Post-2010 recovery bypassed Black-majority Atlanta neighborhoods almost entirely

Evidence

The housing market in Atlanta has finally started to recover. Home prices are rising. As of August 2014, in places like Dunwoody, Georgia, northeast of downtown Atlanta, only 12.3 percent of the homes were underwater. But a radically different picture emerged just a short drive south from Dunwoody. In Riverdale, a lower-income community that is 80 percent African American, 76 percent of the mortgages owed on homes exceeded their market value. The so-called recovery hadn’t touched many of the African American neighborhoods in metro Atlanta. It is a tale of two cities. Affluent white neighborhoods have bounced back. Moderate-income black communities are still drowning. In fact, nineteen of the thirty ZIP codes with the highest percentage of underwater homes in the country are in metro Atlanta. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 69

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete data supporting the value gap as measurable economic outcome — grounds the reader’s stated goal in evidence.
• SEED: A piece contrasting ‘underwater homes’ as both a metaphor and a statistic could bridge economic recovery discourse and racial inequality.