Atlanta Lost Its Black Majority in 2020. Post 3 Candidates Discuss Solutions.

Battling gentrification was a key topic of discussion Tuesday night for the two runoff race candidates vying to fill Atlanta City Council's Post 3 at-large vacancy, a race likely to impact affordability standards for Black Atlanta residents.

Business owner Nicole Evans Jones, a former Atlanta Public Schools principal, and civil rights attorney Eshé Collins, who previously chaired the Atlanta Board of Education , are competing in a Dec. 3 runoff election , after placing first and second, respectively, in a general election matchup that included three other candidates .

The two remaining Post 3 at-large hopefuls spoke about restoring Atlanta's Black majority during the Center for Civic Innovation-led forum in Sweet Auburn on Tuesday — an important issue in a city where Black residents are increasingly being priced out.

Atlanta's rising cost of living has fueled steady Black population decline since the 1990s. (Black residents lost their demographic majority in 2020, according to U.S. Census data analyzed by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.)

Evans Jones said increasing Atlanta's Black population is a priority for her, but first the city has to "stabilize" what's causing Black folks to move away.

"We've got to help with [property] taxes," she said in response to Rohit Malhotra, executive director of the Center for Civic Innovation, who moderated the forum. "Then we've got to attract [more Black residents] with more [housing stock] differentiation. ... We can make sure that working-class people who go to work every day have somewhere to live in the city."

Collins said she wants to address the lack of affordable housing for low-income families.

"We have the need to provide affordable housing to at least 100,000 people," Collins said. "There's affordable housing that's available that's 750 square feet for a single person, but the growth of our families in the city, we're not addressing affordability in that space, and so that is a priority."

Other topics discussed Tuesday include rebuilding public trust in City Hall and improving transportation equity, as many Black residents living beyond the city limits are forced to rely more on public transit to get to work.

Key campaign focuses America's so-called Black Mecca is famous for being a major hub for Black-owned businesses, but it remains one of the most unequal cities in the nation. A real estate study released in late October determined Atlanta has the worst housing cost burden for minimum-wage workers in the nation.

Collins told attendees she wants to be a champion for "affordable living for all" who prioritizes creating not just affordable housing for both legacy residents and families moving into the city, but also city services, such as retail shopping and restaurants on the BeltLine, that are affordable for everyone.

"There's space for your city government, your city leadership, coming in to settle in and subsidize the services that our citizens have to pay for," Collins said.

Evans Jones has made transportation equity a key focus of her campaign, noting that Black residents who can no longer afford to live in the city where they work will need reliable forms of public transit to travel into Atlanta.

She proposed creating a transportation fund separate from the Atlanta Department of Transportation's budget — similar to the city's Affordable Housing Trust Fund — that would set aside revenue specifically to address transit-related needs, such as sidewalk construction and repaving roads in pothole-plagued parts of the city.

(City residents have approved multimillion-dollar tax levies to fund road repavement and traffic safety infrastructure issues that have gone unaddressed for years .)

"We need well-maintained roads," Evans Jones said. "We need transit, MARTA, not to cancel 80% of its service."

Can we trust you after the "Cop City" vote? Evans Jones and Collins spent a lot of time during the evening convincing skeptics in the audience that their loyalties lie more with voters than with the mayor's office, the city's law department, or corporate interests, following the City Council's controversial 2023 vote to fund construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, commonly referred to as "Cop City."

Former Post-3 at-large council member Keisha Sean Waites was one of the members who city attorneys pressured last year to kill legislation that would have allowed Atlanta residents to vote for or against continued construction of the training center, which is due to open in December.

The City Council took additional heat last summer for voting to fund the facility despite passionate opposition from progressive residents who fear it will lead to more militarization of law enforcement and anti-Black police brutality.

Activists who oppose the training center have questioned whether their voices or votes matter inside City Hall after the Atlanta clerk's office refused to count signatures submitted in support of a voter referendum that would have put Cop City on the ballot.

Both Collins and Evans reassured the audience that they're committed to serve the will of voters, not the mayor or the city's lawyers.

"If I don't agree with [a policy], I'm not doing it, and no one can make me do it," Evans Jones said during the event.

"This is the people's seat," added Collins. "The people are our boss."