Housing affordability is the top concern for metro Atlanta residents, topping traffic, crime and the economy, according to a sweeping poll released Friday by the Atlanta Regional Commission.
In the ARC’s annual Metro Atlanta Speaks Survey, 28% of respondents said housing affordability is the biggest problem the region faces. Coming in second was traffic, with 24% saying it was the top issue. Crime and the economy tied for third place, each garnering 13% of the vote.
The ARC, which is the metro’s regional planning agency, has conducted its survey annually since 2013 (except for 2022) to understand how residents perceive their quality of life. The hybrid phone and online survey polled 4,121 adults across the 11-county Atlanta area during August to ask their thoughts on a range of issues, from housing and jobs to artificial intelligence.
Last year, the economy ranked as the top issue facing metro Atlanta, supplanting crime for the number one spot.
This is the first year housing affordability has been an option for the biggest problem facing metro Atlanta. In years prior, the ARC had considered housing costs as part of the economy overall, but after hearing from local officials and residents that this was a growing area of concern, the agency decided to make it a distinct option.
“We were previously known as a sort of affordable haven, the South and Atlanta. Over time that has changed,” Ann Carpenter, the ARC’s chief research and innovation officer, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“We realized that we really needed to drill in our category of the economy as a concern, what is really contributing to that.”
But not every county feels housing is the top concern. Residents in Cherokee, Forsyth and Gwinnett all ranked traffic as the region’s biggest problem.
Overall, more than 60% of residents said if they had to move right now, they could not afford to move to another house or apartment in the neighborhood where they currently live.
When asked what the main reason was for the housing affordability problems, 44% of respondents said it was because of developers building units that were too expensive while 35% attributed it to investors buying properties to rent out.
For several years, metro Atlanta has been a top market for Wall Street investors to buy houses to convert into rentals. An AJC investigation in 2023 found the flood of Wall Street cash was pushing homeownership out of reach for many middle class families.
The region, like much of the country, also saw a surge in home prices during the pandemic, though that has since moderated amid an increase in mortgage interest rates, which also makes homebuying more expensive.
Carpenter said though residents’ perceptions are that the causes were developers and investors, the reason for rising housing costs is because of a lack of supply to meet the demands of a growing region.
“This is not just a city of Atlanta problem anymore, this is really a metro-wide issue, and it’s going to take a lot of stakeholders coming together, different sectors and different parts of the region, and we’re aiming to do that through some of our work,” Carpenter said, pointing to the ARC’s work on housing strategy.
Housing affordability has been a key issue for Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, who is also chair of the ARC. Since 2022, he has pledged to build tens of thousands of new units of housing.
“On this year’s survey, the concerns over housing affordability came through loud and clear,” Dickens said in a statement. “Our region is making meaningful progress on this challenge, but there’s no doubt we have more work to do.”
Overall, pessimism among residents in the region is increasing, with more than 46% of people saying living in metro Atlanta in three to four years will be worse than it is right now. Last year, only a third of respondents felt that way.
More than half of respondents also feel now is a bad time to find a well-paying job, compared with last year when a plurality of people felt it was a good time to find a good job.
But feelings are mixed when it comes to artificial intelligence. While about 61% of respondents said the technology would increase business productivity and about half said it would make life easier, nearly three-quarters also said it would decrease the number of available jobs.
The survey was administered by Kennesaw State University’s A.L. Burruss Institute of Public Service and Research and has a margin of error of 1.5% for the overall region, and a varying margin of error of 3.8% to 5.7% for individual jurisdictions.
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