Georgia wonders if newcomers will turn suburbs blue
“I don’t think there’s a clear explanation to what’s going on out here. I think everyone’s trying to figure it out.” — JEN COX, PAVEITBLUE CO-FOUNDER
JOHNS CREEK, Ga. — At first blush, this bedroom city of 83,000 a half-hour north of Atlanta might be mistaken for the perfect example of a white-flight Sun Belt suburb.
It sits squarely in the congressional district once represented by Newt Gingrich, with excellent public schools and master-planned communities so pristine they could have been built by a model train aficionado. In 2015, the all-white city council rejected the idea of expanding public transit out from majority-black Atlanta on the grounds it “would increase high-density housing.”
But something has been happening in Johns Creek — and, indeed, across much of the vast archipelago of cul-de-sac communities north of Atlanta that served as the launchpad for Gingrich’s 1994 Republican revolution. The promise of a suburban idyll has been increasingly attracting all kinds of people — many of whom are not white, and not Republican.
Today, 24 percent of people in Johns Creek are of Asian heritage. Indian-Americans shop for saris at the Medlock Crossing strip mall and flock to the latest Bollywood hits at the multiplex. Chinese-Americans and food lovers of all stripes head to the Sichuan House, near the Target and Home Depot stores, for sliced pork ears in chili sauce and “tearfully spicy” mung bean noodles.
Indeed, the northern Atlanta suburbs, once considered bastions of Republicanism, are experiencing an identity crisis — one that became acute with the success of a Democrat, Jon Ossoff, in a special House of Representatives election in Georgia’s 6th District, which last sent a Democrat to Congress in the Carter administration.
Fueled by fierce anti-Trump sentiment, millions in outside donations and an untiring doorto-door campaign mounted by liberals including many newcomers to the district, Ossoff placed first in an 18-way race in April and will face Karen Handel, a fixture in Georgia Republican politics, in a June 20 runoff.
Many Republicans remain confident Handel will prevail in a 70 percent-white district where even liberals concede conservative culture dominates. Big churches and golf courses still do much to set the social tone, and homegrown conservative talkradio personalities like Herman Cain and Erick Erickson help commuters assuage the increasingly painful slog through traffic.
November was a watershed, however: Though she did not carry Georgia, Hillary Clinton defeated Donald Trump in both suburban Cobb County, part of which is in the 6th District, and nearby Gwinnett County. Both were once considered classic white-flight suburbs; today Gwinnett is majority-minority, and Cobb is fast heading that way.
At the same time, Republicans here reject the idea that demography is political destiny. Instead, they envision a future in which the charms of suburban life, and the conservative politics that made it possible, will rub off on everyone. Instead of the newcomers changing the suburbs, they say, the suburbs will change the newcomers.
“You move to Cobb, you’ve got a good job and cheaper property taxes, and you say, ‘Hey, maybe this is a better way,’” said Michael Altman, 58, a former vice chairman of the Cobb County Republican Party.
It is the kind of political reckoning many U.S. suburbs may soon confront, if they haven’t already. A report last year by the Urban Land Institute noted the percentage of foreign-born Americans was at its highest in 90 years, and that millennials were now starting families and looking for good public schools. It estimated 79 percent of the nation’s household growth would occur in the suburbs in the next decade, much of it in “affordable sunshine states” where the weather is warm, taxes are low and homes are relatively cheap.
Low taxes, cheap homes and sunshine indeed helped fuel the rise of Atlanta’s northern suburbs beginning in the 1950s — along with a heavy dollop of racism.
During integration the Klan presence was strong in Cobb County, and in later years, it was home to the former segregationist governor Lester Maddox and the white supremacist and convicted church bomber J.B. Stoner. But Cobb also became home to a large group of transplants decoupled from local history, many of them professionals transferred to metro Atlanta from elsewhere who were looking for good public schools.
Gingrich, who served as House speaker from 1995 to 1999, used language in his heyday that liberals saw as racially coded, railing against the “welfare state” of Atlanta. But for the most part he appealed to newcomers and old-timers alike, extolling free markets, technology and traditional values as a means of answering “the cries of the baby boom generation for a new politics responsive to the future’s needs.”
Maddox and Stoner are long dead, but the high-performing schools in places such as unincorporated East Cobb County still serve as a magnet. Eight years ago, they attracted Jen Cox, a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat who had been living in Denver.
Cox is a co-founder of PaveItBlue, one of the many new grassroots liberal groups that have sprung up or vastly expanded to help a Democrat win the 6th District contest. As she passed numerous yard signs for Ossoff, she noted such a display of support for a liberal would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
Cox described the social pressure to conform here that pervaded dinner parties and play dates, influencing the politics of even newcomers. “It’s something really palpable here, like, ‘You’re in the Deep South. This is the way it is, and if you don’t like it, we don’t want to hear from you,’” she said.
But now, with the volunteers pushing Ossoff into the runoff, she said: “I don’t think there’s a clear explanation to what’s going on out here. I think everyone’s trying to figure it out.”