Population of the City of Atlanta as of July 1, 2008. Good news!

[J2rescue]

Originally Posted by neil0311

OK...I admit that maybe I'm ignorant. I have lived in different parts of the Atlanta area going back 27 years, and I've lived in the NY and Boston areas.

Most areas up north were settled many years ago and houses were built that are still being lived in today. Land has become very scarce and you don't have the kind of subdivision or planned communities in most parts of the northeast that you have in the Atlanta area and many parts of Florida for example. I don't understand what the problem is or why that's such as buggaboo for so many people.

The reason many people leave cities and move to suburbs is to get away from living on top of other people and to have more land and a larger living space in a quieter and safer location. What is it about the suburbs that you would change, without turning them into an urban landscapes? What is "unplanned" about a subdivision? Sure, there needs to be planning around utilities and water/sewer capacity, but that is easily done via the permitting process.

So what is it that you would do differently to make the Atlanta suburbs so much better, and please explain your comment about "market demands" as I don't understand your meaning.

I'm saying the fact that 99.9% of the development in Atlanta is sprawl has nothing to do with "market demand". The reason people originally started leaving cities is that after the war, the government offered low cost loans for new housing but nothing for rebuilding existing homes that had fallen into disrepair after years of depression and war. Let me clarify that I'm referring to ALL cities not just the large ones. From Lawrenceville to Marietta, all of them declined.

It evolved into a system where everything is so programmed that nothing else was being offered (especially in Atlanta). Banks required a lot of sameness so that they can bundle the loans and governments developed zoning regulations that require sprawl. Until the last ten years or so a community like a Savannah or Charleston would've been illegal to develop here assuming you could even get financing and thats not because of market demands.

more later...