Fresh Loaf

Attention all wonks! Atlanta is once again featured in a story about the changing faces of cities. The Wall Street Journal reports cities nationwide are seeing whites moving back into cities in large numbers as African-Americans move out. Big shock, I know, but they’ve got great numbers to prove it.

From the article:

Today, cities are refashioning themselves as trendy centers devoid of suburban ills like strip malls and long commutes. In Atlanta, which has among the longest commute times of any U.S. city, the white population rose by 26,000 between 2000 and 2006, while the black population decreased by 8,900. Overall the white proportion has increased to 35% in 2006 from 31% in 2000.

The WSJ focuses heavily on Washington, D.C. and San Francisco, but we get a little play in there, even a mention of how the next mayor’s race may feature the first competitive white candidate since the 1980s.

For an Atlanta-focused — and well-written — take on the the city’s gentrification, check out this article by Governing Magazine’s Rob Gurwitt.

(Many thanks to the mysterious “Christa” at PecanneLog for the find.)

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Using data from the Internal Revenue Service, the info maestros at the Atlanta Regional Commission analyzed the migratory patterns of metro Atlantans. When not doing that, they go through your trash. Here’s what they noticed about your fellow man:

Atlanta Regional Commission, Migration, Trends

According to the data, the 20-county metro region gained more than 800,000 residents from other states in 2000-2005, the majority of which moved into the 10-county core. We gain more than we lose, however, as a little more than 600,000 Georgians moved out-of-state. The primary origin state was New York, adding 38,000 residents to metro Atlanta and highlighting the fact that many of Georgia’s newest arrivals originate from the Northeast. You’ll also notice more people moving from the region’s core to the hinterlands than the other way around. To view more statistics, click here.

If only the IRS kept data showing how many people move out of Georgia because of congestion, air quality, crime, drought, the housing market and the fear of firearms on MARTA buses, this graphic would be sooo much cooler. But the ARC researchers did an incredible job nonetheless.

(Graphic courtesy of ARC)

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Tee hee.

From the office of Gov. Sonny Perdue:

Kumho Tire to Locate First U.S.

Manufacturing Facility in Macon

Korean tire company to create 450 jobs, invest $225 million in Bibb County facility

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No, not you, Shelbinator.

Mysterious Mickey at Atlanta Water Shortage is pissed — I repeat, pissed — at Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby and his earmark-slippin’ ways. According to 11Alive News — and a bevy of others — the distinguished gentleman from Alabama snuck an earmark into yesterday’s pork-laden budget bill that would prevent the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from making any changes to outdated water release manuals. The article says Georgia has wanted the Corps to do just that for years, to take into account metro Atlanta’s booming growth. Alabama’s held out until the states could agree exactly how they’d share the water. From That Other Paper:

In October, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced it would start the three-year process to rewrite manuals for the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint and Alabama-Coosa-Tallapoosa river basins, which together supply metro Atlanta’s water. The ACF includes Lanier and drains south into Florida; the ACT includes Allatoona and drains southwest into Alabama.

Shelby’s provision would bar the agency from spending money updating the manuals unless the corps provides certain information up front, including a 25-year projection of water use in both basins.

Ladies and gentlemen, via press release, Sen. Saxby Chambliss … he’s pissed, too!

“The governors of Georgia, Alabama, and Florida are finally at the negotiating table finding a way forward on this very difficult issue,” Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., said Wednesday, referring to recent water-sharing negotiations. “It is mind boggling to see this language in the omnibus bill intended to block that progress.”

The gentleman from Alabama says he’s just looking out for the health, safety and welfare of the citizens of his state. I suppose that would include Atlanta-based Southern Co., which, according to Open Secrets, was his biggest political contributer in 2006. The company’s subsidiary, Alabama Power, operates 24 power-generating facilities in the state.

According to SourceWatch, Shelby is an interesting character — friend of Big Tobacco, a holdout on a bill that cut off business ties to firms associated with Darfur, and basically an earmark-happy kind of guy.

For example, even though Shelby has put the quash on the Corps’ planned updates, he’s nonetheless gonna give it some new digs. Included in his earmarks was $5 million for what the Associated Press calls his “pet project.” The senator wants to uproot the Corps from its current field office — even though it never requested it — and then raze the riverfront spot to allow the area to be developed.

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… comes from an editorial in Sunday’s Macon Telegraph. A last-minute change in the statewide water plan would allocate the resource to different parts of Georgia based on “service delivery regions” — areas that are not based on watersheds but instead on what critics call purely economic concerns and, in the words of the LaGrange Daily News, “the hydrologic equivalent of gerrymandering.” Critics are up in arms and shaking their heads with disbelief. The window for public comment on the plan is now closed; it’s now up to the Georgia Water Council to pull together the details and present it to the General Assembly next month.

The Telegraph piece echoes the voices of other outside-the-metro-region editorial boards — both literally and figuratively — and eloquently conveys the anger felt by our fellow Georgians when it comes to Atlanta’s water consumption. It also issues yet another warning to Atlanta that its growth, which has fueled its success for decades, could very well be to the detriment of both ourselves and the rest of the state.

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For the moment at least, the age-old image of Atlanta as a maelstrom of sprawl appears to be changing.

The Atlanta Regional Commission released a report that says conversion of forested and agricultural land in the 13-county metro area has slowed by 70 percent in the last two years. In addition, the ARC was able to identify nearly 170,000 acres of protected greenspace in the 20-county metro area. That’s roughly the size of DeKalb County, the report says.

The ARC attributes the reduction of forested- and agricultural-land development to the recent housing-market slump and, to a lesser extent, the growing popularity of living intown and mixed-use developments. Instead of cutting down trees and building in a new area, developers will convert or build on previously developed property.

According to the report, voters are also in favor of preserving greenspace — no special ballot measure geared toward greenspace acquisition or protection has been voted against in the 20-county metro region since 2003. Paulding County has the most protected greenspace in the region, at 16 percent, with Rockdale, Bartow, Cherokee and DeKalb following at 8.9, 7.8, 6.5 and 6.2 percent, respectively. An interesting fact judging that a couple of those counties, notably Cherokee and Bartow, are often considered some of the biggest examples of sprawl in the region.

To view the report, click here.

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Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle sure knows how to speak out both sides of his mouth. He’s parroted the state line in local interviews that Atlanta’s rampant growth over the years doesn’t factor into the current water shortage. But when Cagle makes a trip south of Macon, where editorial boards have chastised the metro region’s builder-friendly mind-set, the lieutenant governor sings a different tune.

“If we simply manage to catch more of the water that falls from the sky we’ll manage the growth for years to come.”
— Cagle to the Associated Press on Oct. 16

“I think there is a concerted effort to try to create fear among Georgians by stopping growth with the threat of no longer having the water resources.”
— Cagle in an Oct. 17 Capitol Impact article

“We are not in the permitting process in terms of buildings, and we do not intend to be.”
— Cagle tells the AJC on Oct. 25 that the General Assembly will not consider legislation putting the brakes on growth

“Communities have got to begin developing in that concept [not allowing new growth unless there is an adequate water supply]. You have to have conservation, you have to have a reasonable managed growth plan, you have to manage that resource in a responsible way. Nobody wants unbridled growth …”
— Cagle caters to rural beliefs in a Nov. 6 Moultrie Observer article about the drought

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Because Delta Tango Commentmeister wants his facts — I won’t fault you for that, sir or madam — and it seems like he or she doesn’t want to hear them from me, I give you two dollops of opinion sandwiched between two slices of reality from various other news sources.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is saying the “81-days-till-we-literally-fall-dead-in-our-tracks” water supply estimate for Lake Lanier is inaccurate. Mussels and sturgeons are canaries in the coal mine and don’t deserve the blame they are a-shoulderin’. And you better get a handle on that development, Georgia, and make this drought a learning experience rather than just another catastrophe. Why? Because our neighbors think we’re water hogs and they shouldn’t have to support our growth.

Late this afternoon the state filed a lawsuit against the Corps in the Middle District of Florida Federal Court requesting that the agency immediately stop releasing water from Lake Lanier and the state’s federal reservoirs. Gov. Sonny Perdue will address the press tomorrow at Lake Lanier, fresh off the plane from his jaunt to Japan to hash up some more biz-nass for Georgia.

You guys have any questions we should ask the governor tomorrow at the press conference?

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From yesterday’s LaGrange Daily News …

“I wish the state was as organized as we are locally,” [Jeff] Brown said. [Editor’s note: Jeff Brown is a former state representative and is current chairman of the West Point Lake Advisory Council.]

The state already should have been doing a better job of curtailing growth, he said, putting a moratorium on septic tanks within a certain radius of metropolitan areas.

“There are so many things the state should have been doing all along,” Brown said.

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