The closer the better? Examining support for a large urban redevelopment project in Atlanta

ABSTRACT

The Atlanta BeltLine (BeltLine) is a large urban redevelopment project that is transforming 22 miles of historical railroad corridors into parks, trails, pedestrian-friendly transit, and affordable housing in the center of Atlanta, Georgia. This study examines how proximity to the BeltLine and other factors relate to public support for it, with data from a general public survey conducted in the summer of 2009. The result shows that support significantly declines as distance to the BeltLine increases. However, after controlling for expected use of the BeltLine parks and transit, the role of distance fades. Further, the results show that being a parent within the city limits is associated with the support for the BeltLine, which implies that the concern over tax increment financing (TIF) affecting future school quality hampers the support of the project. The findings point to individual tastes and family circumstances as driving support for the redevelopment project, rather than strictly property-specific attributes (as the homevoter hypothesis would predict).

Another contribution of this study is to address the technical problem of missing precise spatial location values. Several imputation techniques are used to demonstrate the risks and remedies to missing spatial data.

Notes

1. Though mean support for BeltLine is not significantly different between the sample providing addresses and sample not providing addresses here, other variables do differ between samples. Those reporting addresses tended to be in the city of Atlanta (though not necessarily in the TAD), to be more optimistic about the BeltLine, and to expect to use the BeltLine greenbelt and transit more than other respondents. The means of the other variables in Table 1 are not significantly different between samples.

2. For a census block overlapping multiple ZIP codes, the census block is divided into pieces by ZIP code boundaries. The population of the census block is then distributed by the area of each piece. The population-weighted centroid can thus be generated using the software ArcGIS (IDT, Taiwan).

3. Due to computation limitations, the upper bound of missing distance is generated by doubling the distance between lower bound and geographic centroid of the ZIP code:

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lin-Han Chiang Hsieh

Lin-Han Chiang Hsieh is Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Engineering at Chung Yuan Christian University. Chiang Hsieh earned his PhD in public policy at Georgia Institute of Technology in 2013. As a social science researcher with strong background in environmental engineering, he mainly applies quantitative methods and GIS applications to policy issues in the environmental field. His published works focuses on policy issues in the urban environment, including urban redevelopment projects, flood risk in cities, and green building rating certification. His recent research interest is water-related policies, including the selection of policy tools in controlling non-point pollutions of reservoirs and the potential impacts of mandatary water reuse.

Douglas Noonan

Douglas Noonan is Professor in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis. He joined SPEA in 2013 after spending over a decade on the faculty at the School of Public Policy at Georgia Tech. His research focuses on a variety of policy and economics issues related to the urban environment, neighborhood dynamics, and quality of life. His research has been sponsored by a variety of organizations (e.g., National Science Foundation, Environmental Protection Agency, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, National Endowment for the Arts) on topics such as policy adoption, environmental risks, energy, air quality, spatial modeling, green urban revitalizations, and cultural economics. Noonan earned his PhD in public policy at the University of Chicago.