2023 was the 10th year for Metro Atlanta Speaks–the largest survey done on Atlanta resident perceptions, attitudes, and opinions. Late last year, we published a broad overview of the results from the entire 2023 survey. But with 21 primary questions, and demographic cross-tabulations for each of them, “there’s more…much more”. The first “deeper dive” we took was a detailed look into our respondents’ assessments of the biggest problem facing the region. We continue the series here with a review of resident perceptions and opinions about housing affordability . We posed many new questions in 2023 about this topic–one of the key priorities for the ARC now and going forward.

MAS 2023’s “full story” on housing is embedded in this slide deck, as well as in the slideshare below. But some highlights are as follows:

  • “The economy”, of which housing supply and demand is a critical component, saw a doubling (12% to 24%), between 2021 and 2023, in the share of residents naming it the Atlanta Region’s “biggest problem”.
  • Nearly two-thirds of residents say that they could not afford to move to another unit in their neighborhood; only a slightly smaller share (55%) believed it would be viable for them to move anywhere else in the metro area.
  • While more than half of homeowners felt they could afford to move elsewhere in the metro area, only 3 in 10 renters believed they could so.
  • All races and ethnicities reported this lack of metrowide “housing mobility”,. with only a slightly lower perceived ability to move by non-White respondents
  •  In all but one of the 12 surveyed jurisdictions, 70% or more of residents felt that housing for low-wage workers would not be affordably available in their communities.
  • As far as favored policies to address affordability, no particular option dominated choices–though “developer incentives” had a plurality.
  • And finally, to add further complexity to developing prescriptive solutions, over a third of respondents stated that they would prefer future development occur in “undeveloped or more rural areas” .