Transit exclusion locked Black workers out of booming Atlanta suburban job markets

Evidence

During the 1980s, roughly 86 percent of Atlanta’s metropolitan growth occurred in the suburban ring, especially along its northern rim—Cobb County to the northwest, Gwinnett County to the northeast, and, between them, a small sliver of Fulton County outside the city limits. Of the ten fastest-growing counties in America during the 1980s, three stood outside Atlanta, and one of them, Cobb, took top honors as the fastest-growing county in the entire nation. By the end of the twentieth century, the suburban counties of Cobb and Gwinnett each had more residents than the city. As the suburban population and economy boomed, the lack of metropolitan transportation meant that opportunities there were well beyond many Black Atlantans’ reach. “For an unemployed Atlantan without a car,” a New York Times editorial noted in 1988, “jobs in Cobb and Gwinnett counties might as well be in China.” But that, of course, was precisely the point. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1205

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to the broader narrative of how post-civil-rights housing and transit policy continues as an infrastructure form of exclusion — complements the Milgrom institutional arguments about how built systems encode social outcomes.