Mayor Andre Dickens of Atlanta breezed through re-election on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, winning a second term to lead a city that is Georgia’s largest and an important capital of commerce and culture in the Deep South.
Mr. Dickens, a Democrat and a former city councilman, benefited from an absence of serious competition and a landscape vastly different from the one he inherited four years ago, when Atlanta was buffeted by the same challenges confronting many major American cities at the time.
In 2021, a surge in violence during the pandemic inflamed tensions so severely that residents in Buckhead, a large and wealthy enclave, tried to secede and form their own city, threatening to debilitate Atlanta’s finances and deepen animosity over race and class. The city’s police force suffered from sagging morale and depleted ranks. And a protest over a proposed police and fire training center — nicknamed Cop City by its critics — gained nationwide attention and prompted an aggressive crackdown by state officials that led to the fatal shooting of a demonstrator.
Since then, crime rates have plummeted. The secession bid in Buckhead was thwarted by a bipartisan effort by state lawmakers. The city has fallen short of recruitment goals for the Police Department, but the agency has still gradually built up its ranks. And after the demonstrators were cleared, the public safety training center was completed, and the movement opposing it largely dissipated.
Still, soaring housing prices, which have made many neighborhoods in the rapidly developing city unaffordable to longtime residents, remain an unresolved crisis, even as Mr. Dickens boasted of his administration’s creative approaches to adding thousands of units of affordable housing. Major water main breaks last year highlighted weakening infrastructure, and the city’s slow and muted response infuriated residents.
But no Atlanta mayor has been denied a second term since 1973, and it became apparent early on during Mr. Dickens’s re-election campaign that he was highly unlikely to break the trend. His challengers included a Republican businessman who is the founder of an L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy organization, a retired city police officer and a small-business owner. All of them failed to gain any serious traction in the race.
Rick Rojas is the Atlanta bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of the South.
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