The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
City seeks public’s input on long-term development
Plan A is a roadmap for managing future growth ofAtlanta.
Atlanta city officials introduced a series of events Thursday to increase public participation in its fiveyear comprehensive development plan.
Known as “Plan A” the development plan is an official document and roadmap for the city’s future growth and development.
The kickoff event on Thursday evening was the first of three phases in which the city will conduct com- munity meetings for land use and neighborhood plan- ning. According to the city, it will adopt all Plan A land use and neighborhood plan- ning elements in early 2025, updating the plan “to bring community ideas to life,” a Department of City Planning handout states.
About 300 people gath- ered at the Greenbriar Mall as Mayor Andre Dickens, City Planning Commissioner Jahnee Prince and others pushed for public input as they develop the plan.
Earlier this month, the Atlanta Regional Commis- sion projected that the 21-county metro area will increase to 7.9 million peo- ple by 2050.
“Where are they going to go?” Prince said. “You’ve got to help us plan for that. We need to hear from each and every one of you.”
Dickens said there would be open houses, commu- nity workshops and pop-up events so the public could have their say.
He said that in the past, the comprehensive plan pro- cess had led to the creation of some of the city’s most iconic projects, including the Atlantic Station Mall, new parks along the Belt- line, the Broad Street Board- walk in downtown, and the 80-acre Summerhill commu- nity, a redevelopment of the former Olympic Stadium.
“Cities don’t just rise up by accident. Plan A is our path to grow stronger together,” the mayor said.
The public can comment and meet with city plan- ners to weigh in on topics as varied as affordable hous- ing, transportation, zoning and historic preservation at 12 community meetings in March and April. The meet- ings begin March 19 at the Dunbar Neighborhood Cen- ter and wrap up April 16 at the Northwest Library at Scotts Crossing.
Plan A was adopted in October 2021 and is required by st ate and local laws, according to the city
Atlanta has more than 240 neighborhoods, grouped into 25 neighborhood plan- ning units, or NPUs, which will provide a forum for pub- lic input on Plan A. This year, the city celebrated the 50th anniversary of the units, which were established in 1974, during the tenure of the city’s first Black mayor, Maynard Jackson.
Rohit Malhotra, founder and executive director of the Center for Civic Innovation in Atlanta, told the audience that Plan A was something that “all of us need to be talking about.”
“I’m not surprising anybody here by saying we have heard time and time again that people’s voices will be heard in decision-making processes ... and time and time again, many of those promises have been broken,” he said. “The comprehensive development plan process is an accountability tool that gets us to say that even if we disagree, we can agree on what the plan for the city should be moving forward.” Sigrid Pearson, 44, who attended Thusday’s event, said that affordable housing and accessible transit were two of the things she’d like to see more of. She lives in a two-bedroom apartment and pays $1,200 a month. She works two jobs as a cleaner and cashier, earning less than $20 an hour, and said she spends at least half her income each month on rent.
“When I move, I’m going to have to downsize because this is getting too expensive. They raise the rent every year,” she said.
The last time the U.S. economy was posting surprising economic growth numbers amid rapid wage gains and moderating inflation, Ace of Base and All-4-One topped the Billboard charts and denim overalls were in vogue.
Thirty years ago, officials at the Federal Reserve were hotly debating whether the economy could continue to chug along so vigorously without spurring a pickup in inflation. And back in 1994, it turned out that it could, thanks to one key ingredient: productivity.
Now, official productivity data are showing a big pickup for the first time in years. The data have been volatile since the start of the pandemic, but with the dawn of new technologies like artificial intelligence and the embrace of hybrid work, some economists are asking whether the recent gains might be real — and whether they can turn into a lasting boom.
If the answer is yes, it would have huge implications for the economy. Improved productivity would mean that firms could create more product per worker. And a steady pickup in productivity could allow the economy to take off in a healthy way. More productive companies are able to pay better wages without having to raise prices or sacrifice profits.
Several of the trends in place today have parallels with what was happening in 1994 — but the differences explain why many economists are not ready to declare a turning point just yet.
The computer age vs. the Zoom age
By the end of the 1980s, computers had been around for decades but had not yet generated big gains to productivity — what has come to be known as the productivity paradox. Economist Robert Solow famously said in 1987, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”
That changed by the middle of the 1990s, as semiconductor manufacturing improved and computers became cheaper. Businesses began to learn how to invest in information technology, and it helped productivity to boom.
For years, economists and analysts have questioned whether we might be experiencing a new productivity paradox: Despite our sudden access to cloud computing, rapid internet connections and mobile phones, productivity gains were tepid in the late 2000s and throughout the 2010s.
Since 2020, companies have learned how to leverage existing digital tools in new ways as employees shifted toward remote work. Will that cause lasting efficiency improvements in some sectors?
So far, whether remote work is good or bad for productivity remains hotly debated, as a recent paper by Nicholas Bloom at Stanford and other researchers explained. Early research has suggested that employees may be less efficient when they are totally remote, and that hybrid work leads to small, if any, productivity gains.
But workers who are saving commuting and grooming time often feel more productive — even if that saved time isn’t captured in official productivity data.
“The studies probably understate the effect,” Bloom said, explaining that employees who are happier thanks to job flexibility may be less likely to quit — helping companies to avoid unproductive retraining. Remote work could also allow companies to move more “tedious” jobs abroad, he thinks, shuffling Americans toward more dynamic work.
“The aggregate story is potentially pretty powerful,” he said in an interview, predicting that remote work is midway through unleashing a decadelong productivity boom. “We’re in a brave new world: It’s going to take years.”
The internet vs. artificial intelligence
In the 1990s, the World Wide Web was coming into widespread use. Companies initially fretted that it might sidetrack their workers. (“Oh, what a tangled web, this Internet,” a 1995 article in The New York Times sighed about online distractions.) But the tools streamlined many types of work.
One retrospective on the 1990s boom found that a combination of efficient computer manufacturing and increased information technology use accounted for about two-thirds of the era’s productivity pickup.
Today’s shiny-new-technology equivalent is artificial intelligence. While many economists said it was probably too early to see benefits of AI in full force, some proponents think it could prove transformative by automating mental tasks including proposal writing and emails.
Walmart vs. internet shopping
Another driver of the 1990s productivity boom? Companies were making big logistical improvements.
Walmart grew rapidly during the decade, bringing with it strong supply chain management that allowed it to efficiently stock shelves with cheap products from around the world. Manufacturing, notably in pharmaceuticals, also improved.
One possible challenge is that such gains are hard to win twice: Now that firms have become more efficient, it may be difficult for them to improve drastically. Online shopping continued to revolutionize retail in the 2010s, for instance, but both industry and overall productivity gains were modest.
That underlines an important point about productivity growth. It’s easy to pick low-hanging fruit, like optimizing supply chains using software. Once that has been done, it can become harder to make gains. The economy ends up with higher productivity levels, but not necessarily sustained high productivity growth.
Entrepreneurship booms
What can lead to lasting productivity gains is a burst of innovation that feeds on itself — and that makes the recent uptick in business formation a hopeful sign. New businesses are often more inventive.
Back in 1994, lots of businesses were formed as people tried to capitalize on breakthroughs in information technology. Today, business applications have been surging again, probably the result of people deciding to strike out on their own after losing or quitting jobs amid the pandemic.
The new business bump could simply reflect that people were reshuffling to at-home work, recent research by Fed economist Ryan Decker and John Haltiwanger of the University of Maryland has suggested. But many of the new firms are in potentially productivity-spurring fields including online retailing, software publishing, computer-systems design, and research-and-development services.
Two inflation comedowns
The 1990s and the 2020s have another possible productivity booster in common: slipping pricing power.
Inflation had been cooling for years by the mid-1990s, and Fed officials noted companies were losing their ability to continue to raise prices without losing customers. To keep profits from collapsing, firms had to figure out how to be more efficient.
Inflation is also coming down today. And the job market was strong back then and is now — meaning companies have had to pay up to attract workers. When wages are rising faster than prices, firms must stretch their workers further if they hope to maintain their profits.
Alan Greenspan vs. Jerome Powell
By 1996, Greenspan was becoming convinced that productivity was on the rise — so he persuaded his colleagues that they did not need to try to slow down the economy so much. With productivity improving, strong growth was less likely to cause inflation.
Jerome Powell, the current Fed chair, has praised Greenspan’s “fortitude” and foresight in navigating that period.