The Atlanta City Council is considering banning data centers along the Beltline corridor and near rapid transit stops due to concerns about their impact on walkability and high electricity consumption. “The legislation mirrors similar bans on new storage facilities, gas stations and drive-thru restaurants within the Beltline overlay district, which city leaders said should foster pedestrian-focused developments,” explains Zachary Hansen in Governing.

• Impact on Existing Centers: The proposed legislation would not affect existing data centers but could prevent their expansion.

• Electricity Demand: Georgia Power executives stated that data centers are responsible for roughly 80% of the demand crunch, leading to a request for regulators to approve significant new electricity-generating capacity, mainly powered by fossil fuels.

The move aims to promote pedestrian-friendly development and address the strain on the state's power grid caused by the increasing number of data center projects.

More people moved to small U.S. cities and towns (populations under 250,000) in 2023 than to larger cities, according to data from the University of Virginia. Michael Sasso, writing in Bloomberg CityLab, attributes this trend largely to the persistence of remote work.

• Population Increase: Towns under 250,000 people grew by 291,400.

• Population Decrease: Areas with over 4 million people lost almost 600,000 residents.

This marks the first time small towns have seen such significant population gains since at least the 1970s.

Despite living near — or even directly below — rapid transit lines, some residents in cities like Atlanta and Washington, D.C. still lack access to transit. 

Benjamin Schneider, writing in Bloomberg CityLab, explains this issue is largely due to past planners intentionally skipping certain neighborhoods or designing transit primarily for suburban-to-downtown commutes.

“It’s a pattern that can be seen in the Bay Area, where BART trains skip over much of East Oakland, a low-income area with one of the highest population densities in the region. 

Activists there have launched a campaign to construct a new station in the San Antonio neighborhood, in the middle of a 2.7-mile stretch of tracks without access to the system.”

In Atlanta, Mayor Andre Dickens aims to improve transit access by adding infill train stops. In April, he signed an executive order to build four new MARTA stations on existing tracks, with each station located in one of the city’s four quadrants and near the BeltLine. This approach expands transit access affordably by utilizing existing infrastructure.

“At a time when laying new tracks can be prohibitively expensive, they’re an affordable way to make the most of infrastructure that’s already in place.”