortgage eligible workforce households. NOT IMPLEMENTED.
• Establish a down payment assistance fund to provide a portion of the required down payments for eligible workforce affordable homeownership candidates. NOT IMPLEMENTED.
• Establish a Homeownership Rehabilitation Program (HRP) which provides developers, both for-profit and non-profit, with a subsidy for the rehabilitation of vacant and/or deteriorated houses to be sold to income eligible home buyers. NOT IMPLEMENTED.
• Increase workforce affordable homeownership through the formation of a community land trust. NOT IMPLEMENTED.
• Encourage the development of new for-sale housing product types in Decatur other than detached single-family homes. PARTIALLY IMPLEMENTED.
• Encourage and exploit existing opportunities for additional infill of the Decatur downtown core. PARTIALLY IMPLEMENTED.
• Create design guidelines that define appropriate design concept solutions to allow higher density mixed use infill in targeted areas, such as commercial corridors and the downtown core to be used in conjunction with overlay zoning. NOT IMPLEMENTED.
• Preserve “the image of a traditional and intimate small-town center” to achieve the price points and quantities needed to fill the Decatur workforce affordability gap. NOT IMPLEMENTED.
• Permit “granny flats” and other accessory dwelling units on existing residential parcels. IMPLEMENTED.

Source: Market+Main, Decatur Infill Housing Analysis (February 2014), pp. 6-7