It Was Supposed to Connect Segregated Neighborhoods. Did It Gentrify Them Instead?

Even in its unfinished state, the Atlanta BeltLine is a wondrous thing, threading under graffitied highway overpasses and rising over bridges.

Since the first section opened in 2012, the $900 million project has transformed nearly 13 of the 22 miles of what was mostly a derelict railway corridor, looping around the Georgia capital’s center.

That first completed section, known as the Eastside Trail, is now a wildly popular 2.4-mile esplanade, with green spaces, restaurants, shops, hotels and office buildings. Big companies like Intuit have moved into buildings overlooking the trail, and the electric car company Rivian is expected to join soon.

With more than 2.5 million visits a year, the BeltLine has generated over $9 billion in private investments for the city, according to Atlanta BeltLine Inc., the public development authority building the trail. And the project, which has about 11 miles of smaller trails that shoot off the main loop, has offered Atlantans accustomed to driving everywhere a taste of a less car-dependent way of life.

When a 1.3-mile section on the West Side opened this summer, stitching together two completed trail segments, many residents were excited about the changes that might bring to the area. Arthur Toal, a project manager at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said he was thrilled on a recent afternoon to be able to ride his electric skateboard on a newly paved portion from his home in Howell Station to Washington Park, another West Side neighborhood, without having to cross traffic-choked roadways.

“It’s almost giving me goose bumps,” he said.

But there were also those who were left feeling uneasy, and they had good reason: The Westside Trail passes by historically Black neighborhoods like Bankhead, which had an estimated median household income of less than $27,000 in 2023, making its residents especially vulnerable to displacement.

“The BeltLine scares people,” Shakeesha Jeffries, a certified bike instructor, said while getting her front brakes adjusted at Clutch Bicycle Shop in the West Side neighborhood of West End one day this summer. “It’s like a sign that gentrification is happening.”

Once a portion of the BeltLine opens, homeowners in the area often see their property values, and taxes, soar. One 2017 study found that from 2011 to 2015, the value of homes within a half-mile of the BeltLine jumped 17.9 to 26.6 percent. (Funding for the 6,500-acre BeltLine area depends on property tax revenue generated there.)

Near the Eastside Trail, the Old Fourth Ward neighborhood, the birthplace of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., had a median home value of $1.7 million in 2020, a nearly fivefold jump from $345,000 in 2010, according to a mapping application created in conjunction with a recent report on gentrification and Black displacement by the nonprofit National Community Reinvestment Coalition. The neighborhood’s residents flipped from majority Black to majority white during that period.

The average asking rate for offices along the Eastside Trail has increased 43 percent over the past five years, to about $62 per square foot. That is 74 percent higher than the rate for class A buildings in the Atlanta metropolitan area, said Audrey Giguere, a research manager at Cushman & Wakefield.

At the other end, the Bankhead neighborhood on the West Side is dotted with boarded-up houses, a legacy of the subprime mortgage crisis, decades of redlining and other factors. Over 41 percent of households in the area lived below the poverty line in 2023, more than double the percentage for Atlanta as a whole, according to an analysis by the Atlanta Regional Commission, a planning agency.

Despite what it may look like on the outside, the neighborhood is close-knit. Some families have been there since the 1960s, said Ivy Bowman, chair of the Bankhead Community Association, a neighborhood group. Residents share vegetables from their gardens and keep an eye on one another’s children, she said.

“People are still living and loving in this neck of the woods,” Ms. Bowman added. “There is a vibrant community here — you just can’t see it from the outside.”

Atlanta is one of dozens of cities turning degraded waterways, abandoned train tracks and other obsolete infrastructure into lively public spaces. The High Line, the 1.45-mile elevated park built on an abandoned rail line on New York City’s west side, is perhaps the best known, but the BeltLine, which is expected to be completed in 2030, is likely the largest.

The idea was the subject of Ryan Gravel’s thesis paper in 1999, when he was a graduate student at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Mr. Gravel had seen that people were flocking to Atlanta’s in-town neighborhoods after decades of white families’ moving to suburban towns. He proposed that the fallow land from the old freight tracks be used for a transit corridor connecting 45 neighborhoods that had long been segregated by race and class — divisions that the tracks helped enforce — and providing transportation for those without cars or the ability to hop on a bike.

But the transit part of Mr. Gravel’s proposal languished, while trail building forged ahead.

Developers profited by buying sites near the BeltLine — which many called “beachfront” property — and converting abandoned warehouses to new uses. Ponce City Market, for example, a 2.1-million-square-foot former Sears store, is brimming with activity from restaurants, offices and shops like Pottery Barn and J. Crew.

The BeltLine “lost its way from a transit and trails project to this transformative real estate development project,” said Daniel Immergluck, a professor emeritus at Georgia State University who was a co-author of the 2017 study on home values.

As the Eastside Trail became more popular, resistance from business owners and rail opponents to building a light-rail line that was supposed to start there has increased. They say its construction would be a yearslong disruption and compromise the existing character and appeal of the BeltLine. Atlanta’s mayor, Andre Dickens, recently withdrew his support for an initial phase of that project.

Mr. Gravel resigned from the board of the Atlanta BeltLine Partnership, the BeltLine’s fund-raising arm, in 2016, saying he felt community interests were being ignored.

“The BeltLine is awesome,” Mr. Gravel, now an architect and the author of a book about the project, said during a recent stroll on the Eastside Trail. “I’m also just heartbroken over its shortcomings.”

Clyde Higgs, the president and chief executive of Atlanta BeltLine Inc., pushed back on the criticism during an interview. He reaffirmed his support for light rail on the BeltLine, but he also said that ultimately, a rail line wasn’t likely to traverse the entire 22-mile circuit. Instead, he said, there might be rail on portions of the trail — for example, on the South Side, as the mayor proposes, where the path is still being developed — and “another solution” for the East Side that could involve self-driving vehicles.

The development authority recently got approval for a $3 million pilot project that would allow driverless vans to bring riders to the Westside Trail, timed to coincide with the World Cup games in 2026, when Atlanta is expected to host an estimated 300,000 visitors.

Mr. Higgs also pointed to affordable housing built near the trail.

The BeltLine said it had completed about three-quarters of the 5,600 affordable housing units it had said it would build by 2030. In 2017, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the BeltLine had funded only 785 of those homes.

Given the challenges of the BeltLine’s rollout, the project’s biggest failing might be that it was one of the first of its kind. Similar big urban infrastructure-reuse projects now incorporate affordable housing and support for small businesses and longtime residents early in planning, to avert what some have called “green gentrification.” A nonprofit forum, the High Line Network, was created to help project leaders share lessons, many of them gleaned from the BeltLine.

In 2020, the Atlanta BeltLine Partnership began offering a program that covers the increases in property tax bills for longtime homeowners in designated neighborhoods who meet income limits. More than 270 residents have benefited from that program.

For the people who were pushed out of their neighborhoods years ago, though, it’s too little, too late. But Maureen Sanchez, who recently bought a home in Bankhead, said she felt “tentatively optimistic” about the future of the neighborhood.

Ms. Sanchez said she had found city and BeltLine staff responsive to community concerns, and she was heartened to see a landlord who owns vacant houses in the neighborhood start to renovate and offer to rent them to lower-income tenants through the Section 8 program.

“Gentrification is going to happen, but I do think there are more things in place to help,” she said.

Whether officials can help support and strengthen neighborhoods like Bankhead and, eventually, offer public transit on the BeltLine remains to be seen. One thing is for sure, Mr. Higgs said: “Everyone is watching us now.”

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