White flight goes to stand your ground

This is Eagle’s Landing, a neighborhood in the city of Stockbridge, Georgia, about 20 miles from Atlanta, and it’s one of the few communities in the southern half of metro Atlanta that boasts incomes upwards of six figures, in volumes.

Roughly half of Eagle’s Landing is spread out across seemingly disconnected patches of unincorporated land (meaning belonging to no city) in Henry County. As former Stockbridge Mayor Lee Stewart describes it, “It’s like if you took wet spaghetti and threw it on the wall.” Land logic would suggest that those areas should just be patched together and incorporated into Stockbridge’s borders. But instead Eagle’s Landing would rather just start its own city. The problem with this is that Eagle’s Landing proponents would like to form a city by using land, people, and properties that already belong to the city of Stockbridge.

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This would be extreme even for metro Atlanta, where nearly a dozen other neighborhoods have formed new municipalities since 2005, in a trend referred to as the “cityhood movement.” But unlike Eagle’s Landing’s proposal, all of those new cities formed from unincorporated territories.

The Eagle’s Landing plan seeks to merge into its boundaries the primest real estate and wealthiest households from the city of Stockbridge, leaving behind a smaller, mostly African American population with fewer resources to pay for Stockbridge city services. The Eagle’s Landing city proposal will be voted on via ballot referendum on November 6, but Stockbridge residents who live outside the Eagle’s Landing footprint—the people who will be most hampered by the division—are not eligible to vote on it.

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Right now, African Americans are just over 57 percent of the voting-age population in Stockbridge—a clear-cut majority. If Eagle’s Landing were to form, it would take a third of Stockbridge’s population along with it, including a nice chunk of Stockbridge’s black residents. In that scenario, African-American voting power would be reduced such that they wouldn’t constitute a majority of voters in either the new city of Eagle’s Landing nor the old city of Stockbridge. Meanwhile, the white voting-age public would see its voting power rise in both cities.

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When Atlanta elected its first black mayor, Maynard Jackson, in 1973, with a new African-American political elite emerging around him, white Atlantans took flight to the suburbs, mostly to the north of the city. Last year, Stockbridge elected its first black mayor and its first all-black city council in the city’s near-100-year history, so consider its upper-crust residents triggered. But those who might be uncomfortable with that political shift are not escaping to whiter pastures anymore. Instead, they are engaging in the strangest form of white flight wherein rather than moving, they are standing their ground, and building new municipal borders around their mansions and fortresses.

  City Lab

Trump keeps saying Democratic candidates in cities and states across the nation will turn their territories into Venezuela. In fact, THIS is what Venezuela looks like. The capitol city of Caracas is a veritable slum of poverty-riddled barrios with enclaves of mansions on hilltops surrounded by impenetrable walls.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.