Buttermilk Bottom demolition in 1965Courtesy of The Ross Ingram Collection at the Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center Josh Green, editor of Urbanize Atlanta and a longtime Atlanta contributor, is an award-winning journalist, fiction author, and editor whose latest novel, Goodbye, Swe etberry Park, recently won the grand prize at the 19th annual Hollywood Book Festival.Illustration by Graham Smith The numbers were staggering. In January 1962, Atlanta magazine published the first of two cover stories chronicling urban renewal in the city. Written by the late research editor Gerald Horton, the piece strikes a generally optimistic tone about “slum clearance and rehabilitation” as a complicated but “constructive” means of eventually bettering people’s lives—and adding $125 million to the tax digest—while not shying away from grim statistics. At the time, Atlanta counted roughly 40,000 substandard housing units scattered around the city in pockets, where a population equivalent to all of Savannah lived. Five districts were in the crosshairs of urban renewal (that is, bulldozers were all but lined up), with a concentration of three of the city’s “worst slum districts” around downtown’s core. The areas are described in the article as Butler Street, Rawson and Washington streets, and University Center, where 3,800 families were set to be displaced, most of them Black. The districts targeted for clearance totaled 1,235 acres (the size of six Piedmont Parks), and Horton’s article mentions that urban renewal work had also begun on six others. It’s not named, but the most infamous slum in the city’s history—a neighborhood of dilapidated shacks and busted sewer lines called Buttermilk Bottom, and sometimes “Black Bottom”—was likely among them, as it would be cleared for the development of Atlanta Civic Center, which opened six years later. Public housing projects sprang up from East Lake Meadows to Bankhead Courts and Wheat Street Gardens in Sweet Auburn to help house lower-income Atlantans. But the last of those housing projects, Bowen Homes, was bulldozed in 2009, like the slum clearance of old. Or like construction of downtown interstates that had ripped apart Sweet Auburn’s thriving Black commercial district in the 1960s. Or like the 1996 Olympic Legacy Program—once coined by Harvard College as “the race to displace”—that uprooted nearly 6,000 residents. Obsessed with reinvention since its inception, Atlanta today is witnessing a more piecemeal changeover, as I’ve personally seen over more than a dozen years of covering the city’s physical evolution as my day job. The changes, especially following the Great Recession, have been supercharged by Beltline investment and the cachet of walkable urban places with inimitable, organic qualities and history. Instead of entire districts being flattened, it’s a row of older bungalows, an aging apartment complex, a shuttered factory—all broadly described as gentrification. But is that a gentler way of saying urban renewal never really ended? “Atlanta’s bizarre approach to historic preservation, commingled with using historic preservation only when it’s suitable, fits, or is acceptable, is repugnant,” says David Mitchell, Atlanta Preservation Center’s executive director. Present-day south downtownPhotograph by the Growl Bros. As examples, Mitchell points to blocks of Mechanicsville cleared for Olympics preparations and, more recently, sections of old brick housing flattened along Boulevard for denser but more standard development. Atlanta’s downtrodden areas are referred to more palatably as “blighted” today, but the goal of extraction is largely the same, Mitchell posits. “One of the things that’s defined Atlanta and made it so unique is its diverse neighborhoods,” he says, “and as we homogenize them more and more, we cease to be Atlanta and just become a city.” Richard A. White, senior vice president at Atlanta developer The Integral Group, says the deeper legacy of urban renewal for Black families is loss and mistrust. His firm was founded in 1993 and three years later opened Centennial Place—on the former Techwood and Clark Howell Homes sites—which helped establish a mixed-income “playbook” for rebuilding a neighborhood with schools and community amenities instead of erasing it and its people, says White. “One of the most important changes since the 1950s and 1960s is a broader understanding that displacement is not an abstract policy outcome,” White says. “It affects families, schools, churches, and business networks that take generations to build and moments to disrupt.” Meanwhile, the antithesis of site clearance is roaring ahead in South Downtown, where tech entrepreneurs at Atlanta Ventures are infusing their new portfolio—58 historic structures across 16 acres—with a dozen retailers and restaurants and promising more to come. The whole point is to embrace the city’s past, says Atlanta Ventures partner Jon Birdsong, though it’s massively expensive and high-risk in terms of return on investment. “Atlanta, like most downtown cores, was flattened and bulldozed into parking lots,” says Birdsong. “Restoring our limited, human-scale buildings from the late 19th century and early 20th century in the only grid system left in Atlanta is a once-in-a-city’s-lifetime opportunity, and we won’t let it go to waste.” More on Atlanta development “Atlanta made a deliberate choice decades ago to redefine what a Southern city could be. You can still feel that decision in how the city moves today. In my work across the country, I’ve seen few places match Atlanta’s mix of forward momentum, cultural depth, and economic diversity. It doesn’t follow the region; it sets the direction.” – The Integral Group Chairman, Egbert Perry Back to 65 Years of Atlanta Magazine This article appears in our May 2026 issue. 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